Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller said this morning that the Google Search team has removed a classifier it was using to determine soft 404s. As a reminder, a ton of sites were complaining about pages being deindexed and noticed a spike in soft 404s reported by G…

Gary Illyes and Lizzi Harvey published a new Google Search developer help document on an overview of of Google search operators. This document differs from the existing one in that it is more focused on what SEOs should be aware of in regards to these …

Gary Illyes of Google posted on Twitter that you should keep a redirect live for a year for Google Search purposes. The signals from original page A to destination page B will all be transferred and stick with page B even after the redirect is removed…

Alan Kent from the Google Search Relations team posted on the Google blog some new best practices for creating deal pages that work well in Google Search. While the advice and tips are not necessarily new, Google is saying the company now recommends t…

Did you know that returning a “results not found” type of page can result in Google Search considering that page a soft 404 and thus removing it from the search results? We know Google recently changed how it determines some soft 404 pages, but this …

Google’s Daniel Waisberg did this outstanding post and illustration, he calls sketches, of how Google would categorize the types or causes of organic traffic drops. The categories include technical issues on the site level, technical issues on the pag…

Google has added yet another filter options to the Google Search Console performance report. This is under the “search appearance” filters that list over a dozen specific search result types or features. You can now see “Math Solvers” which is a newis…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if a core update can have the people also ask (PAA) results show up more or less often. John said yes, it can, just like it can with rich results and featured snippets.

Google now officially supports SeekToAction markup for videos on your site, so that you can use the SeekToAction markup to communicate the key moments (timestamps) Google shows for videos in Google Search.

Danny Sullivan of Google published a blog post on Friday named answers to some common questions about appearing in Google News. Sadly, I honestly don’t think this will lead to less questions and frustration from new publishers and their questions arou…

Google’s John Mueller again said that dropping links in forums for SEO purposes won’t help you rank better in Google. In response the the Reddit thread question “Is Forum Posting Still Work As Link Building Method in SEO?” John Mueller said “No.”
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As you know, John Mueller of Google has consistently preached out important consistency is when it comes to your web site for SEO purposes. He has said this numerous times. The purpose is for you not to confuse search engines and tell search engines …

A few days ago, Google made a change in the Google Search Console page experience report to direct developers to debug their AMP pages for page experience issues outside of Search Console. Google is linking them to the AMP Page Experience Guide.
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Google’s John Mueller said when it comes to PDFs on your site, you don’t have to worry about the core web vitals scores or if they are mobile friendly. John said on Twitter “Yeah, we essentially ignore PDFs when it comes to Core Web Vitals & mobile-friendliness. Sometimes they show up in the reports, but there’s no need to do anything specific with them.”

Google is discontinuing the feature to post in your verified Google knowledge panels starting on July 20, 2021. This does not impact Google Posts within Google My Business but does impact those who used it on their knowledge panels.

Google has added a new property to the job posting schema named directApply. directApply is a method to enable someone from Google Search to save steps when applying for your job listing after finding it on Google Search.

Google is really pushing its shopping features these days and expect Google to keep pushing. They integrated with Shopify and other platforms and yesterday announced integration with GoDaddy online store customers.

In addition to the new direct apply property for job postings, Google also announced that new the company is adding new editorial content policy for job postings on Google Search. These new policies go into effect on October 1, 2021 and aim to improve…

The question is, can SEOs give their clients timelines for when they can expect improvements on their SEO or ranking issues in Google Search? The answer is, it depends on the issue and how specific the timeline is.

Google’s John Mueller said that Google Search tries “to find the primary language per page.” So when you mix languages, that might cause issues with Google doing that. He added on Twitter “but what you put on different pages is totally up to you.”
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