Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Do you use a CDN for some or all of your website and you want to manage just one robots.txt file, instead of both the CDN’s robots.txt file and your main site’s robots.txt file? Gary Illyes from Google said that all you need to do is redirect your main…

Google has made a small update to its image SEO best practices documentation, specific to the “Use HTML image elements to embed images” section. The update seems relatively minor but the changes to the wording was done for a reason.

As you know, Google Search Console’s performance reports were significantly delayed this week. But as of this morning, the reports are beginning to catch up. Google said last night it would take them “at least 2-3 days to fully catch up” and reproces…

Today being July 4th, I normally would avoid writing stories here but there are a lot of rumors out there that Reddit is blocking Google Search from crawling and indexing its content. It is not true – Reddit is not blocking Google Search.

Another rumor coming out of the Google Search Console reporting delays is that this is some sort of unconfirmed update is rolling out. Well, that is not the case at all. John Mueller of Google said this is not a core update or even an unconfirmed core …

As of right now, Google Search Console is having a significant delay with its Performance reports and some are wondering why the status of the delay is not in the Google Search Status Dashboard like other search related issues.

This month we had Google June 2024 spam update roll out over a seven-day period. We had a few other unconfirmed Google search ranking updates as well, listed below. Let’s not forget yet another Google indexing bug after the core update was announced…

Google sent out notices via email to Google Merchant Center merchants about a change to how Google collects and uses conversion data that you share with Google. Google said it may use that data for new reporting and also for ways to improve Google Sear…

Google has confirmed it is working to fix the delays and latency issues with the Google Search Console Performance reports. This happens to the performance reports and often other reports in Google Search Console every now and then and generally Googl…

There are reports that some sites hit by the Google September 2023 Helpful Content Update are seeing small, somewhat tiny, lifts over the past week or so. Again, based on what we’ve been tracking, we have yet to see any recoveries but we are all hopefu…

Gary Illyes from Google explained two reasons why soft 404 errors are bad. Soft 404s are when a page returns a 200 status okay, but Google thinks that page should return a 404 page not found error. According to Gary, soft 404s are bad because they (1…

Elizabeth Tucker, Director, Product Management at Google Search was a guest on Google’s Search Off the Record podcast where Lizzi Sassman and John Mueller of Google asked her about search quality, how Google measures it, and so much more. I will post …

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, said it again, that “there’s clearly more we should be doing” with ranking websites that deserve to rank better in Google Search. He clarified that this is not something Google does manually, on a per-site bas…

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, responded to some new SEO advice floating around the SEOverse that suggests you should not add the brand name of the products you are reviewing in your review content. Sullivan disagreed with this advice and sai…

We knew Google would stop accepting publications into Google News Publisher Center, but Google also stopped showing news “sources” in Google News, stopped showing a follower count for those sources, and stopped providing access to Publisher Center feat…

Google has made a small note to the sitemap documentation to add that the lastmod date specified in the sitemap file “should reflect the date and time of the last significant update to the page.” This change was made after I covered the topic of Google…

Google has added a new bullet point in the structured data carousels (beta) help documentation around how to mark up categories with many items with that structured data. This is based on examples pages such as paginated content or infinite scroll.

Google has always said that having pages that serve a 404 status code is normal; most sites have them, and when a page does not exist on your site, and someone tries to access it, a 404 is the proper response. But Gary Illyes from Google is now sharing…

For the past several months, generally around the helpful content update in September and the various core updates we had over the past several months, there have been complaints with image thumbnails for some sites not appearing in the Google Search r…

In the Google Merchant Center structured data documentation, it says that you should add structured data to the HTML source and that it “can’t be generated after a page has been loaded using JavaScript.” This does not mean Google cannot process the str…