Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller confirmed this morning that Google no longer uses the old Google page speed algorithms from 2010 or 2018. Instead, he said, Google only uses the page experience update, looking at the core web vital metrics.

Google for years has recommended against SEOs changing URLs for the purpose of adding keywords to the URL. If you can keep the same URLs and change other things, that is your best bet. The other day, Google’s John Mueller not only doubled-down on that …

Since mid-September, there was a bug where some favicons were not showing up in Google Search at all, as we reported a week or so ago. Well, Google has now fixed that bug and favicons, when done per Google’s specifications, will show up in Google Searc…

Google’s John Mueller said that link wheels are against Google’s webmaster guidelines, I mean search essentials, because Google would consider them link schemes and thus spam.

Google has no documented limit on the number of characters for the site name as listed in Google Search. In fact, the documentation says “there’s no limit to how long a site name can be” but Google does recommend being concise with the name.

Google may be showing fewer rich results, specifically, FAQ rich results and possibly people also ask (although I think that is a bug with the tracking tools). RankRanger is showing a 3 to 4 point drop on the FAQ rich results displaying in Google Search.

Google has confirmed that it has relabeled many of the rich results issues in Google Search Console from “errors” to “warnings.” So you may see a bunch of errors being moved to the warnings side in the Google Search Console rich results reports.

Last week, Google began sending new notices via Google Search Console about ways to enhance your images on Google. The notice talks about using the max-image-preview robots meta tag on all search-eligible images on your site.

There is something super funny about listening to Lizzi and John from Google talk about the Google team doing SEO on the actual SEO help documentation. It is a fun listen to and I recommend you find some time to listen to this, no need to take notes, b…

Google’s John Mueller confirmed that Google Search is working on an issue with some favicons not showing up properly in Google Search. The issue has been ongoing for weeks, well before the new site name and favicon release was announced, by the way.

An individual chat support representative at GoDaddy told a knowledgeable SEO that adding
Google AdSense and/or Google Analytics help with getting your content indexed by Google. John Mueller of Google said that was not true, and that someone should c…

Google’s John Mueller said there isn’t an added delay in Google Search Console reporting for those who have many verified sites in their Search Console accounts. The delays are not specific to the number of sites you have verified but just generic del…

This may be obvious to many of you and this is a purely technical note, but for a URL to be somewhat unique, generally you need to have at least one character after the trailing slash followed by the question mark. So if you have a URL that ends with …

Google’s John Mueller said that there is no need to use English URLs when your pages are not in English. You can use the language of the page in your URLs, if you want. Or if you prefer, you can use English URLs – it does not matter too much he said.

Google’s John Mueller said in the latest Search Off the Record podcast that you should leave decorative alt text on your images empty and blank. Oh, and John later said, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) also says you should do that.

Google has replaced the Google Webmaster Guidelines with the Google Search Essentials. The name change is Google’s ongoing efforts to remove the term “webmaster” so that these tools and documentation do not narrow the focus to just “webmasters,” but e…

Google’s John Mueller said that pinging Google that your sitemap file has been updated can help Google index your new content quickly. He said it is simply Google practice to ping Google with when your sitemap file is updated.

We all know that ranking well for competitive terms in Google Search is not as easy, or even a fraction as easy, as it was two decades ago. This is because of many variables including but not limited to Google’s algorithms getting better and there bei…

Google has added support for image credits for image metadata. Previously, image credit information was only supported with IPTC photo metadata.

Google’s John Mueller recently confirmed again that Google Search does not use the HTML lang attribute. He said many screen readers do and Microsoft Bing might use it as well, but Google Search still does not.