Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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.

Joe Hall posted a poll on Twitter asking what do SEOs use most to manage faceted navigation. The vast majority of SEOs responded that they use “proper canonicals tags.” Others responded they use robots.txt and then some said meta robots tag. But mos…

Google has updated its Google crawler help documentation to specific that the Google Favicon crawler now respects the Googlebot and Googlebot-Image robots rules. Previously, it seemed to just respect its own Google Favicon rules but that was changed o…

Google’s John Mueller said (again) that the Google URL Parameters tool is scary. He said this on Reddit, and then suggested the person try to use noindex or robots.txt methods as an alternative because the Google Search Console reports will show you is…

In the latests Search Off the Record, Gary Illyes and Lizzi Sassman from the Google Search Central team had Danielle Marshak, a Google Search Product Manager for Videos, as a guest on the podcast. Danielle Marshak, who created a couple new SEO video he…

Google seems to be testing displaying the domain the web story is from, while on the web story, in the footer of the story. Also, Google also shows tips on how to interact with web stories when you first load a web story from Google Search.

John Mueller of Google responded to a complaint on Reddit where the SEO or site owner was upset his one month old site was not performing on Google Search. The SEO said despite him “created backlinks on top websites with good DA and low spam score” hi…

Did you ever get an email from Google Search Console that asks you to take an action to fix an issue and then click the “verify fix” button? Well, did you ever just click that you fixed the issue, without actually implementing any fixes or changes?
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As you know, Google has a webmaster guideline against widget links, despite what some SEOs want to tell themselves. But the good news, and we knew this, that Google will likely just ignore those links and not penalize your site for those links today.
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A few years ago, we reported that Google said despite some of the SEO case studies, content collapsed and hidden within expandable tabs (accordions) will be indexed and ranked fully. Well, Dan Shure tested it again and he said no, it is not.

When it comes to “dominating” the search results, most SEOs define that as taking up as much of the search results on page one as possible. Sometimes that means on one domain, sometimes subdomains and sometimes different domains completely. Jonas Sick…