Category: Search Engine Roundtable

Gary Illyes from Google said on LinkedIn that if your server returns a 500/503 HTTP status code for an extended period of time for your robots.txt file, then Google may remove your site completely from Google Search.

Google’s John Mueller repeated it, the time spent on a page by your users is not a factor Google uses for ranking. Time spent on the page is not a Google ranking factor, he said, “It doesn’t,” meaning Google doesn’t care about time spent on the page fo…

Google’s John Mueller said there is no score or threshold for the Google helpful content update. He said on Mastodon “There is no “HCS score” or threshold at which HCS [helpful content score] would switch from unhelpful to helpful for SEO.

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, said on Masoton that your content does not need to be on one topic, one niche topic, for it to rank well. You can write about diverse topics on your site. The main thing, Danny said, was that you should write …

Google Search Console is testing a new feature named “content ideas.” It is labeled as an “experimental” feature that brings Question Hub-like concepts directly into Google Search Console.

Google’s John Mueller said that using expired domains, repurposed domains are “SEO-flotsam, index-cruft.” John went on to add that search engines have had a lot of practice with dealing with that appropriately.”

It is that time of year when content creators take their content that has been performing well and updates it from the 2022 edition to the 2023 edition. But updating the references of 2022 to 2023 is not enough, and Google says only do that when you m…

Gary Illyes from Google loves posting his PSAs on Mastodon. His next PSA is that if you are using a CDN or cloud hosting service, then make sure to test up a routine test to ensure that the service is not blocking Googlebot or other search engine crawl…