Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

A couple of weeks ago, Patrick Stock of Ahrefs released a bombshell report showing that on average about 50% of queries in Search Console are hidden, i.e. classified as anonymized. I reached out to Google, giving them a chance to respond to this, and t…

Google’s John Mueller said on Reddit that any SEO or search ranking issues your site has would not be related to any sort of ratio between follow to nofollow links on your site. John said it is just not a thing and not the cause of any ranking issues.
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Two years ago, Google made a new Google Merchant Center policy named Website needs improvement. Well, now free listings accounts with this issue status are still active, but their products have limited visibility on Google.

Google’s John Mueller was asked again about should you block your search results pages on your site from being indexed. The answer is generally yes, always has been, but John added that a “selected list of search-queries being essentially equivalent t…

As a reminder, back in 2016, Google updated its guidelines for using schema markup on your site with third-party reviews. Google reminded us in 2018 that this is not in accordance with their rich results guidelines. And now, John Mueller of Google remi…

Google has reiterated that when it comes to being eligible to show course rich results in Google Search, you need to have marked up at least three courses on your site. The guidelines were updated to say “you must mark up at least three courses,” but t…

I rarely look at the link report in Google Search Console because, well, I rarely look at my links for this site. But something triggered me to check it and I noticed the raw count of links reported in this tool keeps drastically dropping.

Google’s John Mueller said it is probably safe to completely delete your link disavow file if you have not had manual actions for links before and/or you don’t have a history of link schemes on the site. He said, he would remove the disavow file becaus…

Hope you all had a nice July 4th weekend, here is the July 2022 Google webmaster report to catch you up on the past month. We had two confirmed algorithm updates this past month and many unconfirmed. We also had changes to Search Console, SEO document…

Google Search has added new content guidelines to the rich results help document. These new guidelines directly disallow you to markup product or content that are widely prohibited or regulated, or that can facilitate serious harm to self or others. …

Google has updated its JavaScript SEO help document to add a section on how to properly inject canonical link tags using JavaScript. The document says Google does not recommend using JavaScript for this, however “it is possible to inject a rel=canonic…

The other day, I covered how Google added a line to its Google documentation that Googlebot can crawl the first 15MB of content in an HTML file or supported text-based file, after that, it stops crawling. Then I was a bit shocked to see a large number …

Alan Kent from Google published a video on SEO tips for e-commerce sites, this includes 8 tips. You can watch the video embedded below or just read my summary of those tips.

Another point from the Google NYC SEO Meetup the other night was that Danny Sullivan at Google said Google has been more active about communicating about algorithm updates now than ever before. Danny said Google communicates more often about algorithm …

Normally when someone sends me a sophisticated search result snippet from Google and I dig in, I find a reason for how Google came up with this snippet. But it seems like in this case below, Google is being a bit more sophisticated and showing pros and…

There is an interesting thread on Reddit on a topic we touched on here several times, the topic of Google ranking the wrong version of the URL in Google Search. It all stems back to the URLs you want Google to rank being near duplicate to the URL Goog…

Over the past several days I have noticed a bunch of SEOs sharing information about the Google supplemental index and talking SEO strategies related to it. Just as a PSA, the Google supplemental index has not been in existence for a dozen or so years n…

Google has also updated the crawl stats report help documentation last week. Google made a lot of support documentation changes in the past week including product rich results, Googlebot doc, job posting help doc, moving the HTTP status codes doc and a…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that it is not a bad SEO practice to link to your WhatsApp number on your site. This is despite what some SEO toolsets say, linking to a WhatsApp number, phone number or fax number is fine and Google does not judg…

Google’s John Mueller said once again that “keywords in domain names are overrated.” He and Googlers over time have said this numerous times over the years and he said it again. Instead he said “pick something for your business, pick something for the …