Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller often posts detailed and thoughtful responses on Reddit related to SEO and also general gadget tinkering. In one of his latest SEO posts, he posted a very detailed and throughout post on when, where and how to go about using href…

Google’s John Mueller explained what he would consider being a search quality issue, causing ranking issues specific to Google considering the site not “quality.” John said “to me, quality issues are things that users would consider to be problematic.”

A lot of SEOs focus on the pages Google has indexed versus the pages Google has not indexed on your website. So if there is a larger percentage of not indexed pages, they get concerned.

Google said when it comes to your cookie consent banners, make sure not to make those banners annoying. John Mueller of Google was asked, “does cookie consent banner disturb user experience?” John implied it only does when the banner is annoying.

What if your site gets hacked and there is a ton of spammy content placed on it? Do you have to worry about negative consequences on your Google rankings and overall SEO efforts? John Mueller of Google said Google can filter out the most obvious hacks …

Google has added a new Google crawler, a new user agent, to the Google spider list. Its name is Google Site Verifier User Agent. This user agent ignores robots.txt rules, by the way, and I assume it is used for verifying sites with Search Console and o…

Next week the High Holy Days begin for the Jewish people and some of us will be offline (I will be offline) and some more righteous folks actually disable functionally, like checkout processes, on their sites on the holidays and even on Shabbat (Saturd…

Last week, Google rolled out a new Search Console report for HTTPS, and with that came a lot of confusion around a specific error. The error was “HTTPS is invalid and might prevent it from being indexed.” This shows in the URL inspection tool, which wa…

A lot of folks were thinking that Google in order to bolster the helpful content update rolled out a core update right after the helpful content update was done. As we covered before, that is not the case. It was just that Google had a core update rea…

Some folks in the SEO community have been asking if the last core update, the September 2022 core update, has been slower to roll out in some specific countries than in other countries. John Mueller of Google replied with his “it depends” response.

There is an interesting response from John Mueller of Google on what to do with URLs that may appear duplicated because of URL parameters, like UTMs, at the end of the URLs. John said definitely don’t 404 those URLs, which I think no one would argue wi…

Google can show your favicon in the search results next to your search result snippet. Google’s John Mueller said Google finds your favicon based on the favicon presented on your home page only.

Google Search Console may have improved the URL inspection tools view inspected page screenshot feature to show more of the page. Now it seems with the mobile view, Google is showing a rendering twice as long.

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter this morning that word count is not a sign or factor for what Google considers to be thin content or unhelpful content. John wrote, “Word count is not a sign that a page is thin content.”

Earlier this month, Google said it might remove the word count reference from the best practices for your article pages help document in the Search Console news errors page. Well, it did, it removed the whole section and error around “article too short.”

This may be obvious to most of you, but Google’s John Mueller was asked if profile links, links in forums or social profiles if those links are enough to get you to rank in Google Search. John said no and left it at that, which is probably the best way…

Google has added a new HTTPS report within Google Search Console. This new report now shows you not just which pages are not served over HTTPS but also why they are not being served as HTTPS.

Google announced a lot of new features and availability around shopping and product experiences in Google Search yesterday. Google expanded eligibility for merchant listing experiences, added more structured data properties, and released new Google Sea…

Just like with Google’s consolidation of preventing spam on your site, Google did the same with its blog post on how to minimize A/B testing impact in Google Search. Google has repurposed that old blog post into an official help document in the Google …

Google’s John Mueller said something he normally does not say, the word “never.” He said Google will never penalize a site for not having an H1. John said this on Reddit, adding that it is good practice and low effort to have H1s but you won’t be pena…