Google has made some new substantial changes to their “How Google Search Works” search documents for website owners. And as always when Google makes changes to important documents with impact on SEO, such as How Search Works and the Quality Rater Guidelines, there are some key insights SEOs can gleam from the new changes Google […]
Google’s Mobile First Index Changes
Google’s Mobile First Indexing Change: Everything SEOs Need to Know
Google’s search index is becoming mobile first. This means that Google will be crawling the mobile versions of the website to rank webpages… and if you truncated content on your mobile pages, your rankings could suffer. Read more…
Latest News
Google Quality Rater Guidelines Update: New Introduction, Rater Bias & Political Affiliations
Google has released a brand new version of the Quality Rater Guidelines, the third one this year. The changes aren’t as extensive as the previous two releases were this year, but the new updates can be an interesting signal as to where Google is planning to take the algo, and this update is no different. […]
Google Updates Quality Rater Guidelines: Reputation for News Sites; Video Content Updates; Quality for Information Sites
We have a brand new version of the Google Quality Rater Guidelines, and there are quite a few updates in several areas, namely news content, YMYL and EAT. This is the first update to the guidelines since the Spring, and Google is definitely focusing on some specific areas in this update – especially news content […]
Google Makes Major Changes to NoFollow, Adds Sponsored & UGC Tags
Ever since Google introduced the nofollow link attribute, as a way to help webmasters disavow links they did not want to pass PageRank to, it has been used for many different things. First, it was used specifically for sites to be able to link to sponsors, but without worrying about receiving any link based manual […]
Google Updates Quality Rater Guidelines Targeting E-A-T, Page Quality & Interstitials
There is a brand new version of the Google Quality Rater Guidelines, and here are all the changes Google has made to the guidelines and why these changes are important. The new version is dated May 16, 2019, and replaces the one released back in 2018. One major take away is that Google is moving […]
Google Local Service Ads Display Pricing Estimates for Specific Locations
Google has added a new feature to their local services as, the special local ads that appear for searchers that are looking for a specific business type in their local area, to give estimates for specific jobs in their area. Tom Waddington shared a screenshot on Twitter. This is a great feature for searchers because […]
Google Testing “Relevant History” Section in Mobile Search Results
Google is testing a new feature in the mobile search results – a drop down section labelled as “Relevant History” that appears at the very top of the mobile search results. It shows previously visited pages directly related to the search. Henny Roggy shared the screenshots on Twitter showing the feature. Here is how it […]
Google Converts PDFs, DOCs, XLS etc into HTML for Indexing
A discussion came up on twitter about different content types and how Google determines what type of files they are. The discussion then moved to PDFs in the Google search results and how Google handles them. John Mueller commented that Google automatically converts PDFs and similar document types into HTML format for indexing and ranking […]
Why Google Shows Featured Snippets With Images from Another Site
For a few years now, Google has sometimes shown featured snippets where the text is from one site, but the image shown within the featured snippet itself is actually from a second site. Last year, Google confirmed that it would continue doing this, and it wouldn’t change how it sometimes selects a more optimal image […]
How to Download Links Report in New Google Search Console
Google has released a brand-new link report within the new version of Google Search Console. The important thing to know about this linking report is that it contains different data than what was included in the old link report. To export your links, you need to go to your linking reports within the new Google […]
Google: Avoid Including Redirected URLs in Sitemaps
Google is reminding site owners that they shouldn’t add URLs that are being redirected in the sitemap they submit to Google. The question came up on Twitter about whether it should be avoided or if there was no detrimental effect to having them in a sitemap. John Mueller answered on Twitter and said that sitemaps […]
Google’s Featured Snippet Videos Now Overlay in Search Results
Google has made a major change with how featured snippets with a video are done in the search results. Instead of clicking through to the YouTube video landing page, Google is overlaying the video directly into the search results instead. The overlay does not feature any of the YouTube features and is instead a very […]
Expect Googlebot Crawl Increase With Changes to CDNs
Whenever you make major changes to something about the website, it is natural you see significant changes in the amount of crawling the Google but does on the site. This is completely normal and expected. The same is also true when you switch over your site to CDN. But if you remove the CDN or […]
Google Search Console Links & Disavow Files
If you are doing a disavowal for a site, Google is recommending that you start looking at the URLs that Google is showing in the links section of Google Search Console. While we do know that the list of links showing Google Search Console isn’t a full list of links, it often can show links […]
Google Sending Out Notifications for HTTPS Site Migration Issues
Google is now sending out a new notice to search console users detailing issues that Google has discovered when a site has migrated to HTTPS. The email notice states what percentage of the site is no longer indexed after the HTTPS migrations, with example URLs that were on the HTTP version and not the HTTPS […]
Google’s New Creator Reputation: Guide For Site Owners & Creators
Google has released a new version of the Google quality rater guidelines, and one of the most significant additions was creator reputation. Instead of just focusing on the reputation of the website itself, Google wants the raters to now look and see what the reputation is of the creator of the content. Does this person […]
Google: When Asking for Links Isn’t a Link Scheme
For SEOs, links are very important part of any SEO strategy for all websites. However it can be a pretty geay area for site owners to request links, especially when those links are in exchange for something else, such as content or money. And for the most part, those are pretty clearly a violation of […]
Google Does Not Use Quality Raters for Machine Learning Algos
Whenever there is a new quality raters guidelines released by Google, there is always lots of speculation about what Google does with the data from those ratings. And does that include machine learning? Google confirmed that they use quality raters to evaluate potential changes to the search algos. They push out a change and then […]
Google’s Latest Core Algo Update Still Rolling Out
For those watching the search results to see how well (or not) sites have done with Google’s latest core algo update, you will need to watch for quite a lot longer. Google has confirmed that the algo update is still rolling out. Danny Sullivan from Google has confirmed that the latest update is still rolling […]
New Google Core Search Algo Update: What We Know
Google has confirmed a major algo update in their search results that was released this week. Danny Sullivan from Google confirmed this via twitter after many SEOs noticed major fluctuations in rankings. This week we released a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. Our guidance about such updates remains the […]