Google: No Plans On Taking Away Request Indexing Tool
So I put John Mueller of Google on the hot seat and asked him what is up with Google taking away goodies from us like the request indexing tool. He said “I am not planning on taking away anything.” He said the survey was just for him to learn what, if…
On Veterans Day Google, Bing, Yahoo & The Search Industry Pay Respect
Today is Veterans Day in the United State of America, a day where Americans honor military veterans. It is a Federal holiday, so the banks and some government offices are closed. Like every year, Google, Bing, Yahoo and others pay its respects to the …
Google Page Experience Update To Launch May 2021 With New Snippet Labels
Google announced that the Page Experience Update will be live in about 6-months, i.e. in May 2021. With that launch, Google will also be testing new visual indicators, like labels, in the search results to communicate to searchers if that page does we…
Video On Google Search Quality Evaluators/Raters
Google has released a short video on how Search Quality Evaluators help Google make Google Search better. I assume this is part of Google trying to debunk some myths and get the word out that these Search Quality Evaluators do not manually impact the …
Bing Does Not Know Its Ranking Signal Weights – Machines Learning Deals With It
Izzi Smith and Marcus Tandler in their 302 of a Kind weekly SEO video chat interviewed Microsoft’s Fabrice Canel. In that interview Fabrice Canel explained that he and no one really knows the individual weights of the ranking signals used at Bing becau…
Google: XML Sitemaps Are A Minimal Baseline For Any Serious Website
Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that having an XML Sitemap file is “a minimal baseline for any serious website.” Basically, all serious websites should have an XML sitemap file part of it or it is not a serious website.
Google Responds To Exact Match Domain Not Ranking For Christmas Trees
Got to say, this is an unusual response from Google’s John Mueller. In short, someone with an exact match domain asked John why his site is not ranking for its brand name. The web site domain has Christmas Trees in it and the search query he shared a…
Advertiser: Google Smart Shopping Campaigns Can Report Fake Revenues
Kirk Williams posted a warning that if you are using the new customer acquisition goals in Google Smart Shopping Campaigns, Google might show you revenue that is not real. The issue is that you set how much is the value of a new customer, and Google w…
Google Survey: Why You Want The URL Submission Tool Back
Three weeks ago, Google “temporarily” suspended use of the request indexing tool within Google Search Console. Today, John Mueller of Google says he has no news yet on the tool but created a Google Form asking SEOs why they are missing the “URL submiss…
Beware Of Google My Business Listings Hijackings
Joy Hawkins, a local SEO expert, has said she has seen a “large increase” in the number of hijacked Google My Business listings over the past couple of months. There is this large Google My Business Help thread with almost a hundred posts in it about …
Google Investigating Complaints Of Original Content Not Ranking
There has been a number of complaints from various publishers online that Google Search is letting non-original sources of content outrank their original content in Google Search, Google News and Google Discover. Danny Sullivan of Google has been respo…
Loser: Google Images vs Bing Images
I have been watching the Google and Bing Image search results all weekend for the search term [loser]. I mean, this is the type of stuff that would normally be polluted with the political hacks and commentary. But I got to say, Google has not taken t…
Vlog #93: Michael Lewittes: A Journalist Turned Investor After Succeeding In Journalism With SEO (Part One)
Michael Lewittes came to my home on a Sunday to talk to me about his unique perspective as starting as a journalist and reporter…
Google Drops Local Pack Reviews For Banks
I am not sure when this happened but it seems Google is now treating banks differently in the local results. The local pack would normally show reviews for banks, but now the reviews are missing. You can see them when you click into the detail listing…
Who SEOs Voted For In The US Presidential Elections
I saw an interesting NPR story on which types of Americans voted for who in this US Presidential election race. It breaks it down by tons of different characteristics but not by SEOs. So I ran a super scientific (probably more scientific than our pro…
Google: 18k URLs Dropping Out Of Google In A Few Days Is Not Surprising
A webmaster or SEO said on a site he works with, about “18,000 urls were suddenly deindexed” by Google “in a few days.” And John Mueller from Google said on Twitter “things always come & go over time, so just hearing about 18k URLs dropping out doesn’t seem that surprising to me.”
Google: Two Different Canonicals On Same Page Is Undefined
What happens if you have two different canonical URLs listed on the same page, you know where they point to different URLs. John Mueller from Google said that leads to the canonical information being undefined. So Google will use other signals to det…
Search Buzz Video Recap: 11/4 Google Algorithm Update, Google DeepRank & BERT & Dupe Detection Explored
I start off this week’s video recap with the monthly Google Webmaster Report, where you can quickly catch up on the past month in Google webmaster topics. There may have been a Google search ranking algorithm update around November…
Google Search Console Misclassified Discover As Video Performance Data
Google has documented that on October 28, 2020 it has, in some cases, misclassified some Google Discover data as video in the Performance report after it has been fixed. This may result in “a drop in your Discover report’s video appearance statistics,…
Google: Home Page Outranking Internal Pages For Deeper Keywords
John Mueller from Google was asked why does Google sometimes rank a home page for a specific keyword phrase when there is a deeper page in the site that answers that query better. The home page is more generic and covers a wider topic but there is a m…