Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google would not give a specific date for when we will see independent sites to start surfacing better and higher in Google Search. As a reminder, Google wrote with the March 2025 core update, “We also continue our work to surface more content from cre…

John Mueller from Google said on Bluesky that he sees some SEOs over-focusing on the tiniest SEO metrics and that they should spend their time focusing on more important things.

Google Search Console’s API will soon add support for the 24-hour hourly data view, plus, this will give you access to not just the past 24 hours but the past 8-days by hour.

Google hosts events around the world for SEOs, content creators, webmasters, site owners and marketers named Google Search Central Live. They’ve been doing it for years and I’ve attended many over the years. This is the first time the event was held i…

Google admitted in a video published on its own Search Central YouTube channel that if searchers do not use your page(s) in the search results, those pages may stop showing up in the search results. Martin Splitt said this in a recent YouTube short he…

Google launched education Q&A carousel back in 2022 for English languages only. Now, Google has expanded support to include also Spanish and Vietnamese language. Spanish is supported in Mexico while Vietnamese is supported in all Google regions.

Google added returnPolicyCountry to the return policy code examples within the Google Merchant Center structured data document. This is because Google requires returnPolicyCountry for MerchantReturnPolicy.

Google has switched from updating its googlebot.json file, the file that contains the list of IP addresses Googlebot uses, from weekly to daily. Gary Illyes from Google said this was done based on feedback from the community.

Google’s John Mueller said that implementing hotlink protections with carve-outs for search engines are fine. He added that this is not really a thing sites do that much these days, stating it was a thing in 2010’s or so but not now.

Google has updated its manual actions documentation around site reputation abuse, to expand on the next steps and actions you can take if you receive this manual action. Google now more clearly says that you should not block that content with your rob…

It is time for the monthly Google Webmaster Report. We are now in March as we continue to wait for the first Google core update of 2025. We did have a number of big unconfirmed Google updates, as documented below.

Last April 2024, Gary Illyes from Google said he was on a mission to make web crawling more efficient, he wanted to “figure out how to crawl even less, and have fewer bytes on wire.” Gary updated us saying “there’s lots more in works” for this but imp…

Some sites, hosted on some CDNs (content delivery networks), are experiencing a big spike in server response times for crawling, while seeing a drop in total crawl requests. So technically, the crawling has dropped but Google is taking much longer to …

The Google Search Console API has been delayed for the past several days. Data is days behind the web interface and causing issued for those who use Looker Studio, Big Query and other solutions to see the Search Console data when accessed through the …

Martin Split from Google said that having an audio version of a page or a blog post, does not impact your Google rankings. He said it is good for your users, but has no SEO impact.

Google’s John Mueller said that there is no persistent shortcut to faster crawling. Yes, you can expedite crawling for specific situations and times, but there is no way to just tell Google you want them to crawl you faster, all the time.

Dwarkesh Patel interviewed Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer of Google and one topic he asked about what would it be like to merge or combine Google Search with in-context learning. It resulted in a fascinating answer from Jeff Dean.

Google Merchant Center recently began showing AI-generated summaries for how well your performance is doing with Merchant Center in Google Search. These are labeled as “experimental” and “AI-generated.”

In 2019, Google stopped using rel prev and next as a signal for its search engines to combine or understand paginated results on your site. Then Google offered up some other advice over the years on the topic. Now, John Mueller of Google explains why G…

Google has updated its Merchant Listing structured data documentation to now support, in beta, membership loyalty pricing property types. Google also updated the docs to provide more examples and instructions around active prices, sale prices, striketh…