Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google Search Console’s crawl stats report has a data gap, a missing day, of metrics again. This has happened numerous times, often this is fixed by itself after a few days. So I would check back in a few days – I doubt Google is missing data, it just …

Google announced on August 6, 2022 it will no longer support some of the video and image sitemap extension tags. These specifically impact the caption, geo_location, title and license tags or attributes within image sitemaps and category, player_loc[@a…

Yesterday afternoon Moz’s home page was removed from the Google Search results after Google processed a fraudulent (or mistaken) DMCA takedown request. Moz is now back, within 12 hours from when Google learned about the issue – but there is no respons…

There is some speculation, and for good reason, that Google is showing more short videos over showing web stories in Google mobile search. Glenn Gabe and Brodie Clark both noticed this trend and the two of them follow web stories closer than almost any…

As you know, last week, on April 26th, Google disabled the URL parameter tool within Google Search Console and stopped respecting any of the rules added to that tool. Some are asking if the recent crawl spikes they saw with Googlebot was related to thi…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if you could use hashtags in meta descriptions? He responded on Twitter saying #sure. But the bigger question is, should you use hashtags in meta descriptions?

Google’s John Mueller said there has been a change to the SEO office-hours format he hosts often on Google Meet and YouTube. The change is that Google will only record and post the video of questions submitted ahead of time, live questions will not be …

It is not too uncommon to see app developers, before the app is launched, to launch a blog on the home page of the app’s domain name. This is done to gain traction on the domain name before the official app is actually live. But will moving the blog …

We know that sometimes Google can be triggered to treat your pages as a soft 404, essentially Google thinks that page should be 404ed and thus removed from the search results. So one SEO asked if he should avoid naming his new product or service with …

In Google Search Console, you can use the URL Inspection Tool to test how Google sees a URL in its index versus in real time by using the live test button. Jamie Indigo asked on Twitter how long does that URL for the live test cache. Daniel Waisberg o…

Starting about an hour or two ago Google dropped the average position metric filter from the Google Search Console performance report. This seems to be a bug and Google’s Daniel Waisberg is looking into the issue. Do not panic, I really think this wi…

Annually, Google updates the Merchant Center product data specification and Google made some updates to it last night. Some updates went into place on April 27, 2022 and some go into place on June 26, 2022.

As expected, the Google Search Console URL Parameter Tool is no longer available. If you try to access it for a specific property, you get a message that reads “this report is no longer available here.” It links you to the announcement that the tool wa…

Google has published its annual web spam report and in that report, Google has named its machine learning based systems for spam identification with its own name – SpamBrain. SpamBrain is a new name but the technology, the AI, is from 2018, so SpamBrai…

A recent poll on Twitter by Brodie Clark shows that SEOs really do want both a featured snippets filter in the performance reports in Google Search Console and also an index coverage API. The poll also has a number of other requests but those are by f…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if Google “looks at “CSS .Class” to comprehend the structure of a page; or a section of content that clarifies its SERP Features.” John responded on Twitter saying “not that I’m aware of.”

It looks like Google Site Kit, the Google plugin for WordPress, has bridged in another Google data platform named Google Question Hub. This is in addition to Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google AdSense and PageSpeed Insights.

The AMP cache URL is the URL that looks like https://www.google.com/amp/s/ followed by your site’s details. You do not have fully control over that URL, so there is really no need to worry about having that URL redirect to your site. Google’s John Mueller said on Reddit “It’ll fix itself automatically, you don’t need to do anything special with it & you can’t redirect it.”

Google is sending out notices about intrusive interstitials to sites that are placing these interstitials in a possibly annoying manner on their sites. The email subject lines read “Improve your page experience by removing intrusive interstitials from …

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter he would recommend again changing URLs and then changing them back, and repeating that, for SEO reasons. The individual wanted to do that for SEO testing but generally, with SEO, changing URLs, is not a recommende…