Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google has clarified on its Local Business structured data help documentation that when you want to specify multiple types in Local Business structured data, specify them in an array and do not use additionalType, that isn’t supported.

As you know, the Google helpful content update started to roll out on Thursday, August 25th. Google has opened up a feedback form for you to leave Google URLs of sites that you think shouldn’t have been affected or other feedback.

Google’s Gary Illyes said on the latest Search Off The Record podcast that soft 404s, pages Google thinks are 404s but return a 200 server status code, do waste crawl budget. However, 404s or 410s do not waste crawl budget, Gary added.

Google’s John Mueller said that adding video structured data to pages with videos on them will not make that video more prominent on that page. This comes from a video indexing issue notice in Google Search Console.

Google’s John Mueller was asked about the pros and cons of cloaking affiliate links. John responded on Twitter saying, “I don’t think you gain anything by cloaking the affiliate links, it just adds complexity. You can use a DB-driven setup without cloa…

Google’s John Mueller said that the Google quality raters guidelines are “not a collection of ranking tips.” He said the quality raters guidelines “can be useful” to think about but again, they are not just a list of ranking tips.

I am weird, I love user-generated comments and while tons of blogs removed them ages and ages ago, I kept them here. I do my best to remove the spam comments and keep the comments that are not spam. John Mueller of Google recently said he would not noi…

Google has added a new section to the Education Q&A structured data documentation for content guidelines. Google added three higher-level content guidelines around this type of structured data.

Google announced on Twitter it has added URL-level data in the example URLs within the Google Core Web Vitals report. Plus Google added that it made some textual changes to the report “to make it clearer.”

Do you write poems, creative texts, abstract thoughts, and the like and are wondering how Google Search can and will rank that type of content? Well, John Mueller of Google was asked about that and he said “Search engines don’t interpret your poem.”

Google’s John Mueller was asked if mixing topics on a single blog is a bad idea. John implied that yes, it is, at least for users. John said on Twitter “if you’re giving financial & medical advice on a beauty blog, I suspect users are – probably rightly – going to find that a bit sus.”

As you know, Google will soon roll out the helpful content update and it has some SEOs and site owners a bit on edge. But a recent poll Aleyda Solis posted on Twitter shows that almost 50% of SEOs feel the content they produce is helpful and are thus …

Last week we reported that Google Search Console had an embarrassing bug where it was reporting pages as being indexed, when those pages were not indexed by Google Search. The good news is that the URL Inspection tool API was not impacted by this bug,…

A month ago, Google started to slowly roll out the video index report within Google Search Console. Now that rollout is complete, Google announced on Twitter this morning.

Google’s John Mueller explained that Google doesn’t really care who wrote the content on your site and saying someone else wrote it and you did not write it won’t save you from ranking issues related to the quality of that third-party content.

Google’s John Mueller was asked if Google still ranks sites that are on HTTP (not over HTTPS), i.e. insecure sites. John said yes, being on HTTPS is not a requirement to rank in Google Search he explained.

Google’s John Mueller was asked what percentage of content-to-ad ratio is too much to rank well in Google Search. As you can imagine, John said there is no number he can share. He said you should just know, if it is “too much” – you’d know.

Recently Google recommended strongly against using dynamic rendering as a workaround for JavaScript sites going forward, Google updated its help documentation to strongly say not to use it. But that does not mean it would hurt your rankings, today, to…

Most SEOs that have been doing the search engine optimization thing for any amount of time know that Google can and likely will drop out URLs from the Google index. John Mueller from Google confirmed that this happens with Google Search on Twitter the …

Google just announced that it fixed a bug with Google Search Console that labeled pages as being indexed when they were not indexed. Google said this bug “affected many properties”.