Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google today has rolled out more specific, descriptive and contextually helpful names for the structured data error reporting it shows in Google Search Console rich result status reports, the Google Search Console URL inspection tool and Rich Results …

Google has announced this morning that on April 26, 2022 it will be killing off the URL parameter tool under the legacy Google Search Console. This is a bit of a surprise being that Google did say it was planning on vastly improving it but some Google…

Google is testing displaying a badge or icon or label that demonstrates if a product you are looking at is a low price or not. So if your product sells well below other products in that product category, Google might tell you with this new label.
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Google’s Martin Splitt, Gary Illyes, and Lizzi Sassman sat together on the latest Search Off the Record to talk about de-SEOing – what we would probably call over-optimization strategies. It is an interesting listen to, stuff you probably heard before …

Google posted a notice that it will now show warnings in the Google Search Console rich results report for when your structured data does not define the location for an event. Google said it will “start enforcing location requirements for events.”
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We know that links pointing to pages that do not exist, that 404 or some soft 404, are links that are not counted by Google – that is not new. But John Mueller of Google spoke about how sometimes you can redirect old 404 pages and that link may pass …

Back in 2016, we covered how Google’s John Mueller said product pricing is not a web search ranking factor. Well, the same is true in 2022, six-years later. But this time, Danny Sullivan of Google explained why it is not a ranking factor.

Malte Ubl just left google a couple of weeks ago after being with the search company for 11 years. He came back onto Twitter to ask some very specific SEO advice from his former Google colleague, John Mueller. The funny thing is, Malte was the lead G…

Google’s John Mueller said that the search company did look into what it could do to incentivize sites to be more eco-friendly. He said they looked into a ranking boost of some sorts for sites that are friendly to the environment but it was tricky, he …

John Mueller of Google wrote a very detailed and honest explanation on why Google (and third party SEO tools) do not crawl and index every URL or link on the web. He explained that crawling is not objective, it is expensive, it can be inefficient, the…

We know that Google for several years has been telling us we need to have redirects in place for a year or so for Google to have the site moves stick. But how many months is too few, too little? John Mueller of Google said that three-months for a redi…

For the past several years, Google has been saying that when machine generated or AI generated content becomes high quality, it might be something that Google allows within its search webmaster guidelines. Well, in 2022, that day is still not here – y…

On last Friday’s hangout with Google’s John Mueller, Ankit Dalal, an SEO, asked about a site he is working on and what the issue it has with rankings. In short, the site was not ranking well, so they migrated the site to a new domain and the rankings c…

Sometimes when Google wants to encourage site owners to take action, they might give us a ranking boost for implementing it. They did it for HTTPS, mobile friendly design, page experience and many more. But when it comes to encouraging folks to switc…

Google Search has a carousel, which may or may not be new, that shows categories of offers from a merchant as part of the overall snippet. The carousel is beneath the main snippet and sitelinks (if available) and shows a scrollable carousel of offer c…

I was a bit too eager in reporting the dates for the Google Search Central Virtual Unconference the other week. Google changed the tentative dates on the registration page to now show that the event takes place on April 27th from 11am to 2pm ET, with r…

When it comes to the Google page experience update and its metrics, Google may in some cases split up the scores/metrics it has into different sections of your site. It might go by template type, like all category pages, all product pages or it might g…

Two weeks after Google first confirmed an issue with the Google Search Console URL Inspection Tool, it is still not fully fixed. I will say that while I do see random complaints about the tool erroring out, I have not seen it error out myself. But sti…

Google’s John Mueller said again that Google Search does not use “engagement” as a factor for ranking or other purposes in Google Search. Google Search does not know if your web page has a high or low level of user engagement metrics and even if it did…

Google’s John Mueller said again that using hreflang will not help you rank better and does not change rankings for your site. All it technically does it replace the URL that ranks already with the regionally appropriate URL in Google Search.