Category: Search Engine Roundtable

Fairly recently Google told us we should not expect to see a filter to see featured snippet related data in our performance reports in Search Console. But then we saw the that Google started showing #:~:text= url parameters in the reports for image res…

The Google Sandbox theory started in early 2004, where new sites would not rank well for a while. Well, Gary Illyes and his Google friends spoke about it in the latest Search Off the Record podcast. In short, Gary said he thinks it wasn’t a ranking r…

On Friday Google posted a new blog post about an old feature that confused some in thinking what Google was talking about was new. In short, Google told me the reason the company posted about it was because they wanted to remind retailers before the h…

Google’s John Mueller said on Reddit that links from Wikipedia not only have no SEO value but also those links “will do nothing for your site” from a Google search perspective. In fact, John said all you are doing is “creating extra work for the Wikipe…

Google seems to be testing showing favicons or company logos in the autocomplete search suggestions for some local results, specifically brands. Someone posted a screen shot of this in action in the Local Search Forums, here it is:

Google’s John Mueller said that sometimes “swapping out the URL can certainly help” when that URL has been 404ed or noindexed for a while. He said “sometimes our systems are so used to a URL not “working” (noindex, 404, etc) that it can take a bit of t…

Canonicalization is when Google tries to combine any URLs together as one when it thinks there might be duplicate URLs. How Google does that can depend on a lot of different signals. John Mueller of Google listed some of the signals Google uses for c…

Squarespace, the web site builder tool, now can show data from Google Search Console within its portal. Google announced on Twitter “If you’re a Squarespace user, you can now see how people found each of your pages in Search.”

Earlier this week, on the August 18th webmaster office hours with John Mueller, I asked John for more details on first the Google indexing failure on August 10th and then if he can share any details on what happened last Saturday, August 15th. The sho…

We know that all new sites that have launched after July 1, 2019 would default to mobile-first indexing in Google’s index. But what if you launched a brand new site on an existing old domain name that has not been switched to mobile-first indexing?
…