Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google has posted a short note in the Search Consoles data anomalies that says there was a bug in Google Search that affected some search features, including but not limited to the Top Stories search feature. Google said this started to be noticeable …

The past 30-days or so was pretty heavy between the October 2022 spam update and then several unconfirmed updates that were pretty strong, it was a bumpy road. Google also renamed the webmaster guidelines to the search essentials, rolled out new site n…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if sites that are verified with Google Search Console get crawled more often or at a higher priority. The answer is no, “crawling is independent of Search Console,” John said.

Google’s John Mueller said a website does not need to have 200,000 words to be considered authoritative. This comes after a Twitter thread said “You need around 200,000 words on your website to be considered authoritative by Google.” John replied, “I …

Google has made some changes to its sitemap documentation and title links documentation but has yet to document those changes. Here are a list of the changes, some might be considered more than “minor” but since Google did not document them, I assume t…

Mark Williams-Cook shared an example of a test site he was toying with that got hit super hard by the October 2022 Google spam update. He said the site was “scraped content mixed together answering PAAs (People Also Ask).”

On Friday, Michelle aka @Shelliweb, spotted that the Google Search Console geographic target setting feature was still visible under the legacy features. This is despite Google deprecating the feature months ago.

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that just because a piece of content is written by a human, it does not make that content necessarily helpful and good content. Having a human write content won’t guarantee the content ranks well in Google Search.

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…