Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Over the years Google has been wishy-washy on if they use or do not use Exif (Exchangeable image file format) data for rankings. In 2014, Google’s Matt Cutts said Google can parse the data and reserves the right to use it. But in 2019, Gary Illyes fr…

Google has updated its Indexing API documentation to add a few things but the largest update talks about how “all submissions through the Indexing API undergo rigorous spam detection.” Plus, it says that attempts to abuse the Indexing API “may result i…

Google Search now supports specifying where (which regions) a video is not allowed to be viewed in its video structured data and video SEO documentation. A new ineligibleRegion property was added to the Google video structured data documentation.

This week I interviewed Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, with the goal of better understanding where Google Search quality is at right now, where it is going in the future and what we as content creators and search marketers need to know.

Google has made several changes to its indexing API quota and pricing information document for clarification purposes. Google said this was to clarify “the default quota is for setting up the Indexing API, and how to request approval and quota. Also co…

Google published an internal interview on its Search Off the Record podcast with John Mueller and Lizzi Sassman (who you know) and Irina Tuduce from the Google Shopping team. Irina Tuduce has been with Google for 18 or so years and she provided a supe…

Google has updated its search developer canonical documentation to specify that you should not set specify a fragment URL as canonical. Google added that bullet point to the best practices section of the document.

It finally happened, we got a new core update, the Google August 2024 core update touched down on August 15th. It resulted in some movement with some sites hit by the September helpful content update and also many sad stories, including many sites that…

Google announced on Friday that they finally natively support AVIF image file types for Google Search, Google Images and anywhere Google Search uses images, such as Google News, Google Discover and more.

We know Google has told us for many years that word count is not a thing, Google doubled down on it last year. Google’s John Mueller reiterated that over the weekend saying not just words on a page but also links on a page are not counted by Google.

In the past couple of days, Google has issued many manual actions around Google Discover policy violations. Just to be clear, you may have seen your Google Discover traffic drop with the August core update, and this policy violation notice would be unr…

Back in mid-June, I noticed that Google was not showing many of my images in Google Search and Discover and also some readers were pointing it out to me. So I used the handy Google Search Console URL Inspection tool to find out those S3 URLs I was usin…

Google has updated the first paragraph of its Organization structured data search developer documentation. Google said the update is to clarify “that some properties can influence which logo is shown, while others are used behind the scenes.”

John Mueller from Google in the latest SEO office hours said that Google, Googlebot, does not generally try variations of URLs to see if they work. So if you have a URL like domain.com/pagegoeshere1/, Google won’t try domain.com/pagegoeshere2/ to just …

For many sites that have customer or client portals, including SaaS companies, the login page is the primary destination for a lot of searchers. It will help your customers bypass your homepage and go right to the login area. The question asked of Goo…

Google has overhauled its video SEO documentation to vastly clarify the video indexing criteria and technical requirements. Plus, Google added a new watch page section to the document and expanded the examples in the document.

A negative SEO question came up in the last Google SEO office hours on the topic of sending “bad actor” fake traffic to a site, to make the destination site look more questionable in Google’s eyes. Martin Splitt from Google said that sending such traf…

Google has updated its title links search developer documentation to add that Google Search may use your og:title meta tag title for your title link in the Google Search results. The OG title is normally used by social sharing sites for the title of y…

There are many sad stories around sites getting hit by Google algorithm updates, such as core updates and of course the September 2023 helpful content update. But Hardbacon, a financial and budgeting company, was hit hard by those Google updates, then …

Martin Splitt from Google said on the latest SEO office hours that having lots of nofollow or noindex tags or attributes on your site does not signal to Google that you have quality issues with your site or many low quality pages.