Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller confirmed that the GoogleProber and the GoogleProducer (which we covered here) are both legit Googlebot user agents and crawlers. “These are official Google requests with a user-agent specific to the Google News config in Publish…

Google has clarified in its search developer documents that JSON-LD, Microdata and RDFa are all fully supported forms for structured data and Google Search. Google wrote, “all three supported formats are equally fine for Google, as long as they are val…

Google’s John Mueller was asked again about if you should translate the content of the URL itself to the language of the content used on that page. John this time said, “translating parts of the URL per language is less critical for search.”

Google has updated its search help documentation around canonicalization this morning. The Google Search Relations team split in three distinct sections and updated a lot of the content to provide clearer details around how Google Search and canonicali…

Google may be crawling the web with a new crawler, a new Googlebot, named GoogleProducer. This useragent is not listed on the official Google crawlers page but maybe it is too new to be listed yet?

It is time for the Google webmaster report, where I summarize the most important SEO and webmaster-related Google topics for the past month. Google completing the long rollout of the December 2022 helpful content update and link spam update may be the…

Gary Illyes from Google posted a new PSA on LinkedIn saying that the most common reason a site unexpectedly blocks Googlebot from crawling is due to a misconfiguration of a firewall or CDN.

Gary Illyes said in the Google SEO office-hours from yesterday that verifying your website in Google Search Console won’t impact your Google Search indexing or ranking whatsoever.

John Mueller of Google blasted SEO or marketing agencies that sell both link-building services and disavow link services. He said on Twitter, “These agencies (both those creating, and those disavowing) are just making stuff up, and cashing in from thos…

Google is still recommending that you nofollow your credit links in your footer, if you have control over those links. So the site designed by or powered by or made by types of links, nofollow those links if you can. If you can’t – then don’t worry ab…

Google has posted one of its Google SEO office-hours, this one was posted today, recorded in January, after the Google layoffs news, and one question asked was about if you should worry about spammy from porn sites and if they can cause bad for ranking…

Google has posted one of its Google SEO office-hours, this one was posted today, recorded in January, after the Google layoffs news, and one question asked was about keyword density – yep. John Mueller from Google said, “no, Google does not have a noti…

Gary Illyes from the Google Search Relations team posted another PSA on LinkedIn. This time he said, “when you redesign a site, its rankings in search engines may go nuts.”

Gary Illyes from from the Google Search Relations team posted another PSA on LinkedIn, this one says “don’t use relative paths in your rel-canonical.” Gary wants you to use the full, absolute URL, when it coms to rel-canonical.

Lily Ray ran a Twitter poll asking SEOs if they trust content in the YMYL, your money or your life, category more, less or the same if it was written by AI. The vast majority of responses said they trust AI-generated content less than human-generated c…

A couple of weeks after I said I thought Google would stop publishing SEO case studies, Google just published a new one. This one is on How Vimeo improved video SEO for their customers, specifically by using the indexifembedded rule combined with noind…

Last December, we caught Google testing an experimental feature named content ideas in Google Search Console. Well, yesterday, Google sent more invites to this feature but noted the feature is only available until March 28, 2023 and then it goes away.

John Mueller from Google said that bulk-generating fake URLs of your competitor’s site should not lead to negative SEO and ranking issues for that site. “This is not something I’d worry about,” he added.

Google’s Gary Illyes said on LinkedIn this morning that you should “include the URLs that you would want to see as canonical in your sitemaps.” This is not necessarily new advice, Google has said this numerous times, but Gary had a reason to repeat thi…

Google has also updated the image SEO best practices document to clarify that Google will parses img elements even when they’re enclosed in other elements such as picture elements when indexing images.