Category: Search Engine Roundtable

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter, “when it comes to web pages in Google Search, hashtags are just words, they have no special meaning or effect.” So if you are big into hashtagging everything, Google will consume it as just content on the page.

Google’s John Mueller spoke a bit more about when you should update the date in the lastmod tag in the XML sitemap file. He said on Twitter if you are “providing something new for search engines that you’d like reflected in search,” then update the dat…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if Google Search would be impacted if you block other crawlers, like Bing or the ChatGPT crawler. John said no, “Google doesn’t care if you block other crawlers.”

Both Semrush and RankRanger are reporting several point drops in the percentage of time a people also ask box shows up in the Google search results. The drop started on Friday, February 24th, a few days after the rollout of the February 2023 product r…

Gary Illyes from Google gave a keynote and a Q&A session yesterday at PubCon and while the keynote was pretty vanilla stuff, the Q&A did reconfirm a lot of what has been said in the past around authorship, links and disavowing links.

Gary Illyes from Google said in his Q&A session yesterday at PubCon that while recovering from a Google helpful content update is possible, you can’t always get back to where you were.

Google’s John Mueller went back and forth multiple times with some SEOs on the topic of using ChatGPT not to write content from scratch but to rewrite existing content. The responses from John are educational, useful and somewhat funny as well.

Gary Illyes from Google noted that the list of Googlebot IP addresses that Google started to publish in 2021 and has updated last month is actually maintained in real-time by pulling directly from the “production systems’ configuration files,” he said.