Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller said on Reddit that Ghost directories do not impact SEO or have an effect on your Google rankings. John replied to a thread about this saying “no effect.”

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that the number of links, for SEO purposes, is not a useful metric. He also said by the time you calculate all your links, that number has probably already changed – so it is not a good use of your time.

Starting at about 1:30pm ET, five hours ago, Google Search Console is still down for many SEOs. It might work for you but for many, Google Search Console is not loading. Google is aware of the issue and is working on addressing it but there is not ETA…

John Mueller from Google shared something both funny and mostly true about SEO tasks. He basically said that it is often hard or even sometimes impossible to know which SEO tasks led to ranking success, even after it is all set and done. John said on …

Google announced that now Google Analytics 4 supports data from Google Search Console. This was something Google has supported with the original Google Analytics since 2011 and now has brought over support for with the new GA4.

I previous wrote about how Google Ads is not impacted by the Log4j security vulnerability but many sites and servers are. So if you have a website that needs to have updates because of the Log4j security issue, do you have to worry if you need to take …

Google’s John Mueller said that special characters on your page “doesn’t affect Google” Search rankings. This is in regards to like checkmarks such as ‘” or other special characters.

Google’s John Mueller confirmed again that Google won’t likely penalize or give your site a manual action if you do not add a nofollow or rel sponsored attribute to your affiliate links. He said this at the 31:58 mark in this past Friday’s video.
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There has been a lot of local SEOs talking about the big shake up in the local results over the past week. It might be related to a local search algorithm update (Google has not confirmed it yet) or might be some spam fighting efforts. But I am seeing…

Google’s John Mueller said again that having links to your site is not a requirement and not mandatory for ranking in Google Search. He said this back in 2015 as well, but said again in 2021 that links are not a requirement to rank.

Google said that as of December 14th and onwards that the reviews snippet rich results report in Google Search Console may show fewer review objects. This is because Google is no longer showing top-level rating objects in this report.

As you know, Google has dropped its deadline to switch all sites to mobile-first indexing after missing its self-directed deadlines multiple times in the past. But John Mueller of Google said in a video on Friday that he is guessing that Google will f…

Over the past 24 hours or so, Google has sent me dozens of notices from sites I have verified Google Search Console properties with. The notices say “New Coverage issue detected” and the specific error is a “redirect error.” Google said it is looking …

Google has told us that you want to avoid buying a domain name that was filtered by the Google SafeSearch adult filter. Well, servers.com had this issue and after asking Google to remove the filter, Google did so in about a month of time. Plus, Google…

Google’s John Mueller said putting the category name or topic name in your URL slug has zero impact on your rankings. I am not 100% sure if he really meant ZERO but he used a GIF that says ZERO.

Now that some publishers, like Search Engine Land, are removing AMP because it is no longer a requirement for top stories inclusion, some are noticing weird changes to the publisher’s logo Google selects in the top stories section. Google said when yo…

Google has made some changes to the Google Search Console performance report for Google News where your impressions may drop. Google said this is just a reporting change and the drop in impression doesn’t reflect any ranking changes but rather how Goo…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that when it comes to Google understanding and ranking documents, Google looks at more than just text on a page. He aimed this comment at a question around core updates and a site being hit by a core update.
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Sometimes people change their names, for legal reasons, maybe when they get married, maybe they go from a pseudonym to using their real name. What do you do if you change your name or your author on your web site changes their name – how will Google h…

John Mueller of Google gave a nice one liner of SEO advice using the movie Jurassic Park. He said on Twitter “It’s a bit like Jurassic Park. Technically, you can do a lot of things. But should you?”