Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

So after Google literally paid Reddit for its content and then ranked them incredibly well in Google Search and its search features, Reddit during its earnings call blamed Google’s search algorithm for not hitting its expected user growth.

There is some chatter in the SEO community that Google Image Search may be down ranking, lowering the rankings, of AI-generated images, in favor of non-AI-generated images within the Google Image search results.

Google is making more changes to the Google Publisher Center, in March Google News will fully transition to automatically generated publication pages in March.

Did you ever want to validate to see if Google or other search engines can see your tabbed (hidden in a tab) navigation or content? Well, John Mueller from Google listed some ideas on how to do so.

John Mueller from Google wrote on Bluesky, “and let’s be honest, people can tell when author bios are used purely as an SEO tactic. It’s kinda awkward, not reassuring.” This was in response to a post from Nikki Pilkington who said “Stop treating autho…

Another update in the revised Google Quality Raters Guidelines that was updated on January 23rd was that they added a section for recipe sites and said that requiring “significant scrolling” or making it hard to find the jump to recipe button is not a …

Another update in the revised Google Quality Raters Guidelines that was updated on January 23rd was that they added a section for recipe sites and said that requiring “significant scrolling” or making it hard to find the jump to recipe button is not a …

Gary Illyes from Google reportedly said at event the other day that it is important for us to focus on originality in the coming year. “Originality is something we’re going to be focusing on this year. That’s going to be important,” is how he was quoted.

Gary Illyes from Google reportedly said at event the other day that it is important for us to focus on originality in the coming year. “Originality is something we’re going to be focusing on this year. That’s going to be important,” is how he was quoted.

Gary Illyes from Google ranted on Bluesky about folks updating the lastmod date in their sitemap files when all they have changed was the date in their footers copyright line from 2024 to 2025. Gary said, don’t do it, it is not enough of a change to t…

Gary Illyes from Google ranted on Bluesky about folks updating the lastmod date in their sitemap files when all they have changed was the date in their footers copyright line from 2024 to 2025. Gary said, don’t do it, it is not enough of a change to t…

As you know, Google updated its Search Quality Raters guidelines with 11 new pages a couple of weeks ago. But with that, Google also added the term “generative AI” to the quality raters guidelines for the first time, and it is listed 14 times.

If you embed resources on your pages, those embedded resources can be cached longer than other parts of the page in Google Search.

While this month was not as busy as last month, it was still a pretty stressful month for a lot of site owners and SEOs. I was expecting more core updates this past month, but we had none, whereas the previous report, we covered three confirmed Google…

Google has once again expanded the reach of its site reputation abuse policy, beyond the US enforcement from from May and beyond limited European regions last week – we are now seeing enforcement in the massive German market.

Google may have pushed some improvements to the reporting system within Google Search Console. Now Google can show how soon the report was updated within a 30 minute interval. So instead of showing last updated 3 hours ago or 4 hours ago, as an example…

John Mueller from Google noted that he finds it “interesting” how those who spend time in our industry “can often recognize made-for-search-engine content fairly quickly.” Meaning, we are good at seeing a piece of content on the web and knowing if it w…

John Mueller from Google said that merging content is always more challenging than a basic site move. Meaning, when you take a look at your content on your site and decide to merge a bunch of the content into fewer URLs, that takes longer for Google t…

Gary Illyes from Google said that if a URL has a status within Google Search Console as “URL is unknown to Google” that means that URL is really unknown to Google and has zero priority within Google Search systems.

On Thursday, January 23rd, Google updated its search quality raters guidelines PDF document. The last time Google updated this document was for the March 2024 spam update changes, over ten months ago. This update seems to focus on on spam and adds som…