Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

It has been a while since I heard anyone talk about Google’s passage indexing, technically should be passage

In 2018, John Mueller of Google said Google does not use cache-control headers when crawling. He said then that the has no impact on GoogleBot and how it crawls your web pages. He said that again today, at the end of 2022, but added, “at most, they mig…

Google’s John Mueller said that “writing unique text, adding infographics, and a video” does not by default make that content “good, accurate, and helpful.”

Google’s John Mueller said that removing internal duplicate content and other technical issue fixes won’t lead to your site recovering from a Google spam update. John said that these spam updates look more at the “actual content” than if you have tech…

It seemed a lot calmer this past weekend, Christmas weekend than we had it a while in the world of Google search volatility. This is a good thing since we really want to see the two Google ranking algorithm updates wind down before yearend.

Google confirmed last week that it is working on a fix with SXG, signed exchanges, and not working correctly in search. Specifically, Google serves them in Google Search as normal HTML pages, not as signed exchanges.

As some of you may know, LastPass had a pretty big security breach that is pretty concerning. But outside of password issues, what do SEOs need to consider with this security issue? John Mueller of Google noted that the website URLs in the breach were…

I spotted this thread on Mastodon where both John Mueller and Danny Sullivan of Google was helping internet legend Tim Bray with some SEO issues he was having with Google Search. Yes, he got two Googlers helping him, which is rare, but has happened be…

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.