Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller has put down some strong language against changing your URLs for SEO reasons alone. He basically said in most cases, changing URLs will have a negative impact on SEO and that you probably should not change URLs just for SEO reasons.

Google’s John Mueller asked if there was some sort of percentage people can use to determine if their content may be considered duplicative or not. John said there is none and he asked how would you measure such a thing.

Google’s John Mueller had another good one-liner the other day. He said, “if you don’t know whether your content is expertly written or not, then it’s definitely not expertly written.”

This morning, John Mueller from Google offered to do a gut check review of part of your presentations to help ensure what you are presenting is accurate. He posted this on Twitter and wrote that “the feedback is private, ask before you speak – if you w…

Google’s John Mueller said that Google Search “won’t get penalized for keyword-stuffed URLs.” He said stuffing the keywords in your URLs “basically has no effect, positive or negative for search engines.”

Just a reminder, since I am seeing this question come up often. The Google product reviews update is updated periodically, just like with core updates. Google will run them every now and then as it sees fit, so far, Google confirmed five different prod…

Google’s John Mueller said Google Search will de-duplicate its search results based on almost duplicates. John said this on Twitter the other day when asked about canonicalizing international URLs.

As we reported last month, Google has now officially deprecated the International Targeting report in Google Search Console. If you try to access the report, Google will show you a message that says “This report is no longer available here.”

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.