Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Generally over the years, we’ve heard and reported on complaints about how new sites find it hard to rank above older sites. We also heard how old sites sometimes can’t make changes and adapt as faster as new sites. Google’s John Mueller said on Twit…

Google notified some local businesses that specifically had set their business address not to show to the public, did end up being shown to some searchers by accident between the dates of October 2019 through April 2021 – yes, a full 18 months. Google …

Back in 2017, Google announced that it was working with The Trust Project to help publishers use “eight trust indicators that newsrooms can add to their content.” But Google’s Danny Sullivan said that was the extent of it, and that Google does not use…

Both Semrush and RankRanger are reporting an increase in the frequency Google shows the “people also ask” types of search featured in its search results. It is not a huge jump but up a few percentage points according to both trackers starting on May 6t…

Google said that starting on May 10, 2021 it has changed how it reports in some event structured data. Specifically, Google will now begin detecting Event entities at all hierarchy levels, not just at the root level, and errors in recommended properti…

This past Friday, I asked John Mueller of Google a bit more on if and how Google may use machine learning for adjusting the weights of various ranking signals. The short answer is, Google may or may not do this, depending on the specific ranking signa…

What is the latest in terms of how Google / GoogleBot sees the content on your full page. Now when it comes to lazy loaded content, John Mueller said GoogleBot tends not to watch out for a scroll event or a click to load more button. With this set up…

For the past couple of weeks or so, well, really since page experience report launched in late April in Google Search Console, there has been a bug with some sites over HTTPs. The error is “Insufficient HTTPS coverage on your site” and it is a known b…

Let’s say you have multiple international sites, ccTLDs, with your business registered with a .com for the US, .fr for France, .de for Germany and so on. But you have not translated all of those sites into its local language, and some or many of those…

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 …