Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

I have to say, I love these Search Off The Record podcasts because they always contain really useful details on how Google Search works and the hosts are always fun to listen to, when they chat together. In this episode we have the regulars John Muell…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that he has “never seen a site where that was an issue which caused visible problems with SEO.” I wonder if any of you have. I suspect where SEOs stuff up the pages with content where it causes the page flow to b…

While Google already published its annual web spam report for 2020, yesterday Google also published a bit more details on how the company tackled webspam in 2020. Specifically, Google said it sent out less manual webspam actions than previous years, 2…

John Mueller of Google had an interesting reply to a question around linking to a page without a rel canonical attribute on it, and that page has URL parameters on it for necessary tracking purposes. John said “if the parameter URLs are few, we can ke…

As you know, when the page experience update launches, AMP will no longer be a requirement for showing up in top stories. The buzz in the SEO news world is what will you do, will you remove the AMP pages, will you keep the old ones, will you keep goin…

Google announced it is removing the generic rich result filter from the Google Search Console performance report search appearance section. That means, you will no longer to see in general how well rich results are performing on your site. Instead, you…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if redirecting a URL to a new URL will also pass the Core Web Vitals metrics. The short answer is yes, if you redirect page A to new page B, page A’s Core Web Vitals metrics and signals will passed over from page A to n…

Google’s John Mueller said that tweaking your title tags after your site was impacting by a quality update won’t make a big different in your rankings. But yes, changing your title tags does help you rank for the desired change you made in your title …

Google on occasion tells you which method of technology they prefer over others. They did it with mobile, saying go responsive over other methods. They did it was schema markup solutions, saying JSON-LD is preferred over other methods. But using a pre…

Google documents in its Core Web Vital reports the scores and grades for each URL it knows about on the web. But how that will impact your web rankings in Google Search, when the Page Experience Update is released next month, Google will not document …

Google launched a new search appearance filter in the performance report within Search Console for the practice problem rich results. Google officially launched these in March, after testing them last December. With the launch Google added structured…

In March we reported that Google was going to migrate over the last batch of sites to mobile first indexing soon. This was after moving the mobile first indexing deadline from September 2020 to March 2021. Well, Google is still not done moving some si…

Googlers are often being asked about why content on specific websites do not rank or are not indexed. In this last case, John Mueller of Google responded to one request saying “We just don’t index all content – complaining about it on Twitter won’t ch…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if it is against Google’s webmaster guidelines to create a blog and build content that is unrelated to your business, with the sole intent of building links. John said no, it is not against Google’s guidelines but that …

Here is a new question I have never heard before in the SEO space. Someone asked if “adding punctuation after a link is somehow bad for SEO.” He said he heard this as a rumor and didn’t know if there is any truth to this. The truth is, this is a myt…

Google at an AMA at I/O this week on the top of web vitals was asked about how the core web vitals impact your rankings in Google Search. In short, Google said that it is not the case where you need to have all three “good” scores to get any ranking bo…

The big search news this week from Google was around MUM, Multitask Unified Model. Which is different than BERT but similar in that it helps Google better understand language & make it easier to get helpful responses to complex search needs. Well, it won’t go live for months to years and when it does, Google will let us know.

Google’s John Mueller said in his I/O talk that Google is now crawling “more than half of all URLs with HTTP/2.” GoogleBot first started crawling over HTTP/2 for a limited number of URLs in November 2020 and now half-a-year later, over 50% of what Goo…

Google’s John Mueller announced at Google I/O yesterday that Google now supports (currently in BETA) two new schema markups for video content. The first is Clip markup that provides segments to Google and the second is Seek markup that enables Google…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if removing Google Ads and stopping paying Google for search ads would help your site rank better in the organic free listings. John said no, they are not related and what you do or do not do on Google Ads has no influe…