Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Gary Illyes from Google ranted on Bluesky about folks updating the lastmod date in their sitemap files when all they have changed was the date in their footers copyright line from 2024 to 2025. Gary said, don’t do it, it is not enough of a change to t…

Gary Illyes from Google ranted on Bluesky about folks updating the lastmod date in their sitemap files when all they have changed was the date in their footers copyright line from 2024 to 2025. Gary said, don’t do it, it is not enough of a change to t…

As you know, Google updated its Search Quality Raters guidelines with 11 new pages a couple of weeks ago. But with that, Google also added the term “generative AI” to the quality raters guidelines for the first time, and it is listed 14 times.

If you embed resources on your pages, those embedded resources can be cached longer than other parts of the page in Google Search.

While this month was not as busy as last month, it was still a pretty stressful month for a lot of site owners and SEOs. I was expecting more core updates this past month, but we had none, whereas the previous report, we covered three confirmed Google…

Google has once again expanded the reach of its site reputation abuse policy, beyond the US enforcement from from May and beyond limited European regions last week – we are now seeing enforcement in the massive German market.

Google may have pushed some improvements to the reporting system within Google Search Console. Now Google can show how soon the report was updated within a 30 minute interval. So instead of showing last updated 3 hours ago or 4 hours ago, as an example…

John Mueller from Google noted that he finds it “interesting” how those who spend time in our industry “can often recognize made-for-search-engine content fairly quickly.” Meaning, we are good at seeing a piece of content on the web and knowing if it w…

John Mueller from Google said that merging content is always more challenging than a basic site move. Meaning, when you take a look at your content on your site and decide to merge a bunch of the content into fewer URLs, that takes longer for Google t…

Gary Illyes from Google said that if a URL has a status within Google Search Console as “URL is unknown to Google” that means that URL is really unknown to Google and has zero priority within Google Search systems.

On Thursday, January 23rd, Google updated its search quality raters guidelines PDF document. The last time Google updated this document was for the March 2024 spam update changes, over ten months ago. This update seems to focus on on spam and adds som…

Google’s John Mueller said that when it comes to disavowing links “it’s in a spammer’s best interest to encourage others to spend time on it.” Why? Because Google has said there is little reason to disavow links, unless you have a manual action or kno…

Google looks to have expanded its enforcement of its site reputation abuse policy to European regions this week. Google began enforcement in the US back in May but Google seems to have issued a ton of these manual actions (manual penalties) to European…

Google has updated not just its site reputation abuse policy for clarification purposes, Google also updated the manual actions section for site reputation abuse. Again, these are just clarification changes, and as Google put it, “it include guidance …

Google has updated not just its site reputation abuse policy for clarification purposes, Google also updated the manual actions section for site reputation abuse. Again, these are just clarification changes, and as Google put it, “it include guidance …

John Mueller of Google said that sometimes doing SEO can cause sites more problems with search and search rankings. Sometimes not doing SEO, might be better, John implies.

John Mueller of Google said that sometimes doing SEO can cause sites more problems with search and search rankings. Sometimes not doing SEO, might be better, John implies.

Google is testing an expandable brand store knowledge panel. So if you search for a brand like New Balance, Google will show a knowledge panel on the right with products, descriptions and so on but then if you click on the arrow button, it will expand…

Google’s John Mueller replied to a bunch of screenshots of SEO tools showing word counts for the same page that tailed the word counts differently. John said, “This is also why word-count itself makes so little sense.”

Chris Nelson, Senior Staff Analyst, Search Ranking at Google has updated his LinkedIn bio to specify that he manages a large team that builds ranking solutions for Google Search. One line says, “Address novel content issues (e.g., detection and treatme…