Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google added a new annotation to the Google Search Console performance reports on December 5th, saying that sites that use Subscribe with Google may see an increase in clicks and impressions. I’ll be honest, I am a bit confused by the annotation was ad…

A couple of years ago, Gary Illyes of Google noted that using many more X-rated curse words can trigger Google to think your site is adult oriented and thus be filtered out by SafeSearch. But how much, how often, and how explicit do those words need to…

Gary Illyes from Google posted a PSA (public service announcement) of sorts on Mastodon and LinkedIn for sites that are heavy with JavaScript. He said that you should try to load the content, including the “marginal boilerplate” content, first when you…

Google has updated its Google Crawler / User Agent help document with a new section for “Retired Google crawlers.” With that, Google announced the retirement of the short-lived DuplexWeb-Google User Agent.

On Friday, Lizzi Sassman from Google updated the crawl budget management help document with two more topics. Specifically, Google added two new myths to the crawl budget documentation.

Welcome to the big Google Webmaster Report for December 2022, the last one for the 2022 year. It was a fun 30 days or so; we learned a lot. The VP of Google Search, Hyung-Jin Kim, told us E-A-T is used everywhere and that there was a Coati algorithm …

Google’s John Mueller said it is a big deal if your most important page or pages are terrible but not such a big deal if your less important pages are terrible. So if your home page is terrible, that is really not good. But if your archived orphaned pa…

A recent Twitter poll by Tim Soulo shows that SEOs are super mixed in their opinion of the importance of domain name age on SEO and Google rankings. The poll showed 40% said domain age is a significant ranking factor in Google, 26% said no, it is not….

Here is a bizarre question that was asked on the Google office hours video asking if Google rotates its index. The question kind of makes sense, because the SEO who asked said on one day they see their page indexed, the next it is gone, then it comes …

Back in 2015, Google said the URL should be in the same language as the content of the page. But now, Alan Kent from Google said the URL doesn’t have to be in the same language as the content of the page.

Google has annotated the Discover performance report in Google Search Console, saying the report has been improved. Specifically, Google said it improved the system for counting clicks and impressions within Google Discover.

Duy Nguyen from Google’s search quality team said in the Google office hours video that “backlinks as a signal has a lot less significant impact compared to when Google Search first started out many years ago.”

Duy Nguyen from Google’s search quality team said in the Google office hours video that Google has “algorithms to go after” those who post AI plagiarized content, he the algorithms can “demote site scraping content from other sites.”

In the last Google office hours, Gary Illyes said that Google is not more likely to crawl or index shorter or more niche content better or worse than other forms of content. Just because the content is shorter and potentially cheaper to crawl, it doesn…

Here is a good one-liner from Google’s John Mueller on the technicalities of the Google index. John said on Twitter “A page’s content doesn’t need to be indexed for a page to be indexed.”

Google’s John Mueller said on the last Google office hours that using HTTP/3 for your server will likely not have any impact on your SEO or rankings in Google Search. He said it also would not likely lead to much or any gains in terms of your core web…

Google is testing the Things to know search refinement expander feature in a carousel format. Normally, the Things to know is in this list format but here Google is testing it in a carousel format.

The other day, I covered a poll that showed about half of SEOs still use guest posting for SEO purposes. Then a few days later, an SEO asked John Mueller about something and John told him that the guest post links should be nofollowed, and the SEO was…

Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, said there is no such thing as an SEO compliance score from Google. He said instead think about avoiding technical errors, don’t spam, and use best practices for your content.

Gary Illyes from Google announced at the Google Search Central Live in Singapore yesterday that Googlebot, Google, can now crawl from outside of the US. He said, according to reports, that the system to handle this is currently live but may not be use…