Category: Search Engine Roundtable

We know Google has said numerous times that word count is not a ranking factor, nor is it indicative of quality. We know Google said short content can rank just fine. But Google has to answer this question often enough. John did that this morning in …

In the longest SEO mythbusting video yet by Google’s Martin Splitt, he invited Glenn Gabe to talk about site migrations. It is a wonderful topic and they covered a heck of a lot. One of my favorite parts was the analogy with food trucks and how they …

In 2007, 25% of all queries that searchers entered into the Google search box was never seen by Google before. That figure changed to 15% in 2013 and has remained at that figure according to Google even through today.

If you read the Google docs on XML Sitemaps and look at the lastmod field, Google says “Google reads the lastmod value, but if you misrepresent this value, we will stop reading it.” Lily Ray asked John Mueller of Google if changing the lastmod date of…

If you use dataset structured data then you may see a spike in warnings in your Google Search Console enhancement report for those datasets. Google said it is now reporting warnings for any Dataset object that is missing the recommended property “creat…

Google has a new form you can use to report false positives around security issues with your site. In short, if you think your site was mistakenly flagged by Google Search for security issues, you can ask Google for a review using the “Report a Securi…

Google added a new section to the supported structured data developer docs for home activities. This structured data should be used on recorded or live videos where you offer instructions on what activities, like fitness classes and so on, to do from y…

Bing’s Fabrice Canal said on Twitter “Sitemaps are a daily, and ideally real time, snapshots of all relevant pages of your sites.” “Sitemaps must include these main ranking pages,” he added. This was in response to Dawn Anderson posting something a dev…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter there is maybe a small bandwidth savings when it comes to GoogleBot crawling your site when you use webp over jpeg image formats. But then you would only see that difference when the site is a “very image-heavy si…

“Is it just me or have things been a little too quiet recently,” said on SEO at WebmasterWorld. That is the feeling recently since we saw a couple search ranking (or indexing) bugs a couple of weeks ago and it has been 3 months and 22 days since the l…