Category: Search Engine Roundtable

A couple of weeks ago we reported that Google was testing how-to schema on desktop search. It seems like that test is now over. According to Brodie Clark and also by Glenn Gabe, the test ran from around May 20th through June 4th or 5th.

Last week we covered how Google launched for some browsers and some featured snippets that Google will highlight and scroll down to the content of the featured snippet on your web page. As expected, some publishers and web site owners are not happy abo…

Another interesting tidbit from Marie Haynes interview of John Mueller was a snippet around how people place text on the bottom of e-commerce category pages. John kind of suggested that 90% of that content is unnecessary but it is useful to have a sen…

Whenever Google confirms a temporary indexing issues, you see weeks and weeks afterwards SEOs and webmasters ask Google if there are still indexing issues. Why? Well, many individual sites do not get fully indexed by Google and thus they feel there is …

Gary Illyes from Google responded to a question around if brand based queries can hold any influence around search rankings. In short, he said it is a hard question to answer for a number of reasons.

It seems Google has added new search appearance filters to the Google Search Console performance reports. The filters are named “recipe gallery” and “recipe rich results.” This was shared with me by Brian Freiesleben but Google has not yet confirmed …

Friday we reported that Google was showing rich results for home pages. Well, it turned out this was “unintended” and “it’s being fixed.” Gary Illyes from Google responded to me on Twitter saying “this change was unintended and it’s being fixed.”
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Google’s John Mueller in an interview with Marie Haynes said that it would be “really rare” that disavowing links would result in your web site doing better in search algorithmically. Sure, if you have a manual action, maybe but not without a manual ac…

Another snippet from Marie Haynes interview of John Mueller was around BERT. The short snippet, as Glenn Gabe nicely summed up, is that BERT helps Google understand content better but it does not help Google with evaluating quality.

Google’s John Mueller was asked if Google maybe does a first round of ranking of a new page based on the URL, even before it does any content analysis. John responded on Twitter “not that I’m aware of.”