Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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 …

Are pages that are found in the Google Search Console coverage report, under “excluded” and labeled as “Crawled – currently not indexed” a sign that there are quality issues with not just those pages but also the site? Maybe. John Mueller of Google res…

Google announced that it is changing the insufficient payment information for Google Merchant Center. Specifically Merchants will no longer be required to provide their accepted payment methods on their website to customers before the checkout process…

Google has vastly expanded its help document on how various redirects impact your site’s performance in Google Search. The document even mentions “Crypto redirects” which to me seems like a new term but just means a way to communicate in normal languag…

Last week, Google began showing non-AMP content in the top stories carousel in mobile search. This was as expected with the page experience update rollout. But Kyle Sutton posted on Twitter that in some cases Google may even show the non-AMP URL in th…

Google’s Martin Splitt confirmed that having a hover over expandable text for navigational elements is not considered cloaking by Google. Martin said doing this is “Deffo not cloaking.”

Google has added a help document that has shows how How HTTP status codes, and network and DNS errors affect Google Search. The page goes through each type of code and error and tell you how GoogleBot and Google Search will be impacted by it.

Google’s John Mueller was asked in the video hangout this past Friday if how to handle brand or product names with accented characters, like maybe Škoda Auto via Skoda Auto. Do you use the word spelled Škoda with the accent in the name or Skoda without it? The answer is probably include both variations in your content.

I know we covered this topic countless times but just another reminder, Google prefers to “neutralize” bad links and neutralize spam as opposed to penalize you for those bad links or spam. That means that Google will ignore it, like it isn’t there.
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Google seems to be testing a new set of search refinements that let you filter by the brand or specific store you want to filter your results by. So a search for a [camo backpack] has search refinements for colors and size and type but also to let you…

Google’s John Mueller had to tell an individual that when Google makes changes to its search algorithms, those changes should have zero impact on your direct traffic. Yes, they can have a big impact on your organic traffic, but not your direct traffic…

Google has created a single page where you can find all of the Google Search content policies. This includes Google Search’s overall content policies, search feature policies and feature specific policies. You can find them all in this one document he…