Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller said that “you’ll start to see positive effects once you get out of the “poor” area in core web vitals.” This means that you may see a positive impact around the Google page experience update once your pages are out of the red ar…

A few years ago we reported that Google may treat a 308 redirects as a 301 redirect. Then shortly later we said you can’t rely on that because it was not documented. Three years later it was added to the official Google documents that Google treats 3…

I found a question and answer dialog between an SEO and John Mueller of Google on last Friday’s hangout interesting. The answer to the question for most of you is obvious, exchanging a link for a link is against Google’s guidelines but it seems some m…

John Mueller said in this morning’s video that Google has changed how it handles soft 404 detection saying it looks at desktop vs mobile differently but in Search Console only reports what it shows in mobile and not on desktop. So if Google sees your m…

Google said that starting in August 2021 it will change its insufficient contact information policy in the Google Merchant Center guidelines from having two forms of contact information, to only one form of contact information on your site.

Google has a disavow tool, a tool that reluctantly launched in 2012 that lets you tell Google which links you don’t want them to count that are pointing to your site. It turns out, there are a number of SEOs that end up disavowing their disavow tool -…

Darcy Burk asked John Mueller of Google if you still get the HTTPS ranking boost if you have HTTPS, but all your other page experience signals are poor. So your core web vitals are horrid but your URLs are over HTTPS, do you lose out on the HTTPS rank…

Google’s John Mueller told one publisher that “it’s possible that there’s just no SEO solution” to your Google ranking issues. He said sometimes it is not a technical or link building issue, sometimes it has to do with your content and your product and…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that while it is not only okay but also expected for many sites to link from their home page to all of their internal pages, that it is not recommended to link from all of your webpages to all of your webpages.
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Danny Sullivan of Google did one of his reminder blog posts on the Google blog to highlight on your website how customers can contact your company for support. Google said this can Google show your main phone number as opposed to a third-party support …

I spotted this funny chain of tweets on Twitter between different Google reps, each tagging a different Googler to answer a question. You won’t really learn much from it, but for some reason, it made me smile. You had the @AdsLiaison tag the @SearchLi…

A very common question I see SEOs and publishers ask is that they see that Google Search Console shows them in position 3 for a query but when they look at the actual search results page, they are not in that position. Or similar related questions that…

Google’s John Mueller shared some of his thoughts on third-party metrics that try to replicate Google’s internal PageRank metrics. PageRank is one of many signals Google uses for ranking websites in Search, the importance of PageRank in Google’s sear…

Imagine that one day I would write a story here and it would go viral, and get an insane amount of attention. Okay, I wrote a few stories that have done that. But should you be worried about the spammy links viral stories attract? The answer is no, ac…

In the second part of the Search Off The Record podcast released this morning Gary Illyes from Google explained how Google does ranking. In short, he said Google first cuts down the pages that can rank for a specific query to a short list of let’s say …

On the latest Search Off The Record podcast, John Mueller, Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt had a special guest from the Google Search Quality team named Dewey. He said that Google has built a “very effective and comprehensive machine-learning model that…

John Shehata shared some data from his Newzdash product showing that the top stories carousel in Google Search broke displaying over 12% of non-AMP URLs for the first time. We expect that figure to grow with the AMP requirement for top stories going a…

Google’s John Mueller said as far as he knows the page experience update does not have any exception list or whitelist. Meaning, there is not a list of sites where Google says do not apply the page experience update to. John wrote on Twitter “as far …

I read one of those deep thought lines online from Johan Hulsen on Twitter who asked Gary Illyes of Google a question on crawling. In short, Johan asked if the crawl budget looks to the scheduler, which kind of depends on Googlebot, but Googlebot does…

Google’s John Mueller said that spammy links to your site would not be the cause of soft 404 errors being displayed in Google Search Console. Honestly, I’ve never heard of this theory before, so it is new, and I figured I would share it. But I do not …