Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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.

Google’s John Mueller said Google Search does not care one way or another if you use premium security plugins or not. The answer is, Google probably doesn’t care if you use any premium plugin or not for any purpose.

Google’s Danny Sullivan told us that the Google product reviews update primarily evaluates product review content on a page-level basis, but not always. Danny added “for sites that have a substantial amount of product review content, any content within…

Google has added three examples of the type of product review pages and who can write them to the “how to write product reviews” help document.

Google has confirmed that structured data is one of the many signals the search company uses to help identify if a page has product reviews content or not. This was first said by Alan Kent of Googe and then confirmed by Danny Sullivan of Google.

Google Search Console is not currently tracking clicks or impressions for traffic sent through the new Google multisearch feature. Glenn Gabe confirmed this the other day by running some tests on a few of his client sites.

Danny Sullivan from Google provided some advice and took some feedback on a specific example of when an original piece of research from a website was being outranked by a site copying its information.

Google has confirmed that some data may be missing in the Google Search Console Search Performance report on September 21, 2022. If you log in and view that report, you should see an annotation on that day, that explained more.

With all these different Google search ranking algorithm updates over the past several weeks, it has been a very busy time for SEOs. While most sites probably don’t see huge swings. Glenn Gabe documented a site that didn’t just see one big ranking cha…

Google’s John Mueller said it again, he said on Twitter “anything that talks about “link juice” should be ignored.” Instead, he said you should “go and make awesome websites with content that’s useful and inspirational to real people.”

Talk about a busy month, we didn’t just have one or two confirmed updates this past month – we had three! We had the helpful content update finish rolling out on September 9th, we then had the September 2022 core update kick off on the 12t, and then t…

There are some brands that have generic names that have become more popular than the actual meaning of the word. In those cases, Google Search may rank or show information about the brand over the meaning of the word.

Google’s John Mueller said that your site or page would not be removed from the Google Search results over page speed issues. He was asked about this on Twitter and said no, page speed won’t lead to your site on the basis of page speed.