In the recent Search Off The Record podcast, Gary Illyes of Google said Google no longer assigns less importance to content or items that are not visible on the page. It just needs to be in the HTML...

Google's Creators channel has released a super basic video on SEO and how to rank your content in Google Search. It covers four basic tips and makes it all sound so easy. The whole video is less than...

I found it super interesting to listen to a dialog between a new German startup and Google's John Mueller. The conversation leads to John Mueller explaining that new sites can ultimately use internal...

The legacy feature to control how fast Google crawls your website is going away on January 8, 2024. It is a feature that launched 15 years ago but Google never migrated it to the new version of...

20 years ago tomorrow (December 2, 2003), I started this blog aimed at archiving some of the best discussions within the search marketing community...

The Google March 2024 core update finished a week ago and Google did not tell us until today. It finished officially on April 19, 2024, and took 45 days to roll out after starting on March 5, 2024....

I am seeing numerous complaints this morning that Google is showing header tags, H1s and H2s, instead of the meta title tags, for its search result snippets. I am seeing some public complaints on...

As I mentioned briefly in my Friday video recap, I was starting to see renewed chatter on Friday morning around more Google search ranking volatility. I spotted some renewed chatter that lead through...

Google Search is currently having yet another indexing bug, similar to what Google Search experienced just about two weeks ago on June 20th. Google is not indexing new content that was recently...

Google announced on their blog yesterday that Google Analytics turned 10 years old. Yep, Google relaunched Urchin, the awesome analytics software they purchased in March 2005 on November 13, 2005 (we...

What is going on? Again, three times in about a week, we are seeing increase chatter and the tools are lighting up around a Google search ranking algorithm update. Yesterday morning the chatter once...

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...

Gary Illyes from Google said on Reddit he thinks it is unlikely that core web vitals "would ever become the primary factor for organic traffic." He said you shouldn't ignore it but Google and other...

Starting around Friday, April 23rd or so, there seems to have been an unconfirmed Google Search ranking algorithm both on the web search results side and the local search results side. There is...

Mordy Oberstein, Head of Communications at Semrush, shared some really early data on the Google title change we've all been obsessed with. In short, the number of Google search results showing with...

Often I see webmaster basically disavow links simply because they are from a site that is written in a different language, on a ccTLD or caters to a different geographic market than their own site....

If you follow this site, you will see there is a theme with Google - that theme is that they keep investing more and more into schema and markup. They keep adding more support for it and they keep...

John Mueller of Google wrote a very detailed and honest explanation on why Google (and third party SEO tools) do not crawl and index every URL or link on the web. He explained that crawling is not...

On Friday we reported on a possible Google update that touched down on September 27th. Google's Danny Sullivan confirmed on Saturday that Google did do a "smaller" update this past week but would not...

Google Search had an incredibly volatile month of July and it ended the month with a huge bang. The volatility in the Google Search results yesterday, July 31st, going into today, August 1st, is...

The Google Search Console link report now seems to be fixed. As we reported last week, we saw a decline in links being reported by the tool, followed by a huge decline a few days later. The tool now...

Google's John Mueller said that your site can rank fine with or without H1 tags. You don't have to use any H1 tags, or you can use many, either way, it is not a critical issue specifically for Google...

Last week we reported how Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, said how they are looking for ways to better promote sites that were hit by that helpful content update in September. Now, over the...

Google had a big issues years ago, every Google algorithm update was about PageRank and subsequently DA (which is something Google doesn't even have) - it was all about links. Google knew that was an...

Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, said we should expect to see more clarification from Google on its creating helpful content page, specific to the section "Get to know E-E-A-T and the quality...

Google, in a rare move, pre-announced that they are going to be rolling out a core update tomorrow. They are calling this Google search algorithm ranking update the June 2019 Core Update and sometime...

Google's John Mueller said that in some cases, if your site goes down, Google may start to remove URLs from its index within two days. This is on a URL by URL basis, so Google needs to see if the URL...

Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that having an XML Sitemap file is "a minimal baseline for any serious website." Basically, all serious websites should have an XML sitemap file part of it or it...

Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that all the search ranking algorithm changes we have been following, some confirmed, are "not related to mobile indexing." Some are thinking that all the...

Yes, it appears a lot of Google services are currently down right now. You are not alone.

I probably should have covered this yesterday but I have been seeing more ranking volatility starting late on Monday, July 22nd, through yesterday, July 23rd and into today July 24th. This may be a...

The other day we reported that Google confirmed they are testing the mobile first index in the wild. But we didn't know the details on how often, when and how to tell when that mobile first index was...

Google announced that Google Merchant Center Next, the updated version of Google Merchant Center it announced at Google Marketing Live in 2023, is now coming to all merchants this month. Google has...

Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that when it comes to Google understanding and ranking documents, Google looks at more than just text on a page. He aimed this comment at a question around core...

Google has posted its post-trial debrief document for the DOJ trial that talks about many different things, including stating that its search quality continues to improve. We covered its statement...

Gary Illyes from Google spoke at the SERP Conf on Friday and he said what he said numerous times before, that Google values links a lot less today than it did in the past. He added that Google Search...

After over 32 hours of silence after the Google Search ranking data leak, Google has finally confirmed the leak, but urged caution around making assumptions on how Google Search ranking works based...

Google has clarified in its image search help documentation that images are only extracted from the src attribute of img tags in Google Search. This is not new, but Google decided to update its...

Rand Fishkin along with Mike King may have published one of the biggest data leaks outside of the Department of Justice data reveal around Google Search and its internal ranking features and signals....

Even after the Google search API data leak, even after it was confirmed by Google, still 10% of SEOs will continue to trust Google statements going forward. The wild thing is, this level of trust has...

There is a difference between what you see at Schema.org and what Google publishes at its Google Search developer documents for structured data rich results. The short difference is that what Google...

Since 2013 we've been hearing Google may extend the search analytics query data from 90 days of data to a full year. Well...

On the heels of the completion of the June 2024 spam update this Thursday, June 27th, I am now seeing signs of an unconfirmed Google Search ranking algorithm update and volatility. It seems more...

As part of the JavaScript SEO series Google is publishing, the first video is super basic and describes how Google indexes JavaScript sites. In short, they first crawl and index the page as is and...

There has been a heck of a lot of chatter from the SEO industry over the weekend, starting late Friday, June 10th, and then heating up June 11th and June 12th. Google has been doing this weekend...

As a reminder, with the release of the Google March 2024 core update, the old Google helpful content update is no longer a thing. As we reported, Google has incorporated helpfulness signals into the...

Google is also testing link icons in the AI Overviews to show citations for statements generated in the AI Answer. These links, when clicked, will take you to an overlay window that shows those links...

Google made a boat load of announcements last night around Google Search. Now, while some of the announcements were things already launched, many were new. Google covered changes to BERT, how it...

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....

Google's John Mueller said at the 9:43 mark into a Google hangout that for SEO purposes, links in PDF files are treated like links that have the nofollow attribute on them. But the weird thing is,...

I am deeply sad to report that Mark Irvine passed away unexpectedly last night. Mark was deeply involved in the search marketing community, known as being a brilliant paid search specialist who...

Over the past couple of weeks, the Google search rankings have been pretty stable and calm. It actually has been unusually calm that some SEOs are getting nervous. I recently saw some super early...

It is not news that Google now mixes in ads within organic results, but I have to say it still feels super icky to me that Google does this. Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, confirmed that...

If you are tearing down your web site and rebuilding it completely from the ground up, you should expect a lot of search ranking fluctuations. If you want to control and track as much as you can on...

Google seems to be testing a new interface for how to results, maybe just with recipes or maybe more wide spread. Brian Freiesleben shared this recipe result that shows the old and new interface side...

Several months ago, the disavow backlinks help document in Google's help center mentioned a section about PageRank and how PageRank is one of 200 signals Google uses for rankings. That help document...

Google's John Mueller said on Reddit that links from Wikipedia not only have no SEO value but also those links "will do nothing for your site" from a Google search perspective. In fact, John said all...

John Mueller, a Google Search Analyst at Google, wrote a response to a site owner who saw their site tank in September 2023 and hired SEO, and there has been no improvement. John's response was that...

There have been some people noticing that the Google Notes On Search labs experiment has an end date of May 2024 and thus they are expecting Notes on Search to be turned off by then. Just because it...

Just another reminder that if you spam people asking to buy links or other link schemes, Google will potentially use that email and the sites listed in that email against you. John Mueller of Google...

Google's John Mueller said that if your website is www.domain.com and then you decide to canonicalize it to the non-www, so it goes to domain.com from www.domain.com - that change would not have a...

Google has officially confirmed the launch of the second release of the Google helpful content update/system. It started lightly on December 5th but became noticeable, according to Google, on...

Forbes has blocked its coupons section of its web site at forbes.com/coupons using an x-robots-tag: noindex directive prior to Google enforcing the upcoming site reputation abuse policy. As a...

Google is also testing this new ad format labeled "People also browsed." I guess this shows you what other products on Google searchers looked at for a similar query and is now showing you ads that...

Google Search may be having a new indexing or serving (or both) bug where it is now showing new content from sites that are creating new content. Sites like the Wall Street Journal, NY Times, CNN,...