Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

John Mueller is out with another #AskGooglebot Google SEO video, this one is on site migrations and URL changes. It is a short two minute video on one of the most SEO intimidating changes one can make to their site – change all the URLs on their site….

Glenn Gabe noted that he is seeing some weird Google Googlebot activity recently, saying he is seeing “crawling spike across a number of sites” that started on January 12th through January 13th. I then checked some of the properties and noticed that on…

The other day I wrote about how Google said fluff content is hard for search engines to understand and thus rank. I explained how Google does rank content that is surrounded by a lot of fluff. But then I heard John Mueller of Google once again talk ab…

As promised, Google has released the desktop version of the page experience report in Google Search Console. The desktop version is pretty similar to the mobile version, as you’d expect. With the page experience update algorithm coming to desktop nex…

Google’s John Mueller confirmed that the search company’s 2014 guidance with faceted navigation remains true today – do not use non-standard URL encoding. That means do not use commas, brackets or other non-standard URL encoding in your URL structure….

Google’s John Mueller was asked a series of questions around the product reviews update on last Friday’s video hangout. In short, it will expand to other languages and countries, it probably does use machine learning and eventually it might be incorpo…

Google’s John Mueller posted one of those PSA tweets this morning asking hosting companies that trigger robot detection interstitials to not use a 200 status code. John also said not to place a noindex on that page. If you do these things the pages se…

Most SEOs often look at titles tags when browsing web sites, I mean, I do, while the average person does not. So you’ve probably seen numbers in the tab bar representing an unread direct message count or chat request. Well, Shopify sites using chat-bo…

Google’s John Mueller the other day said on Twitter the example given to him was “less about duplicate content, and more about fluff.” He said when it comes to fluff content, it makes “it hard for search engines to figure out what you’re trying to say….

Google’s John Mueller posted a short post on Twitter that needs to be highlighted. He said “the quality raters guidelines are not guidelines for SEOs though.” We often forget that, these search quality raters guidelines are for the search quality evalu…

It is probably not the best advice to block slow countries or regions with the goal of improving your Google search rankings. Yes, Google has a page experience algorithm that is mostly made up of speed factors from its core web vitals. But it is such …

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter “disavow the whole domain if you know there’s an issue with some of its links.” He said there is “no need to be exact when everything on a site is bad from your point of view.” This reminds me of the advice from Ma…

Alan Kent from Google posted an “informal poll” on Twitter asking SEOs “how confident are you in giving advice or planning strategies for Google Discover?” The poll only had 161 responses, so it is super informal but it showed that most SEOs are not c…

This is just a reminder that the Google Page Experience Update for desktop pages is coming to a Google search ranking algorithm soon. Well, technically it is coming next month – in February and it is something you really don’t need to stress about.
…

Danny Sullivan of Google confirmed on Twitter that there is or was a backlog of manual actions issued by Google. Google has been slow and delayed in responding to those manual actions but is working through the backlog.

Google’s John Mueller said you can ignore threats and blackmail emails from people who demand do-follow links. John said on Reddit when asked about these threats “ignore it, it’s just spam.”

Google’s John Mueller said it again, when it comes to “toxic links” you can ignore them. If you are losing sleep at night over them and it makes you sleep better, you can disavow the links – but you don’t have to – John Mueller said just ignore them an…

So it is now 2022 and some folks are asking if keyword density is an SEO Google search ranking factor. The answer is still no, according to John Mueller, a Search Advocate at Google.

Google’s John Mueller was asked if stock levels can impact the ranking of products on an e-commerce site. John implied that the answer is no, he said “that seems unrelated, at least for normal search. It might impact product search but he is not sure …

You do not need to nofollow or use a rel sponsored attribute on your internal links, even if those internal links lead to sponsored reviews content with affiliate links to those products. Lily Ray asked Google’s John Mueller about this and John said wh…