Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

Google was asked where Google’s Danny Sullivan and John Mueller get their information from when responding to search and ranking-related questions. Sullivan responded directly to the engineers who code those ranking systems at Google.

Google may be bringing comments to the Notes on Google Search (and Discover) feature. Notes on Search came last November as a labs feature in Google Search and Google Discover. Google recently tested a new button for the notes feature in Search. Now Go…

When Google announced it is rolling out AI Overviews in the US search results and last year when Google launched SGE in labs, SEOs and content creators wanted to know how to prevent their content from showing up in these responses. Well, you can, but …

Google has added two new Googlebots, Google crawlers, to its crawler list. They include GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video, which are part of the GoogleOther category of bots and are used for crawling of binary data for research and development re…

For the past few months we have covered the vocal and visual complaints around Google Search not showing image thumbnails for recipe search results and other search results that generally have image thumbnails attached to the search result snippet. Goo…

Google’s John Mueller was asked when can a site expect to recover from the September 2023 helpful content update, assuming the site took all measures to “fix” their site. John Mueller said you can assume “bigger changes would be visible when the next …

A bunch of local SEOs are buzzing about a possible new local SEO Google ranking factor and are looking to confirm it. Darren Shaw posted on X that while setting the service area historically had no influence on your Google local rankings, that may now…

Bloomberg reports that Google has downgraded/lowered the search rankings of Deepfake porn sites. Bloomberg wrote, The company is lowering such content in search rankings, a spokesperson said, adding Google is “continuing to decrease the visibility of …

Google may be showing more review stars in the mobile search results, according to some reports. RankRanger six-point lift in how often review stars are showing in mobile search, while is also showing a lift but more modest lift.

Gary Illyes from Google confirmed that Google has “suddenly” dedindexed a “vast amount of URLs” from the Google Search index this past February. He said this was done because Google’s “perception of the site has changed.”

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, said yesterday on X that he has read the feedback from the community related to the March 2024 core update and the general feedback about search quality over the past few months. He said there are places where…

For over a decade now, I’ve been talking about Google adding an automated action viewer to Google Search Console to accompany the manual action viewer. This would provide a way to see if a Google Search ranking algorithm negatively impacts your site’s …

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, posted on X explaining the differences between algorithm updates, like core updates, and then data refreshes, the data that goes into those ranking systems. This is actually something Matt Cutts, former Googler…

Gary Illyes from Google said on LinkedIn that Google Search Console doesn’t “keep (almost) any data for un/de-indexed.”

About a week ago, we reported that Google began enforcing its new site reputation abuse policy by issuing manual actions and ranking penalties for those sites that violated those policies. Google seems to be now lifting some of those manual actions whe…

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, made it crystal clear that the site reputation abuse policy has zero to do with linking. This means that who you link to and/or who links to you has no impact on this new policy that Google began enforcing with …

Here is a new SEO myth I have not heard before… Someone said that using the word “news” in your site’s name is bad for SEO and Google ranking. John Mueller from Google said it is not, it is fine to use “news” in your site name.

Google said it began to enforce its new site reputation abuse policy last night. The policy went into effect on Sunday, May 5th, but Google did not announce it would take action until last night. As a reminder, this should target sites doing what some…

Google’s John Mueller said again this morning that sites hit by the old September helpful content update or even new core updates can recovery. He said on X and on LinkedIn that it is possible to recover but it is not a simple change you can tweak on …

Google’s John Mueller said on X that he believes Google will remove the disavow link tool “at some point” in the future. Bing dropped the disavow links tool from Bing Webmaster Tools in September 2023 and I suspect Google will also drop it from Google…