Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller said it is acceptable to restrict access of your XML Sitemaps to just search engines. So you can technically block humans from seeing your XML sitemaps but allow Google to access it.

Most sites I know do not fill in their image alt text for many images. I know a lot of SEOs work on this task but sometimes it is a lot of work. One SEO said his client wants to take a shortcut and autofill any blank alt text with his company name. Jo…

Some how, I forgot to post the Google webmaster report last month, so this one will be a bit longer as I am combining the June and May Google webmaster report in one big report. Sorry for missing that report, but here is the catch up. The big items for…

Google’s John Mueller said when it comes to reindexing and resubmitting your web pages to Google Search – Google does it on its own. You do not need to resubmit your pages each time you update the content, Google will figure it out.

Google’s John Mueller has one of his good one liners again. An SEO named Sara Taher asked him for his “thoughts on people updating the disavow file everyday?” John responded “It would be easier to stop buying links /shrug.”

Danny Sullivan from Google hinted the other day on Twitter that links that are nofollowed, even if they are useful links, are unlikely to pass much weight or any weight at all. In short, despite Google changing how they see the nofollow attribute in 2…

Google has added new rich results for learning videos. Learning videos are videos that are aimed at students and teachers to discover and watch educational videos. They include educational level and concept and skills covered in the video. There is ne…

Yesterday an SEO named Nilesh Dhobi submitted an XML sitemap through Google Search Console. It was on June 1, 2022 but Google showed the date submitted as June 2, 2022. I doubt this is a big deal but I found it funny.

Google has posted a whole new section in the article structured data documentation for author markup best practices. These new best practices can help you communicate to Google the correct author details for your articles.

Google has officially suspended (pun intended) the job training rich results, this is something Google did by accident in January 2021 but now it is official. Google said they “ultimately found that it wasn’t useful for the ecosystem at scale.”

Google Search Console has yet another reporting bug, this one is with the Google News performance report. The data between May 12, 2022 and May 26, 2022 may show a drop due to a logging error. Google said there was no real drop in Google Search even if…

I spotted a weird question that was asked of Google’s John Mueller around plagiarism. The question was, what percentage level of plagiarism does Google allow so a site can rank in Google. Is it 5%, 10%, etc? The question is weird but I guess there ar…

Google’s John Mueller was asked what are the timeframes for the data used when calculating quality metrics for the Google broad core updates. John said that there is a lot of “work that’s done well in advance” and “usually with data collected until th…

Google’s John Mueller was asked Myriam Jessier if it makes sense to use subdomains for the YMYL content on a larger site. She asked “if a subdomain talks about a YMYL topic, can it impact the rest of the site?” John Mueller didn’t really give an answer…

Google’s John Mueller posted one of those short question and answer videos the other day, this one was on why do the Google Search Console graphs sometimes fluctuation. The answer is maybe something Google changed on their end or something you changed…

Kenichi Suzuki asked Google’s John Mueller an SEO question that got an interesting response. The question was “I’m curious about this thread. If page A has noindex and rel=canonical pointing to Page B, are the signals of A transferred to B?” John repl…

The other day, I reported on Search Engine Land that Google seems to be showing fewer sitelinks in the search snippets. Not that Google is showing sitelinks less often in general, but rather that I cannot find any sitelinks that are made up of 6 links …

Google’s search results keep getting more and more visual and with this newish Explore Outfits and Shop Similar box, we now see super large images that slide into other images. Here is a GIF of it in action, I personally was not able to replicate this …

Google has added one line to its video best practices document explaining that you should have at least 80% of your thumbnail pixels have little or no transparency to enable video indexing.

Remember the new video page indexing report Google demonstrated at Google I/O? Well, I didn’t pick up on this but Google may be renaming the “coverage” report to “pages” report. If you look at the screenshot Google shared at Google I/O, the coverage re…