Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

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.

Google’s John Mueller reminded us that when it comes to your CSS background images, Google won’t be indexing or ranking those images in image search. John Mueller said on Twitter “last I checked, we don’t use CSS background images for image search.”
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The upcoming Google Page Experience Update which is suppose to launch next month is not going to be real time, like some of Google’s other algorithm updates. This is kind of obvious, since we know there is a 28-day delay in gathering the core web vita…

If your website contains both YMYL, your money / your life, and non-YMYL topics of content, you may want to consider separating those out into their own standalone websites. Google’s John Mueller implied that sometimes Google can do that automatically …

Google has made changes to how it calculates the CLS, cumulative layout shift, metric within core web vitals. Specifically maximum session window with 1 second gap, capped at 5 seconds. This was done to make it “more fair for long running pages and si…

Gary Illyes from Google said when it comes to ranking in Google, it is often not about your core web vital scores, if you are using AMP, nor your database size. After you know that Google can access and render your pages, the next step is making sure …

Google made a small update to the video structured data help documents to communicate that the thumbnailUrl now also supports WebP and SVG image formats, in addition to the already documented BMP, GIF, JPEG, and PNG image formats.

Google updated its Google Discover guidelines to specify that it won’t show “content that’s not desired or that might confuse readers.” Google specifically gave these examples of content that it might not show in Google Discover.

On April 6th, Google said it made an update to “the algorithm for counting image impressions in Search results.” This might lead to a “Small drop” in the image impressions you see reported in the Google Search Console Performance Report.

Google’s John Mueller has said many times that 302s vs 301s are pretty much the same thing in terms of how Google treats redirects. He often said not to worry about using a 302 over a 301 or the other way around. The question is why? John basically s…

A site owner on Reddit asked if there is a way to remove his site from Google Search in a specific country, specifically Indonesia. John Mueller of Google said there really is not way of doing that, he said “you can’t reduce your rankings in one count…

Google’s John Mueller said again that the best method to block Google from crawling and then indexing your staging site is to block GoogleBot and other humans with authentication. Prompt the access request to the staging site by requiring them to ente…