Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

A site that lets you do online HTML editing has supposedly received a manual action for unnatural links. So what the site owner did was post a notice to its user base in a big box saying “goodbye” that the site “has been penalized for unnatural link b…

Just another reminder that if you spam people asking to buy links or other link schemes, Google will potentially use that email and the sites listed in that email against you. John Mueller of Google said on Twitter the other day “Yes, we do use these kinds of lists to check our existing manual actions & algorithmic classifications, as well as to expand them.”

So while about half of you call Google Ads, Google AdWords, only 20% of you call Google Search Console, Webmaster Tools. I ran a poll for both to see if the new branding is sticking and clearly, it takes time but the new brand does for the most part s…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that it is a bad idea for Google to try to rank its ranking factors. To say content is more or less important than links, or to say one search ranking factor is more important than an other, was a “was a bad idea …

Google has added a new section to its video best practices help document for SafeSearch and adult oriented content. The document was updated on June 3rd, after a big update to that document this past March.

Google said that if you don’t need an XML sitemap file anymore, all you need to do is delete the sitemap file from your server and CMS. There is not much more you need to do after that, just delete it.

Google’s John Mueller was asked if templated content above the fold can rank in Google Search, where the unique content is below the fold. John Mueller said “the important part for us is really that there is some amount of unique content in the above t…

Google has added support to mark a product as back ordered for its product rich results. You can now set the availability property with a BackOrder value to communicate to Google Search that the item is back ordered.

To double check, Glenn Gabe asked Danny Sullivan of Google if there was a product reviews update that happened at the same time or so as the June 2021 core update. The answer from Danny Sullivan of Google was no, if a product reviews site was impacted…

Google’s John Mueller posted a short #AskGooglebot video question and answer on indexing limits. In short, like we covered numerous times before, Google does not have a limit to what it can index, but Google does not have unlimited resources to index …

In 2013, Google told us that it is not enough to disavow links if you want your unnatural link manual action to be reversed. Is that still true in 2021? The answer is probably yes.

The past month or so was one of the most active months I’ve seen with Google Search in a while. We had a confirmed Google June 2021 core update, several unconfirmed algorithm updates, Google announced MUM, and Google told us the page experience update…

The question of which anchor text does Google count when you have the same link multiple times on your page, linking to the same location, is not a new question. We have been covering it since before before 2008 and even Matt Cutts made a video on it i…

As more and more writers try to write using a more inclusive approach; specifically using inclusive language, does Google adapt to understand that language and rank that content as well to language that maybe is not that inclusive?

Google added a support document for the web crawler Google uses for Duplex, its Google Assistant voice features that can have conversations with people. The bot’s useragent is named DuplexWeb-Google and is now part of the modern set of GoogleBot crawl…

Google has added six new supported math solver rich result problem types to its support documentation. The new types are arithmetic, eigenvalue, eigenvector, limit, statistics and system of equations. There are now 49 problem types supported in the mat…

Google launched the ability to use regular expressions to do advanced filtering in Google Search Console in April. But what was not supported was the ability to use regular expressions to exclude patterns in your filters. Google added support for nega…

In April, Google updated how the Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) metric within the core web vitals was calculated. In short, Google made the metric more beneficial to most sites, so your CLS scores may go up by themselves on June 1st.

It has been half a year since I saw Google test the Google page experience and core web vitals label or icon in the search results. Google’s latest messaging is that Google will continue to test it but made no promises that this label will launch. We…

Google’s John Mueller was asked by an SEO named Promothash Boruah when is it safe to delete tag and/or category pages on your web site. John responded that you can remove those pages with no real impact on your organic search traffic if those pages ha…