Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google’s Gary Illyes posted on LinkedIn with two common examples of when a spike in Googlebot activity, crawling, is a bad thing. The short answer is when Googlebot gets to crawling an infinite section of your site (like calendar pages that goes on fo…

There is a lot of talk in the wider SEO community around pound signs, #, in the Google Search Console reports, meaning something about canonicalization. John Mueller from Google, along with a number of SEOs, said it has nothing to do with canonicalizat…

Google’s John Mueller said in the last SEO Google Office Hours video that Google’s “search results are not an indication of what Google’s systems consider to be the original source.” This means that just because Google ranks a piece of content, it does…

Google launched AI overviews in the SERPs in the United States officially on May 14th at I/O. This follows the launch of Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) in May of 2023…

Google has tweaked its hreflang search developer documentation to clarify that link tags for denoting alternate versions of a page must not be combined in a single link tag. Google said it wanted to document this “quirk” in its documentation.

In the last Search Off The Record podcast, Gary Illyes from the Google Search team said that sometimes issues can arise within the Google Search results due to two experiments that conflict with each other. He said at the 19:41 mark, “Very often there …

Google posted a public service announcement saying you should disallow Googlebot from crawling your action URLs. Gary Illyes from Google posted on LinkedIn, “You should really disallow crawling of your action URLs. Crawlers will not buy that organic no…

Yesterday at SMX Advanced, I interviewed the Google executive who announced the March 2024 core update on the main Google blog. I asked Elizabeth Tucker a boatload of questions around SEO, the core update, the helpful content update, the search data le…

Google Search no longer shows “home activities” after launching the feature just under three years ago. Google has pulled down the home activities structured data from its search developer documents last night and wrote, “The home activity feature no l…

Google once again said you can recover from the damage inflicted on your site by the September 2023 helpful content update with the next core update. Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison said on X, “yes, people who have had impacts with core rank…

Google added deeper insights for those who use merchant listings to see how well their merchant listings are performing within the Google Image Search tab. A new search appearance filter works for the image filter in the performance report in Google S…

Now that Google is encouraging publishers to use proper lastmod dates in their sitemap files, what happens if your lastmod date is incorrect and shows the wrong date. Gary Illyes from Google said either Google trusts your lastmod date or doesn’t, ther…

Last week we reported that Googlebot will pretty much halt crawling and indexing websites using its desktop crawler and just crawl using its smartphone crawler (which caused a lot of confusion). But John Mueller of Google said on Reddit that he doesn’…

Google is currently working on fixing a bug that prevents the product variant structured data from showing rating stars in the search. This bug was spotted by Jarno van Driel and Ryan Levering from Google confirmed it and said they will work on a fix s…

Google has placed a notice at the top of the Google Search Console removal tool that says, “Cache updates are no longer available.” It added that you “can still request snippet updates.”

Google has removed the How-to enhancement report from Google Search Console. When Google stopped showing how-to rich results in the search results, it said it would keep the reports “for the time being,” I guess that time has been completed.

There has been a tremendous amount of confusion around the news that Google will stop indexing sites that are completely inaccessible via a mobile phone after July 5th. Google will index sites that are not mobile-friendly – period. But if your site w…

Google has updated its coupons FAQs in the original Google March core update blog post to clarify which sites would be hit by the site reputation abuse policy. Google wrote “white-label services that focus on redistributing coupons with the primary pur…

Google Merchant Center seems to be testing a whole slew of new analytics for the Merchant Center console. The data itself is not new but the UX is, and I am told the analytics is presented in a more user-friendly and easy-to-navigate manner.

Google has fixed an issue with site names not appearing for some internal pages, this has been an issue since December 2023. I checked some examples, and they are indeed fixed – although Google said some fixes are still rolling out and those pages nee…