Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s John Mueller said, “It makes no sense to block” privacy, disclaimers, or other legal types of pages from your site. He added on Reddit, “They don’t cause a ‘duplicate content issue’.”

Google Merchant Center now lets merchants specify which payment methods and options they offer customers. Google would normally handle this in an automated way but now Google is letting you override those payment options, in case Google is getting it …

Mark Williams-Cook gave an unbelievable presentation at SearchNorwich named Improving your SEO with conceptual models. Lucky for you and me, this presentation was posted on YouTube for us all to enjoy. It covers how Mark found an exploit in Google’s e…

Forbes has reportedly fired some of its freelancers for some stories over its ongoing issue with Google’s site reputation abuse policy, aka parasite SEO. The Verge wrote, “Forbes will stop using freelancers for some types of stories indefinitely ‘” and…

Jonathan Jones attended the Google Search Central Live event in Zurich last week and posted excellent and detailed notes about the event, including a bit more on the more often core updates. But he also covered how Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liai…

Google’s John Mueller reiterated in a big way that SEOs and site owners should not spend time disavowing “toxic” links. He said it is a “billable waste of time” to disavow toxic links, as provided in some of these SEO toolsets.

Google has repurposed its 2014 blog post on faceted navigation best practices (which we covered a decade ago) and created a new help document page named Managing crawling of faceted navigation URLs.

Google’s Daniel Waisberg confirmed that the new 24-hour date filter that is in the Google Search Console web interface is not yet supported by the Google Search Console API. Of course, you can query the API for any date range and it will bring back dat…

Google’s John Mueller said it again, he said on LinkedIn, “We’ve been pretty clear that Core Web Vitals are not giant factors in ranking, and I doubt you’d see a big drop just because of that.” Google has been saying Core Web Vitals are important in ge…

Google is now saying it has ranking systems that “aim to understand if a section of a site is independent or starkly different from the main content of the site. This helps us surface the most useful information from a range of sites.” This is the reas…

Google has added a new search document on Google Trends while also making some small updates to the URL structure, best practices documentation, and favicons documentation. Google has been doing a lot of videos around Google Trends, so the new document…

Google Search Console’s performance report seems to have a bug where it is showing almost zero data for today. I can replicate this across numerous Search Console properties, so maybe something is stuck with Search Console right now.

Google Search likely does not use ARIA Accessible Rich Internet Applications, for ranking or even indexing purposes, according to both John Mueller and Martin Splitt at Google. ARIA is a set of attributes you can add to HTML elements that define ways t…

Google may have hit Fortune Recommends with a search penalty, downgrading its Google search rankings. This may be related to the site reputation abuse policy, like it may have done previously to Forbes Advisor a few weeks ago and some other large publi…

Google’s John Mueller said he understands why some in our industry look to optimize for metrics within various SEO tool platforms, but he said there are not shortcuts in SEO and optimizing for those metrics won’t directly lead to Google search ranking …

Google is deprecating the ten-year-old Sitelinks Search Box. It is going to start to disappear from the search result snippets starting on November 21, 2024. This does not impact the normal sitelinks, just the search box.

Google’s AI Overviews seem to not show citations or link to sites that were hit by the helpful content update (and probably core updates), even when you ask the AI Overview directly about that site and even if that site is ranking well for that query i…

There is this interesting conversation on LinkedIn around a robots.txt serves a 503 for two months and the rest of the site is available. Gary Illyes from Google said that when other pages on the site are reachable and available, that makes a big diff…

Google is rolling out the Store ratings feature beyond US Search. It is rolling out to searchers in Australia, Canada, India and the United Kingdom. Although, we’ve seen examples of Google showing them in Australia and other countries over the years, …

Google added eight or so words between brackets to clarify that fields that aren’t explicitly listed in the robots.txt documentation aren’t supported. Why did they do this? Because sometimes Google gets questions about it.