Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s advice since Penguin 4.0 was that you don’t need to disavow links since the links are neutralized and don’t end up helping or hurting you. In short, Google ignores those links. This even applies to when someone redirects a site that was penali…

Google’s John Mueller said on Mastodon that the Google Search ranking algorithm does not look at words per section or the word count in different sections of your page.

Gary Illyes from Google said on LinkedIn that if you want to you can use a single robots.txt file for all your international sites. He added that he is not saying this is a good idea, but rather, technically, you can implement your robots.txt this way.

There is an interesting thread on Mastodon where Danny Sullivan and John Mueller, both of who work at Google, talk about making Mastodon more search-engine friendly. The thread was started by Gabe Rivera of Techmeme, when he wanted a way to search Mas…

Gary Illyes from Google said on LinkedIn the other day that sitemaps are hints, not orders. Meaning just because you submit an XML sitemap file to Google, it does not mean Google will index and rank that content.

Google’s John Mueller said that Google has no plans to release another core update in 2022. This was in response to a number of SEOs worrying that Google might release one by year’s end. John said on Twitter, “just to be clear, there’s no core update …

Google has updated its learning video structured data documentation to no longer require the text field for Problem walkthrough videos and clips, now it is just recommended.

The Google search quality raters guidelines were updated and updated in a big way, with a new E added on to E-A-T. Google is adding experience on top of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Google said that trust is the most important of…

Google is shutting down the Google Question Hub feature on January 15, 2023 – a month from today. Google officially launched Question Hub in the US two years prior, but it was This feature has been live since 2018, limited to India (Hindi, English), I…

Google has launched a new visual elements of Google Search gallery that documents some of the more popular search features in Google Search. Now we no longer have to guess or make up names for some of the Google Search features.

John Mueller of Google said in a post on Reddit that disallowing Googlebot to crawl your site would not immediately lead to the site being deindexed. He added that “it would take quite some time for the whole site to drop out,” and the home page may n…

Gary Illyes from Google said on LinkedIn that if your server returns a 500/503 HTTP status code for an extended period of time for your robots.txt file, then Google may remove your site completely from Google Search.

Google’s John Mueller repeated it, the time spent on a page by your users is not a factor Google uses for ranking. Time spent on the page is not a Google ranking factor, he said, “It doesn’t,” meaning Google doesn’t care about time spent on the page fo…

Google’s John Mueller said there is no score or threshold for the Google helpful content update. He said on Mastodon “There is no “HCS score” or threshold at which HCS [helpful content score] would switch from unhelpful to helpful for SEO.

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, said on Masoton that your content does not need to be on one topic, one niche topic, for it to rank well. You can write about diverse topics on your site. The main thing, Danny said, was that you should write …

Google Search Console is testing a new feature named “content ideas.” It is labeled as an “experimental” feature that brings Question Hub-like concepts directly into Google Search Console.

Google’s John Mueller said that using expired domains, repurposed domains are “SEO-flotsam, index-cruft.” John went on to add that search engines have had a lot of practice with dealing with that appropriately.”

It is that time of year when content creators take their content that has been performing well and updates it from the 2022 edition to the 2023 edition. But updating the references of 2022 to 2023 is not enough, and Google says only do that when you m…

Gary Illyes from Google loves posting his PSAs on Mastodon. His next PSA is that if you are using a CDN or cloud hosting service, then make sure to test up a routine test to ensure that the service is not blocking Googlebot or other search engine crawl…

John Mueller of Google has always downplayed the importance of HTML sitemaps over the years, he is a fan of XML sitemaps, but HTML sitemaps, not so much. On Mastodon the other day he really showed his dissatisfaction of HTML sitemaps by saying that HT…