Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

So you get this fancy knowledge panel for your company name and/or product names and people search you on Google and can see how amazing your business is in this knowledge panel. But then all of a sudden, Google decides to show “alternatives” or compet…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that Google “generally recommends not keeping open redirects.” An open redirect is when a parameter values (the portion of URL after “?”) in an HTTP GET request allow for information that will redirect a user to a…

In December 2020, Google posted a Core Web Vitals & Page Experience FAQs. Well, Google has just updated those FAQs to add a lot more detail. The most important thing that I wanted to pull out are these line “out systems will continue to prioritize pages with the best information overall, even if some aspects of page experience are subpar. A good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content.”

Google has updated its help documents to explain that now it has limited which video providers can show up with the key moments interface in Google Search. It is available for all YouTube videos based on just adding a video description and now a “smal…

Often when it comes to getting a better score in some of the core web vital metrics it is about making your images faster to load. One SEO asked if they can downsize the images in a very heavy way where the image would become blurry in order to improv…

Martin Splitt from Google confirmed that Google Search does not measure title tags by the number of pixels. He said “that was a joke” when it was mentioned in the live version of the Search Off The Record podcast.

Google has added isAccessibleForFree to the datasets structured data help document. This new property tells Google Search if the dataset is accessible for free or if you need to pay to access the data.

Annotations are great in Google Analytics and other tools. You can make a note in the reporting tools on a specific day or data point what happened that you think caused the blip in the data. So if you do a huge redesign one day, annotating that in you…

Gary Illyes from Google said it is an “silly idea” to re-block or re-disallow pages after you allowed them to crawl that page in order for Google to see the noindex tags on that page. I apologize for the title of this story, it was a hard one to write…

Google has new structured data markup for the practice problems and math solver search results. We first saw these results in the Google Search results back in late December 2020. Now, Google has officially launched this feature and with that launch …

Google posted in the data anomalies page that the crawl stats report deep inside the Google Search Console interface had internal reporting issue between March 10 and March 23, 2021. As a result of the data issues, you may see a
“drop in data in this…

With all the unnecessary panic over the Google Page Experience update coming up in May, the question now is, will this update roll out slowly or abruptly? Will Google slowly roll out the impact of this update or will it be a jarring release all at onc…

The topic of hyphens between words is a classic old time SEO question, something we’ve covered here many times. Recently, John Mueller of Google was asked about how Google treats words with hyphenation. For example, is WiFi the same as Wi-Fi to Googl…

Here is a new question I have never seen asked before; does Google downgrade the search rankings of web sites that receive FTC warning letters about their medical and health content. The answer is no, not that I know of, but it is interesting that som…

Alan Kent, Developer Advocate at Google, posted a lightening talk on the Google YouTube channel around how to get your products in search. This can help e-commerce sites get more visibility and sales from Google Search.

Google’s John Mueller, once again, said that for SEO purposes, for ranking in Google purposes, you do not need to worry about your site’s bounce rate. John said this on Reddit “Google doesn’t use that for SEO, so if you’re focused on SEO, you can igno…

We’ve all seen the message in Google Search Console’s index coverage report for “Page indexed without content.” Google’s Gary Illyes said when you see that, most of the time (not all of the time), it is about “pages that are blocked by robots.txt.”
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Ever see one of your sites rank well for a featured snippet in Google Search but the information that was shown was not something you are proud of? Maybe it was inaccurate, maybe it has a typo, maybe it had some other issue? How do you update the feat…

Recently, Google’s John Mueller posted about what to do if your site goes offline. The advice was to serve a 503 server status code if the outage is short term. So someone asked if they can serve a 502 server status code instead. John Mueller said you…

Google’s John Mueller said in a video hangout on Friday that Google has stopped automatically moving sites to the mobile-first indexing system. Instead, the last batch of sites are being queued up and will all be moved over sometime in the coming mont…