Google: Code To Text Ratio Is Not & Has Never Been An SEO Factor
Google’s John Mueller and Gary Illyes both said in a Reddit thread that code to text ratios for SEO does not matter. John Mueller said it is not an SEO factor and Gary Illyes said “it doesn’t matter.” This is not new, Google has said this numerous tim…
Google Search Console Performance Report Suffered A Data Loss Again
Google is having a hard time holding on to its data in Google Search Console. Google posted yet another data logging issue on its site, this time it impacted the performance reports for all – Google Search, Google Discover, and Google News. This happe…
Daily Search Forum Recap: February 7, 2022
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.
Google confirmed some sort of issue with crawling Shopify websites…
Google Fixes Shopify Crawling Issue, Calling It A Temporary Drop In Calculation
Last week, we saw reports that some Shopify sites were showing massive declines in crawling activity from Google’s Googlebot. John Mueller of Google responded this morning that this was “temporary drop in how we calculate how much we can crawl” adding…
Google Rolls Out Black Bar Knowledge Panels With Links That Don’t Work?
Yesterday, Brian Freiesleben and Khushal Bherwani both noticed a new design for some of the knowledge and local panels on the mobile search results. Google is showing a more sleek black bar for some of these panels. I personally can replicate it and n…
Google: Update Dates On Articles When You Significantly Change Existing Content
Google’s John Mueller said it only makes sense to update the date on a piece of content or article when you either “write something new or significantly change something existing.” He said this on Twitter and it goes along with previous advice John has…
Google Shows More Product Rich Results For Pages Without Structured Data
Starting in mid-December, Google seemed to start showing more product rich results in the search results for many snippets even if those pages did not have product structured data on them. Brodie Clark first posted about it on January 12th (which we c…
Some Google Algorithm Tracking Tools Are Reporting An Update But Results Are Mixed
Over the past couple of days, some of the Google search algorithm tracking tools were reporting large swings in volatility in the search results – thus signaling a possible Google search update. But the chatter amongst the SEO industry during that tim…
Vlog #158: Brian Wallace On Measuring The Success Of Infographics
In part one we spoke about how Brian Wallace of NowSourcing got into infographics, how it is not just about links but much more and some cool scores he had with them. In part two…
SEOs Says Google Page Experience More Important Despite There Being No Impact
Aleyda Solis did a Twitter poll thread, multiple polls in a Twitter thread, around the Google page experience update. In short, the poll shows that page experience related metrics, such as core web vitals, is more important to their SEO recommendation…
Google Buying Guides In Search Results
Google is testing, at least I can’t replicate it right now, enhanced buying guides in the search results. Basically this “buying guide” in Google Search lets you really drill into the options around what products you can buy based on your query.
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Google Doesn’t Use MUM For Ranking Or Much Of Anything In Google Search
So I wrote this pretty deep dive into how Google uses AI in Google Search at Search Engine Land, and Google posted a shorter version on their blog. I noticed after that, some folks were saying that Google uses MUM for search rankings. Truth is, Googl…
Google: No Mechanism To Force Title Tag Changes Even For Legal Reasons
As you may remember, in August 2021 Google changed the algorithm it uses to determine your title links (tags) in the search results and it caused a huge issue in the SEO community. A couple months later, Google toned down some of those title changes …
Googler Says Web 3.0 Won’t Kill SEO
All the craze right now is Web3 or Web 3.0, the new iteration of the World Wide Web based on the blockchain, which incorporates concepts including decentralization and token-based economics. And some are concerned it will kill SEO, that Web 3.0 will b…
Search News Buzz Video Recap: Google URL Inspection API, Manual Actions Galore, New Partner Programs, Earnings, MUM, Web3 & More
I posted the monthly Google webmaster report for February 2022, so check it out. Google released a new API for the Google URL Inspection Tool – it is exciting. Google seems to be clearing out the manual action backlog. Google also issued a slew of new …
Daily Search Forum Recap: February 3, 2022
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.
Google Maps documented some of its review spam and enforcement practices and policies…
Google Maps Details Review Spam Policy Enforcement Systems
I believe for the first time, Google has provided more detail on how it handles review spam policy enforcement for Google Maps. The search company wrote a blog post, accompanied by a short video, describing what they do to tackle issues with reviews i…
Google Tests Lens Button In Search Bar On Desktop Search
Last November, we spotted Google testing adding the Google Lens icon/button to the mobile search bar. Now, according to 9to5Google, Google is testing adding the Google Lens icon/button to the desktop search results on google.com.
Google Search Console Domain Properties Can Now Be In Search Results
Google announced on Twitter yesterday that the Search Console snapshot in the search results now also supports domain properties. This is a snapshot card of some of the higher level data for your site from Search Console directly in the search results….
February 2022 Google Webmaster Report
This month was packed with a handful of unconfirmed Google search algorithm updates, as you will see in the bulleted list below. In fact, there may be a more subtle update going on now…