Google Can Render Animations But They Might Look Weird
Google’s Martin Splitt at TechSEOBoost last week in Boston gave an awesome presentation around how Google crawls and renders, with a deeper dive around Google’s WRS, Web Rendering Service. One note that was interesting was that Martin confirmed on Twi…
Search Buzz Video Recap: Google Local Update Confirmed, Core Search Tremors, Quality Raters Guidelines Update & Larry & Sergey Step Down
This week, Google confirmed the November local search update and said the reason for the changes were because Google added neural matching to local search for the first time. Google may have also done a small Google…
Google: Not Having A Manual Action Does Not Mean Your Site Is Good
Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter “not having a manual action doesn’t mean that the website is good overall.” Simple but true – there are algorithms that judge the quality of the site and if your site is not ranking well, and you don’t have a manu…
Google Updates Search Quality Raters Guidelines On December 5th
Yesterday I spotted that Google updated its Search Quality raters guidelines. George Nguyen from Search Engine Land dug into the changes, you can read the details over there. In short, Google added a page to the guidelines, bringing it up to 168 page…
Google Ads Explanations Beta; Explains Large Performance Changes
Google Ads launched a new beta feature named “explanations.” Explanations gives you clear insights into large changes in your Google Ads account performance. Google said it helps you with “understanding why your performance changes is critical when op…
Google Tests Package Tracking Directly In Search With Opt In
Google is testing an early adopter program to let shipping companies like UPS, FedEx, DHL, USPS and others integrate their tracking data with the search company. This would allow Google to show the status of the package directly in search, as opposed t…
Google Search Console Updates Messaging Interface
As we reported, new stuff has now come to Google Search Console’s messaging. Google announced a new method for viewing messages in Google Search Console. You can now access these messages in the bell icon at the top right, it will have a red indicator…
Google: Only Insane CPU Usage Will Limit How It Renders JavaScript
Google is good, really good, at rendering JavaScript these days, even pretty inefficient JavaScript. So much so that Martin Splitt from Google said the only time you really need to worry about CPU usage being a problem is when it is such a big issue t…
Simple Video On How Google Search Works
Google posted on their Google Webmaster YouTube channel a nice very clear and simple beginner video on how Google Search works as it relates to how you, webmasters, can make your web sites better. This might be one of those videos you share with new, n…
Google My Business Reviews Select Rated Highly For Tags
Google is now letting Local Guides and maybe other Google users to select a tag to describe why you like the business you are reviewing. So not just leave a star rating and a review and photos but also select a descriptive tag that Google can use in a…
December 4th Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update. Maybe?
Some of the tracking tools are spiking up and showing signals of a Google search ranking update over the past couple of days – maybe December 3rd or 4th. There is some limited chatter, nothing crazy, but some chatter at WebmasterWorld. Some are sayin…
Vlog #29: Jeff Selig On Early SEO Days, Google Algorithms, International SEO & More
My last vlog for my trip to Boston was with Jeff Selig (@seosem), who is the VP, Director of Earned Media and Analytics at Overdrive Interactive. He started back in 1995 when he bought his first domain and built a web site…
Larry Page & Sergey Brin Hand Sundar Pichai CEO Role For Both Alphabet & Google
Big news came out last night from the Google blog where Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google, are stepping down from their roles as CEO of Alphabet. Sundar Pichai, the person they put in the CEO spot for Google when the two formed Alp…
Google: Type Of Page Less Important Than Quality Of The Page
Google’s John Mueller was asked if the site should make the meta data of its audio files indexable by Google. In which John responded “Think less about the type of pages, and more about the quality of the pages that you want to have indexed.”
Google Images Dropped Custom Date Range Filter
Google Image Search has dropped the custom date range filter when you try to filter by time. This seems to have been removed a few months ago, so this is not “new” but I missed reporting this. Now you can only filter images by the past 24 hours, past…
Do Effective & Efficient Web Sites Really Need SEO?
Pedro Dias, a former Googler, posted on Twitter this line “Doing SEO means either the website, or the search engine, or both, are not dealing effectively–and, to some extent, efficiently–with the web as they should.” In which, Gary Illyes from Google…
Poll: After The SEO Audit; Next Steps
Chris Green posted a few Twitter polls about what folks in the SEO profession do after the SEO audit is complete. The responses to the poll show that many times SEO professionals do not agree on implementation or maybe “it depends.”
Google Keyword Planner Now Lets You Share Keyword Plans
Google Ads announced that you can now create and share keyword plans in the Google Keyword Planner tool. Google said “you can now create, save, and share plans from directly within Keyword Planner.”
Google News Publisher Center Request Inclusion Feature Broken?
There are numerous threads in the Google News Publisher Help that there is a bug with the feature to submit a site for inclusion into the Google News index. After you request inclusion, it says successful but then goes back to its original state. It s…
Google: BERT Does Not Affect Indexing
Google’s John Mueller said something obvious to most the readers here, that “BERT does not affect indexing.” BERT launched as a way for Google to understand queries better, which can impact how a site is ranked in Google search because Google might ma…