Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, said it again, that Google does not have a system to recognize if a site is run by a big brand and then automatically just ranks it higher. He said on X, “but no, we don’t have a brand-ranking system.”

It appears that Google is letting Reddit’s AI translated pages rank too well within its search results. This is in addition to Google letting Reddit get a lot of other search visibility, but AI translation, well, that should really not perform so well.

It’s time for the monthly Google Webmaster Report – the April 2025 version. This month we had the Google March 2025 core update kick off and finish rolling out. Google launched AI Mode, AI Overviews are now powered by Gemini 2.0, we saw some weird AI …

Last month we reported that Google News Publisher Center changes are coming, well those changes should have happened and been fully completed by today. Google updated its help document on the topic to say “Google News is fully transitioning to automati…

Google made a really small change to its spam policies documentation to say, “In the context of Google Search, spam refers to techniques used to deceive users or manipulate our Search systems into ranking content highly.”

Google’s John Mueller responded to a concern on Reddit about a site that scored a D with its Pingdom score. Pingdom measures sites uptime and overall page speed metrics. John Mueller responded to the concern saying, “this is not affecting your SEO.”

Google would not give a specific date for when we will see independent sites to start surfacing better and higher in Google Search. As a reminder, Google wrote with the March 2025 core update, “We also continue our work to surface more content from cre…

John Mueller from Google said on Bluesky that he sees some SEOs over-focusing on the tiniest SEO metrics and that they should spend their time focusing on more important things.

Google Search Console’s API will soon add support for the 24-hour hourly data view, plus, this will give you access to not just the past 24 hours but the past 8-days by hour.

Google hosts events around the world for SEOs, content creators, webmasters, site owners and marketers named Google Search Central Live. They’ve been doing it for years and I’ve attended many over the years. This is the first time the event was held i…

Google admitted in a video published on its own Search Central YouTube channel that if searchers do not use your page(s) in the search results, those pages may stop showing up in the search results. Martin Splitt said this in a recent YouTube short he…

Google launched education Q&A carousel back in 2022 for English languages only. Now, Google has expanded support to include also Spanish and Vietnamese language. Spanish is supported in Mexico while Vietnamese is supported in all Google regions.

Google added returnPolicyCountry to the return policy code examples within the Google Merchant Center structured data document. This is because Google requires returnPolicyCountry for MerchantReturnPolicy.

Google has switched from updating its googlebot.json file, the file that contains the list of IP addresses Googlebot uses, from weekly to daily. Gary Illyes from Google said this was done based on feedback from the community.

Google’s John Mueller said that implementing hotlink protections with carve-outs for search engines are fine. He added that this is not really a thing sites do that much these days, stating it was a thing in 2010’s or so but not now.

Google has updated its manual actions documentation around site reputation abuse, to expand on the next steps and actions you can take if you receive this manual action. Google now more clearly says that you should not block that content with your rob…

It is time for the monthly Google Webmaster Report. We are now in March as we continue to wait for the first Google core update of 2025. We did have a number of big unconfirmed Google updates, as documented below.

Last April 2024, Gary Illyes from Google said he was on a mission to make web crawling more efficient, he wanted to “figure out how to crawl even less, and have fewer bytes on wire.” Gary updated us saying “there’s lots more in works” for this but imp…

Some sites, hosted on some CDNs (content delivery networks), are experiencing a big spike in server response times for crawling, while seeing a drop in total crawl requests. So technically, the crawling has dropped but Google is taking much longer to …

The Google Search Console API has been delayed for the past several days. Data is days behind the web interface and causing issued for those who use Looker Studio, Big Query and other solutions to see the Search Console data when accessed through the …