Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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 Gary Illyes from Google said over time the Webmaster Guidelines have become confusing and somewhat outdated and it does need …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.
…

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…

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…