Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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…

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.”