Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

We’ve known for like two decades that Google does and can treat the same URL but with different cases differently. So domain.com/Apple vs domain.com/apple can be seen by Google as different URLs. But Google seems to be stricter about this rule when it…

Lily Ray posted on Twitter that many SEOs are noticing this and posting about it on Twitter with “many examples of URLs in GSC’s “Crawled, Not Indexed” report (with recent crawl dates) that are, in fact, indexed URLs.” There are lots and many of me to…

Google has said that the Google Search Console rich results report for product structured data now provides more granular levels of errors. Google said starting September 29th, “Search Console now provides more granularity in error reporting for Produc…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that directory submissions, article submissions and bookmarking links are generally against Google’s webmaster guidelines. He said they are generally seen by Google as artificial links and thus you should likely av…

Did you ever wonder if putting your XML sitemap URL at the bottom of your robots.txt will impact your Google Search indexing? The answer is no. Google does not care about the location of your Sitemap URL in your robots.txt file.

Aleyda Solis posted a Twitter poll asking if SEOs have experienced an “unexpected” Google search rankings drop and why. The poll had less than 300 responses but the results do not surprise me too much. In short, most SEOs have experience such a drop a…

Google has added a multipage set of new help documentation around e-commerce best practices for Google Search. The docs include how to build the best possible e-commerce site for your users and Google Search.

Did you know that Wikipedia has a WikiProject Spam section where it publishes all its link spam reports for all to see? That is basically a list of all those who do link drops on Wikipedia. Long story short, Google Search does not use this list for …

I asked John Mueller of Google about category pages that contain sponsored products. Does Google want sites to ensure Google cannot index those sponsored products. John Mueller said “some sites take care to prevent them from being indexed in various …

Earlier we reported that Google does not use URL length as a ranking factor. While that may be true, Google does use the URL length as a “very light” signal for canonicalization, said John Mueller of Google.

Google’s John Mueller said that Google is trying to move away from the over 200 ranking signal number because they find it to be “kind of misleading.” Misleading in that it is hard to quantify the number of ranking signals Google uses.

While I was offline, Google had a super long delay and a bunch of issues with Google Search Console and some of the reporting. Well, now that I am back, it seems to be coming back to normal. In fact, John Mueller of Google said this morning it might c…

You often see on product pages or even blog posts, a section for related products or related stories. What if those related links were so dynamic that every time the page load, it loaded a new set of links? Is that bad for Google and your SEO efforts…

The other week we covered how Google’s John Mueller said that changing your website theme or WordPress theme, can impact your rankings. But when will changing your website theme not impact your rankings?

A while back an SEO asked John Mueller of Google if “linking to an external site from the FAQ Schema of a discounts/vouchers site?” John responded, “sure.” I guess if the link is against Google’s webmaster guidelines, sure, you can get a manual actio…

Google’s John Mueller said that using self-referential canonicals is a good way to clean up small SEO mistakes. He was asked about it on Reddit, about the difference between self-referential canonicals and normal canonicals.

Google’s John Mueller confirmed that even if you do not have reviews on your product landing pages, you can still use product structured markup/schema on your product pages and gain product rich results in the Google search results page.

Lily Ray asked John Mueller of Google what does one do if the author of a piece of content does not want their name on the content because of fear of being harassed or worse. Should you leave the author byline off or will it hurt that page in terms of…

Google’s John Mueller said he would not recommend that you remove old content or old news from your news site for SEO reasons. He said “I don’t think you would get a lot of value out of removing just old news.”

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that he doesn’t think that Google does “anything special with all-caps headings.” So if you want to shout your headlines in UPPERCASE, go for it.