The SEM Post

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Google is testing a new feature in the search results that allows searcher to filter the search results by the approximate time it takes to read the article. The tool is accessed through the Tools filter.   The new filter is a drop down that says “Any duration.”  Then the searcher can choose between 3 time […]

At Google Dance Singapore, Gary Illyes from Google revealed a new feature that is coming to the Google search results.  The new feature would see specific content from a webpage, including FAQ, Q&A and how-to verticals being highlighted in the search results for those pages.  And these rich results take up nearly the entire screen […]

Google has removed the public version of their submit URL tool.  This tool allowed anyone to submit a URL to Google, as it wasn’t restricted to site owners only, We've had to drop the public submission feature, but we continue to welcome your submissions using the usual tool in Search Console and through sitemaps directly. […]