Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Lily Ray shared on Twitter some examples of Google making up artificial author names to attach to some of its search results snippets. She showed some named such as ALP Dull, R Wine, W Wine, and other names that are being pulled from the content somew…

Google’s John Mueller, Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt released their latests “search off the record” podcast where they pretend to create a search engine named Steve and discuss how they would build it out. One topic they spent a lot of time on is the t…

Google’s John Mueller confirmed something most of us know, that your site and/or pages can be indexed by Google Search but that not all data centers may have that URL in that specific index at the same time. John said it is rare to see but it can happe…

Technically, if you change your content based on the IPs or user agents visiting that piece of content, specifically giving GoogleBot different content than your users, that would be against Google’s cloaking policy and warrant a Google penalty. But b…

A competitor to Google Analytics named Simple Analytics wrote on its blog “Google penalizes you for using Google Analytics.” John Mueller of Google was asked if this is true and John said on Twitter “No, it’s not the case that we penalize for Google A…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if adding images to your web pages, if that will help you rank higher in Google Search. John said no, he said on Twitter “there is no automatic effect from adding images.”

Google’s John Mueller confirmed that using a rel=external, rel=noopener and/or a rel=noreferrer have no impact on your Google search rankings or SEO. John said on Reddit that there is “no effect” by adding those link attributes to your hyperlinks.
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Google offers numerous ways to verify your website with Google Search Console. Jackson Lo asked on Twitter which is your preferred method and without surprise, most SEOs said that they prefer DNS and HTML tag verification over the others.

Last month in the Google webmaster, SEO and search world was pretty busy to say the least. We had a few unconfirmed Google updates but on top of that we had the product reviews update rollout and the delay of the product experience update.

Google has stopped displaying the scroll-to-text data in the reporting within Google Search Console’s performance report. It started showing this August 2020 but now Google is no longer showing this information in Search Console.

Google’s John Mueller posted a great thread on Twitter about considerations around how to make your images more optimized, so that your pages load faster, while also taking into account how that might impact your rankings in Google Image Search. John …

Back in February 2020, Google due to EU pressure began showing a new carousel box in the EU based search results to show search results from other search providers. The box is named “find results on” and can link you to Yelp, Groupon, Craigslist, and m…

Dan Brickley, a developer advocate at Google who managed Schema.org, had a really great line that I wanted to amplify here. He was asked by a seasoned SEO about which schema one should use in a specific case. In which Dan Brickley replied “that quest…

Google’s John Mueller said that if you are seeing “seeing a drop in valid, and not a rise in invalid, that’s possibly just a matter of the sample used for testing becoming smaller for that site.” This is specific to the Search Console structured data …

There was an interesting thread on Twitter about DA, Moz’s domain authority metrics. In short, a blogger named ChloÃ

Google’s Paul Bakaus, he is very involved in web stories these days, said on Twitter that at Google “we don’t generally ‘suspend’ sites, and when you fix issues, you are always eligible to reappear.” Truth is, and I posted this reminder before, Google…

Google has a new method to debug and ultimately report indexing issues with Google Search. Google opened up a new form where currently US based site owners can report issues directly to Google around Google Search indexing. This is how it works.
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Google has a few link attributes that allow you to tell Google not to pass any link signals from the link to the site you are linking to. There is the classic rel=”nofollow” and the newer rel=”ugc” and rel=”sponsored”. But no, there is no do follow or…

Google has added a bunch of new supporting details to the robots.txt specification document. Jamie Indigo noticed these changes and explained what was added include “explicit details on the files for IDNs, IP-addresses, and port numbered hostnames.”
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Google has made design updates to the Google News Publisher Center. I don’t know if new functionality was added, it does not appear so, but maybe I am missing something. I’ll be honest, I do not use the publisher center that often, so I’m really not s…