Google PSA: Do Not 301 Pages that Should 404 To Your Home Page
Google’s John Mueller said it again, if you 301 redirect pages that should 404 to your home page, Google will treat them as soft 404s anyway and thus all you are doing is confusing your end users. There is no benefit in using a 301 redirect for a page…
Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update Around January 6th
Google may have pushed out their first larger search algorithm update of 2019 over this weekend. It may have started around January 5th or 6th and it seems to be continuing on through today – the 7th. There is both chatter within the SEO community an…
Gary Illyes From Google Now Takes Speaking Requests Via Google Form
Gary Illyes speaks at a lot of conferences around the world on Google SEO and webmaster related topics. He works for Google and over the past several years has spoken at most large SEO conferences from what I’ve seen. He said if you want him to speak…
Google: Unnatural Links By Humans Or Bots Are Your Responsibility
Google’s John Mueller was asked if there is a difference between a human adding unnatural links on your web site compared to AI, algorithms doing it on their own. John responded that ultimately it is the responsibility of the site owner to make sure t…
Google’s John Mueller Gives Hard Advice To Low Quality Site
Google’s John Mueller often doesn’t give direct advice that contains hard messages. But in a Google Webmaster Help thread John decided to give the hard truth to one webmaster producing low quality content. In fact, John recommended that he “take the s…
Google Says Isaac Newton As FA Cup Player
If you go to Google and search for [fa cup] and then click on the players tab. The second player Google is currently listing is Issac Newton from 1600s and one of the most recognized and well known personalities of all time in science and beyond.
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Search Buzz Video Recap: Yelp Ghost Update, Google Featured Snippets, Bing Crawler & New Years
It has been a bit slow with the holiday and New Years season but we have some news for you all in the SEO world. We posted our monthly Google webmaster report. Yelp did an update a couple months ago that made reviews disappear. Google launched a new …
Google Featured Snippets Tests Blue Feedback Bar
Two SEOs from India noticed and told me about Google showing them a new blue bar under some of the featured snippets that let them give Google feedback about that specific featured snippet. This is in addition to the small “feedback” link that I curren…
Google: Too Many Repeated Internal Links Doesn’t Hurt
Google’s John Mueller responded to a question on Twitter around having too many internal links with repeated links to the same page. John implied that it doesn’t hurt for you to link naturally internally to your pages.
Google Drops Unicode Hack In Local Panel
Earlier this week we reported how one Google My Business listing added unicode like text to their business name listing and it shows up all funky and cool in the local panel. Well, now it is gone – it no longer shows up as unicode. I guess Google did…
Yelp’s Ghost Update In October: Reviews Drop Out & Not Recommended
Craig Mount posted a detailed analysis of a Yelp update being named the Ghost update over at Search Engine Land. In short, sometime around October, Halloween time, Yelp dropped tons of reviews in their results and in some cases, it ended up listing the…
Google Local Asks For Food Or Other Photos From Local Guides
I cannot replicate this, but I suspect certain level Google Local Guides are being asked to upload specific photos to local businesses they are viewing. Here is a screen shot from Carrie Hill where she is being asked to upload a photo of food to this …
Bing: We Ignore Default Robots Directives If There Is A Bingbot Section
Frédéric Dubut from Bing’s search team said on Twitter that if you create a specific robots.txt directive for Bingbot, their crawler, then Bing will only look at that specific section. So you should make sure that when you do that, copy all the directives from the default to the Bingbot section that you want Bing to comply with.
Google Explains Why Some Image Search Results Look Racist
Someone pointed out to Google’s Danny Sullivan that searching Google Image search for [white couples] vs [black couples] shows racist bias by Google. Danny Sullivan explained why the results were not racist on Twitter.
Google Zero Results For Record A Video Result
We know Google launched zero results for time/date, conversion or math related answers. But did you know it might also work for task related queries, such as record a video. Cian Murphy shared a screen shot on Twitter of Google on Android showing him…
January 2019 Google Webmaster Report
In our first monthly recap for 2019 we covered a couple smaller unconfirmed Google updates. It was a slower month with the holidays and New Years but Google launched some new features…
Google Tests More Movie & TV Streaming Options In Search
Google in November 2017 began showing movies and TV shows to watch on YouTube and other providers directly in search. Now, it seems Google is pushing that a bit more with the ability to add more streaming providers and testing new interfaces for it.
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Google Tests Larger Messaging Buttons In Local Panels
Joy Hawkins who follows the local SEO beat really closely spotted a new interface treatment that really calls out the messaging functionality within the Google local panels. The new button to message a local business, when available, is massive compare…
Google: Links From Non-English Languages Are Not Unnatural Links
This may be filed under the super obvious category but John Mueller from Google confirmed that you do not need to disavow links to your site just because those links come from pages that are in your language. So if you write in English and a site in S…
New Year Day Logos & Themes From Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Sogou & More
Happy New Years everyone – here is to an awesome, successful, healthy, happy and consistent 2019! See what I did there? Anyway, today is New Years and to celebrate, the search engines have special logos and themes up.