Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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?”

Google’s John Mueller said for some sites, you can ignore the Google Webmaster Guidelines that says you should have “a page with a human-readable list of links to these pages (sometimes called a site index or site map page).” John said in some or prob…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that the Google Product Experts do not get access to any ranking or SEO secrets. Nor do these Product Exerts get any sort of ranking boost in Google Search for being a Google volunteer.

Google’s John Mueller said again that Google does not index parts of a page – like the header versus the footer versus the main area of the content. Google indexes it all and does not index a piece or part of it. But there is one exception, embedded c…

Google’s John Mueller responded to an SEO asking if he should undo the URL site migration changes made a year ago to restore the traffic the blog had previously. In which John Mueller said that his guess is the “traffic change is unrelated” to the URL …

Google Merchant Center can now show you which products are automatically eligible for badges. Krik Williams shared a screenshoot showing off this new feature and Search Engine Land received confirmation from Google that this is indeed a new feature.
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Google’s John Mueller said when it comes to repurposing old domains that may have not been used but were being redirected elsewhere, it is fine for the most part. The only cases where it can cause SEO or Google ranking issues is if that domain was redi…

On Friday, Google’s John Mueller announced Google is doing away with the deadline for sites to switch over to mobile-first indexing. Some sites just can’t move over yet and Google won’t force them by giving them a deadline that it will continue to push…

So now that we know that bolding works for SEO and rankings in 2021, we need to start bolding everything. Or maybe we need to be more random about our bolding efforts. Or maybe we need to really think about what we bold. In all seriousness, it is kind…

Google’s John Mueller said that semantic HTML is not a quality signal used in Google Search for ranking purposes. An SEO said “Proper HTML semantics and tag hierarchy must be a quality signal.” John Mueller responded saying “I don’t see it as a quality…

I am sure you’ve all seen websites that have a section on their website for “As Featured On” or something like that, then a carousel or listing of logos from those brands. Well, those links should not be feared, John Mueller from Google said putting t…

Do you want to use the same design theme on multiple websites? Well, Google’s John Mueller said it is fine to do that, in fact, he said many sites do share a similar or the same theme.

Google has another bug, this time with Google Search Console’s crawl stats report. The report has a gap in the data, missing data on November 19th and November 20th. Google’s John Mueller confirmed the issue and said on Twitter the team is working on a…

Google’s John Mueller confirmed Google had a crawling issue – specifically saying “crawling for the caches had slowed down for some sites.” Google said it was fixed “a while” ago and added that “it wasn’t widespread, and that there were no negative ef…