Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

We have seen lots of SEO threats in the past, mostly around negative SEO but I have not seen one threaten to delete a whole website. Someone went to Twitter asking for advice from Google on how to deal with such a threat.

Lily Ray shared an interesting chart from Ahrefs, the SEO toolset, showing how for a single keyword phrase, there were multiple intents from searchers spike over a different time period. In which, John Mueller of Google responded that it makes sense t…

Google’s John Mueller once again confirmed that Google will continue to retry old, redirected URLs for years and years even if the redirect remains in place for a long time. John said on Twitter “I suspect we’ll keep retrying these for years, on and o…

I am seeing numerous complaints this morning that Google is showing header tags, H1s and H2s, instead of the meta title tags, for its search result snippets. I am seeing some public complaints on Twitter, but also in some of the private forums and ema…

Google announced that all signed-in Google Search Console users who go to the English help form can now submit indexing bug notifications to Google. This ran as a pilot to a limited number of users back in April but is now open to a lot more Search Con…

Google’s John Mueller was asked a two part question on the last video hangout he conducted. The first was, does it still take several months for Google to reevaluate the quality of a site. The second is, how do you know that you are on the right path…

John Mueller, a Google search advocate, said on Twitter that most of the updates Google does related to Google Search are not in response to any spam action. So it is not like Google is reacting to spam all day with various Google algorithm updates.
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Gary Illyes from Google posted on Reddit that he is looking for examples of where GoogleBot might not be behaving. Specifically he wants examples of “cases where refresh crawls are going nuts.” I assume this means where Googlebot is recrawling pages i…

John Mueller of Google said that by just moving a link from one position on a page to another position on a page – you likely won’t see any ranking boost from that action. He said on Twitter “I wouldn’t assume that you’d get a boost out of just moving…

Google has posted a document about upcoming changes to the Google podcasting requirements coming by September 21, 2021. All podcast RSS feeds must now include more details on the show level to be eligible to appear in Google Search and Podcasts recom…

Google’s John Mueller said this week that the search company is still not done moving sites to its mobile-first indexing. This was suppose to be completed March of this year, after moving the deadline from September of last year.

Does Google think less of your website if you link your site to a “lesser” website? I guess the question is similar to if you hang out with a lower class crowd, do your more upper class friends think less of you? With Google, the answer is no.
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Google recently started to support author.url and other author properties that let you communicate to Google which author wrote an article on your site. I asked John Mueller of Google if he is worried if people will fake author details and spam it, to…

Daniel Waisberg and Maya Mamo from the Google Search Console team published a blog post named Google Search Console Insights behind the curtains. This document, according to Daniel Waisberg, has new details on how Google “handles the data was not out …

For the past few weeks or so, I have been hearing complaints from SEOs, mostly in private forums, about Google having weird indexing issues. The issues are not persistent, in that a new page is indexed, then drops out of the index, then indexed again…

Google said it has recently added the author.url property to the Article structured data documentation. Google said this “url property helps Google disambiguate the correct author of the article.” But it seems Google added a number of author based pr…

Google has updated the structured data testing tool page to a page that instructs the user to either go to the rich results testing tool on Google or the schema markup validator on Schema.org.

Newsflash, Google’s Martin Splitt said that “alt text is important for SEO too.” I did ask him how important, but he would not disclose that information. Here is more of the context around this on Twitter.

Google’s John Mueller clarified on Friday that when Google pushes out new core updates that each one can be unique and impact Google’s core rankings differently. So if your site is impacted by one, it might not be impact by another core update.
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Google’s John Mueller confirmed that Google Search Console does not filter out all bot traffic. John said on Twitter in response to someone suspecting seeing bot traffic in the Performance report, “sometimes it can be from bots – we don’t necessarily …