Programming Note: Offline For Passover 5779 – April 26th
This is a programming note that I will be 100% offline on Friday April 26th, for the Passover holiday.
Any story published on Friday April 26th were pre-written and scheduled to go live on that date. That includes this post announcing I am offline……
Google Maps Business Reviews Vanishing After Suspension Removal
There are numerous reports of Google Maps listings, Google My Business listings that have had their suspension removed then seeing all of the reviews they had on their listings vanish. Joy Hawkins at the Local Search Forums wrote “listings that are su…
Google Images, Featured Snippets & Videos More Often In Web Search Results
It looks like Google is showing more vertical search features in the core web search results – more often. Yesterday I covered at Search Engine Land that the image search box is showing up way more often in Google’s web results than previously. But a…
Searchers Upset That Easter Got Google Treatment While Passover, Ramadan & Others Did Not
Google on Sunday had a pretty unique and new home page feature for Easter. It was the first time they did something like this in general but not the first time they had an Easter Google Doodle. There was no Doodle, but if you clicked on the I’m Feeli…
Google Can See Disavow Links Between Canonical URLs
Google’s John Mueller said it is best to disavow all the possible places the link may be pointing to, even if you redirect one URL to another and someone is linking to the original URL. But he said Google can follow and see “links between canonical UR…
Google My Business: POI Establishment Category
I am seeing reports of business owners and local SEOs saying they are seeing a new category being added to some of the business listings they manage. The category is called POI Establishment and folks are confused what this is about, espesially because…
Google Search Console Coverage Report Delayed 16 Days & Counting
It is now 16 days and counting since the Google Search Console Coverage report has been updated. Two-weeks later than the normal two-day delay and there is no end in sight. I’ve been seeing complaints pointed at Google’s John Mueller on Twitter with z…
Google: AJAX/XHR Calls Can Impact Crawl Budget
Google’s Gary Illyes posted on Twitter this morning that he updated the crawl budget post from January 2017 to explicitly say that AJAX (i.e. XHR) calls were added to the list of things that will consume your site’s crawl budget.
Google: Nofollow Link Attribute Is Working Fairly Well
Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that the nofollow link attribute has been and still is working fairly well. He added hasn’t “seen many cases of sites causing themselves significant issues, or of pages not getting credit in quite some time.”
…
Google Home & Assistant Listings May Need Google Guaranteed Label
You’ve seen the Google local services ads before, they have the Google Guarantee label on them. But when the Google Assistant started showing ads, people asked how does one not pay to show up in the local listings if you need the guarantee label but t…
Google Defends Search Results: No Influence On Ads Or Google Analytics
Here we have Danny Sullivan, who now works at Google, defending Google’s organic, free search results. He said again, Google’s organic results are not influenced by ads, the Google Ad program and also Google Analytics has no influence on Google’s orga…
Google: It’s Easy To Read Between The Lines
As you all know from reading this blog, I try hard to read between the lines when it comes to what Google and Googlers are saying. I try not to stretch that too much but I do use my 15+ years of history of covering Google to kind of help me with those…
2019 Earth Day Logos From Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu & More
Today is Earth Day and for the special day the search industry has some special logos and themes. Google has an animated Doodle, Bing has a pretty home page, Baidu has a GIF logo, Yahoo even has a special logo.
Google Emails Some Publishers About Google AdSense Changes
Google has supposedly sent out emails announcing upcoming changes to the AdSense platform in the upcoming weeks. I have not personally received such an email but there are some in the WebmasterWorld forums that received it. It covers changes to the “Y…
Google & Brackets – How Google Use Brackets In Search
I noticed over the past couple weeks, when Google announced the before and after search commands that some SEOs didn’t realize that when Google uses brackets, it is there way of quoting a search phrase. Google can’t really use quotes because people can…
Submit Questions Around JavaScript SEO For Google
As you know, Google posted their last video on their JavaScript videos for SEO yesterday. But now that the first part of the series is over, Martin Splitt from Google wants to keep it going. He asked folks to post their ideas and questions in this Goog…
Google Posts Supports Highlighting Customer Testimonials & Reviews
Google posted on Twitter that within Google My Business you can now highlight and post automatically suggested reviews as customer testimonials. Google said “Google My Business now provides suggested posts to help you showcase positive reviews. These …
Google Might Change How NoIndex In Robots.txt Works
For years Google has been communicating and we’ve been reporting that Google does not support using the noindex direction within your robots.txt file. Well, people still use it and now Gary Illyes from Google is on the case – he may end up making sure…
Google Search Console URL Parameters Tool May Change
Google’s John Mueller hinted on Twitter that the URL parameter tool that was added to Google Search Console in 2009 may not be 100% ported to the new Google Search Console. He said Google may make the tool evolve versus make it a 1 to 1 switch over.
…
Google: We Don’t Hand Rank Web Pages, It Would Be Impossible
Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that Google does not manually hand rank any web page. He added the web is too big for that and if they tried, it would be impossible.