Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Gary Illyes from Google posted an awesome question and answer on Twitter talking about pages that are on the edge of the Google quality threshold. He said that if your pages disappear from Google Search and then reappear when you manually submit them …

John Mueller from Google said it is wrong to say that “Edu domains tend to have a ton of outbound links, and as such, Google ignores a big chunk of them.” He said “People who focus on .edu links usually have bigger problems to worry about, but I’ve ce…

When Google announced the new link spam update, a ton of confusion arose with that announcement. The confusion was mostly around do you need to change your nofollow links to rel=sponsored for affiliate or similar links. The answer is no, nofollow is …

Google was asked if you have an English version of your site for years and years and then expand the site to France. So you create an FR subdomain or subfolder for the French users. Does the English version signals pass through to the French version o…

Google has launched numerous search algorithms around speed in the past. The question some folks have is does Google still use those old ones or does the new Page Experience Update replace those. John Mueller of Google said he would assume the Page E…

On Friday, Google updated its FAQ structured data guidelines to provide examples around the guideline that reads “all FAQ content must be visible to the user on the source page.” The examples explain that it is okay to have the content in expandable s…

Gary Illyes from Google said on Twitter “I don’t know who needs to hear this but putting work in core web vitals doesn’t mean that the site can’t lose rankings over time.” He then added “I also washed my car hundreds of times and it still left me stand…

Over the past couple of days, Google stopped showing review snippets, the stars under the search result snippets, for all queries. I did ask Google about this yesterday morning, as it really seems like a bug, but I have not heard back yet.

Technically, when it comes to using file extensions in your URLs, it doesn’t really make a difference which one you use for ranking purposes. .PHP, .HTML, .ASP, etc – it doesn’t matter. But if you use image based file extensions for web page based fil…

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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