Category: Search Engine Roundtable

We all get it and get it a lot, email spam selling links, DA, PR, and metrics around trying to improve your rankings in Google by manipulating Google’s algorithm. Some of this spam comes from places like India (not all) and Gary Illyes from Google sai…

Google’s John Mueller said you should absolutely not “use robots.txt to block indexing of URLs with parameters.” He said if you do that then Google “cannot canonicalize the URLs, and you lose all of the value from links to those pages.” Instead use r…

We had a slew of tweets triggered by Gary Illyes of Google and then followed up by John Mueller of Google around robots.txt and XML sitemap files ranking in Google. In short, if they rank for normal queries, John Mueller said “that’s usually a sign th…

Earlier this week, I wrote how yet another Googler once again said Google does not use user behavior signals for rankings. But what happens is people don’t believe Google and they come up with theories on how Google does use user behavior as a ranking…

Dr. Pete, Pete Meyers, from Moz, posted on Twitter “Any algo update that impacts query interpretation or relevance will impact Featured Snippets.” This was retweeted by Google’s John Mueller, so I guess that is a vote of confidence without passing DA …

I knew this Martin Splitt laptop head-bang GIF would come in handy the day he would answer this question. Many Googlers have said over the years that user actions, such as dwell time, time on a page, and so forth at not used by Google as a search rank…

One of the takeaways from the Google Webmaster Conference was that if Google tries to access your robots.txt file is unreachable but it does exist then Google won’t crawl your site. Google said about 26% of the time GoogleBot cannot reach a robots.txt…