Search Buzz Video Recap: Google Drops Twitter Carousel After Hack, Google Updates Discover Document & New Google Ads Policies
It was a bit of a slower week, with the big news this week being that Google dropped, for now…
Google Maps: Wear A Mask Alert
Yesterday, like many others, when using Google Maps, Google showed a notification box at the top right, warning people to wear a mask. The notice said “wear a mask, help slow the spread of COVID-19.” The notice was also on Google.com’s home page. Bot…
Google My Business Products Section Design Updated
Google has updated the products section within the Google My Business Console. It now has a cleaner interface, with “see it on Google” and a nice layout for “All products” and a way to filter your products.
Google Discover AMP Articles Going To Main Canonical URL?
Valentin Pletzer has noticed that Google Discover is showing some AMP labels for stories but when you click on the story, Google is not taking the user to the AMP version, the AMP URL, but rather the canonical URL, the main URL of the story.
Google: Do Not Block GoogleBot From Crawling 404s
John Mueller of Google said it would be “a really bad idea which will cause all sorts of problems” if you block Google or other search engines from crawling pages that return a 404 server status code. He said “billions of 404 pages are crawled every d…
Google Video On Crawl Budget & SEO
Alexis Sanders of Merkle sat down with Martin Splitt of Google last year (before COVID) and spoke about crawl budget. It may be one of the more informative videos in the SEO mythbusting series to-date.
Google: It Is Safe To Keep 302 Redirects Up
Here is a new question I don’t think I’ve seen before. Someone asked Google if it is safe to keep a 302 redirect up for a long time. The question was “how long is it safe to use a 302 redirect?” The answer is, it is safe to keep them up for a long ti…
Google Ads Adds Image Extensions, Responsive Ad Features, New Layouts & More
Google Ads has added a bunch of features and announced a bunch of new features according to their announcement yesterday. Google added image extensions beta program, a responsive search ad features to highlight your sales, promotions and shipping offe…
Google Removed Twitter Results From Search
As you probably all know, Twitter has been hacked in a big way yesterday. In short hackers pushing a crypto scam hijacked Twitter accounts for Bitcoin, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Ripple, Binance, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Apple, and many more. …
Google: Remove A Lot Of Pages From Your Site, Remove The URLs From Your Sitemap
John Mueller of Google said it is a good idea to remove the URLs of pages you remove from your web site from your XML Sitemap file. He said “if you remove or change a lot of pages on your site, it’s good to reflect that in a sitemap file.”
John Mueller On Google Rants On Ranking Factors
Google’s John Mueller, Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt released another podcast this morning. This one they covered a bunch of topics including rendering with SEO but also John Mueller kind of had a rant on ranking factors. It is fun to listen to, so I …
AdSense For Search To Display Google Shopping Ads
If you run AdSense ads on your site and you have AdSense for Search, where you use Google AdSense to monetize your search results – Google may start to show Shopping Ads in those search results. This requires no code changes on your part and will begi…
Google Shopping Actions Disallows Downloadable Software CDs & DVDs
Google at the end of this month, end of July, will start to disallow marketing of downloadable software CDs and DVDs through Google Shopping Ads. This does not include video game DVDs, those will still be allowed.
Google My Business Will Notify Business Of Listing Suspensions
Google will soon begin sending email notifications to businesses when their business listings or accounts are suspended with Google My Business. Until now, if your listing is suspended, you won’t know about it until you login to Google My Business to f…
Google Books Ngram Viewer Gets Fresh Data Through 2019
The Google Books Ngram Viewer, a tool that shows you how often phrases occur in books over time, now shows data through 2019. In short, this tool displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books. Previously, it showed data…
Google: Links From Lower Quality Sites To Your Site Doesn’t Necessarily Hurt
Let’s say your site has a DA of one billion and you get a link from a site that has a DA of 999,999,999, which is obviously less than one billion – can that hurt your Google rankings? In short, does getting links from pages that are lower quality than…
Google Discover Help Document Updated With E-A-T Mentions & More
Google has updated the help document on Google Discover. It has been almost completely revamped but one of the more interesting areas of the update is the section added to E-A-T. I mean, we know Google Discover can be impacted by Core updates in a bi…
New Google Shopping Ads Policy Against Phishing & Scamming
Google has updated its Google Shopping Ads policies to add two new “unacceptable business practices.” These include (1) scamming users by concealing or misstating information about the merchant’s business, or product, or service and (2) offer destinati…
Google: Links Placed Without Your Input Is A Good Thing
Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that links placed without any input by you is not a bad thing, often he said it is a good thing. John wrote “just because links are placed without your input doesn’t make them bad (it usually makes them good, eve…
Google: Make Your Site Architecture Easy & Interesting
Google’s John Mueller said the way to make your site architecture and navigation easy and interesting is to make a “smart site structure.” This will not only help GoogleBot find your content and more interesting pages but also help users navigate and …