Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google has confirmed an issue with the Google Search Console Performance reports specific to image search. The issue is a logging issue that may result in your clicks and impressions data in those reports being lower than normal. Google said the issue …

It is okay to have multiple properties verified for the same site in Google Search Console. It is not a bad thing, it won’t hurt you, in fact, it might give you more granular data to use if you do. In fact, John Mueller of Google confirmed it is fine…

In November 2020, Google said we may see a label for the Google page experience update show up in the search result snippets. Then in December 2020 we saw actual examples in the raw of Google testing this icon and label in the search results. In Januar…

Does it matter how deep your subfolder URL structure is for SEO purposes and Google rankings? No, not really. John Mueller of Google said even recently on Twitter “I don’t think any search engine would care either way.”

Lily Ray asked John Mueller of Google if the product reviews update work also for reviews of places or things. For example, think about comparing universities, online courses, vacation locations, etc. John Mueller said no, “I suspect not, since these …

Google has often said that if they shared the full details of how its search algorithms and ranking factors would work, it would lead to abuse and poorer quality results. It seems like most SEOs agree with that sentiment.

Last week we broke the news that Google does some form of deduplication of the top stories and web results in some situations. John Shehata released some data from his Newzdash product showing that 67% of all Google searches have duplicate top stories…

Google generally likes you to stick with one language per page, that isn’t to say you cannot use different pages throughout your site with different languages. But if you do not listen and you put multiple languages on a page, Google can assign multip…

Brodie Clark posted a Twitter poll asking “is optimizing a website for search term variations that include “near me” good practice for SEO?” The results were pretty almost evenly split amongst “yes” and “no”, with more people leaning to “it depends.”
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Google has announced a brand new robots tag it will obey going forward, it is named indexifembedded. It lets you control if you want Google to index a page with embedded content.

I am not going to get into the 301 vs 302 redirect debate, covered that countless times here. But I found an interesting conversation on Twitter about the differences between 301 and 302 redirects and how they consolidate signals forward or back, also …

Google’s Gary Illyes said on the last Search Off The Record Podcast that Google in 2022 is looking to make crawling more efficient and environmentally friendly. And while Google is investigating ways to do that with IndexNow, Gary said it wont be done…

Google has updated its product structured data help documents to say that you need both product and car structured in order for Google to display ratings and review snippets in search for car search results. Google said “currently car is not supported…

Everyone panic – Google might not just make larger updates to the Google Webmaster Guidelines but also rename the guidelines. Gary Illyes from Google said over time the Webmaster Guidelines have become confusing and somewhat outdated and it does need …

The Federal Vampire & Zombie Agency is no longer showing up in Google Search, is it some sort of conspiracy or technical bug? Well, it is a technical issue with the web site, it is having server issues but I thought it would be fun to cover since I never knew such an agency existed.

Google’s John Mueller said again that a spike in crawling activity on your site is unrelated to an upcoming search ranking algorithm update. John Mueller said on Twitter “it’s unrelated” when asked if crawl spikes are related to Google updates.
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Google’s John Mueller said in an SEO hangout last Friday that it is impossible for Google to understand that one piece of content is equivalent to another piece of content when those content pieces are in different languages. So Google is basically tr…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that “anecdotally, it feels like we’re already doing much better with getting languages & location right, even without hreflang or geotargeting settings.” This was in response to an excellent question from Glenn Gabe about can Google use MUM AI to figure out page language pairs without hreflang.

Google no longer supports time ranges for cook prep and total times times within recipe schema markup and structured data. Google said it removed the “guidance about specifying a range for the cookTime and prepTime properties in the Recipe documentati…

We know Google has deduplication efforts for when a featured snippet is displayed so that it might remove the snippet from the main web results. Google may do the same, in some cases, for when a URL is listed in the top stories section and then not sho…