Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller reiterated on Twitter that consistency is the number one piece of SEO advice. He said last night that “SEO lives and dies with consistency.”

Google’s John Mueller described how Google is able to recognize an author and all of that author’s content and mentions across the web, without supporting authorship markup anymore. In short, John said Google can do this when all of the author’s artic…

Google’s John Mueller said when it comes to breadcrumbs, the links you see on pages that tell you where you clicked from, the placement and location of those breadcrumbs don’t really matter for SEO. John said “no, the placement doesn’t matter for SEO. We use breadcrumbs for crawling (finding internal links) & for rich results (structured data); both don’t depend on placement of the breadcrumbs.”

Gary Illyes from Google said on Reddit that for a page to be indexed by Google “the content still has to pass quality checks.” If that content does not pass the quality checks, Google may not index it even if you manually try to submit the page to Goog…

Google’s John Mueller pointed out an important fact that I see a lot of folks in the industry misunderstanding around core web vitals. Googlebot does crawl the web and brings in most of the signals Google uses to rank your pages, but the core web vita…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if using the abbr tag – the HTML abbreviation markup – if that can help you rank higher in Google Search. John said no.

A week or so ago, I reported that there was an issue with Google Search labeling real content pages as soft 404s, and thus not ranking those pages in Google Search. This bug directly seemed to have caused traffic issues for these sites. Well, that bug…

Google was asked if building links too fast, let’s call it speed link building, is a bad thing. If you get too many links, too fast, is that something that can count against you in Google Search.

The Daily Mail owner has filed an antitrust lawsuit in a NYC federal court against Google alleging Google punishes publishers, like the Daily Mail, in its search results if they don’t sell enough ad space through Google’s marketplace, like Google AdSen…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if changing the design of a site but leaving the content and URLs the same would possibly lead to ranking changes. John Mueller said yes, it likely will because he said “if you change design, you generally change the con…

Google has added a new report in Google Search Console named the Page Experience Report. Google also added new filters in the Performance Reports where you can compare the performance of green/yellow/red performing pages to each other.

With the change where the top stories carousel in Google Search no longer will need AMP, you do need to meet some guidelines to be included but you do not need to be faster than your competition to show up in the top stories carousel.

Google’s John Mueller was asked “are seals a good way to improve the E-A-T of a website” By seals, the user means trust seals, like BBB seals, security seals, certification seals, anything that conveys a form of trust on the website. John Mueller basi…

John Mueller of Google was asked another interesting question in this Friday’s SEO hangout. The question was, do you need to optimize your whole website if you only care to have one URL, one page, on that whole website to rank well? The answer was not…

Michelle Race, aka ShelliWeb, asked an interesting SEO question, she asked what is better for Google when you have empty webpages. Should you noindex the empty webpage or should you let Google index it and treat it as a soft 404?

Google might be having some issues with serving Web Stories in Google Search now. This started last night, maybe around 7pm ET. Some publishers have been complaining that the Web Stories were not surfacing in Google Search for trending topics and tr…

Google can show the wrong date in the search results snippets. We’ve covered this topic numerous times over multiple dates and times. But one aspect we did not cover is that when Google does this, it does not mean Google has quality issues with your w…

Google’s John Mueller implied that since the product reviews update has been rolled out, it will be hard for user generated content generated product reviews to rank well in Google Search. John said on Twitter “the focus there is clearly on reviews fr…

Google’s John Mueller, Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt published another Search Off The Record podcast and this one talks about how Google (or any search engine) serves results, Gary spent a lot of time on this topic. Martin Splitt spoke about the proces…

Over the past several days, I think starting around April 9th, Google made some change to how it detects soft 404s and that change may be causing ranking issues for some sites in Google Search.