The SEM Post

The debate over subdomains versus subdirectories has been a hot one for SEOs for years.  For SEO reasons, most prefer subdirectories, primarily for link equity purposes.  But Google’s official stand is either works in the eyes of Google – even if they won’t necessarily rank equivalently. During the most recent Google Office Hours, the question […]

If you have a large number of sites in your Google Search Console, chances are good you have received one (or twenty) emails from Google alerting that sites have been switched over to mobile first indexing in the search results. The new notices are identical (aside from a non-relevant footer change) to the ones Google […]

Google is testing a disambiguation box which shows up on the mobile search results for a local pack.  Disambiguation features in the search results show up when Google isn’t entirely sure which meaning of a word someone is trying to search for. Here is what it looks like: Google is asking whether someone is searching […]

In Google Search Console, you can add and remove sitemaps from your site, and Google will include information related to the sitemap files such as any warnings or errors, as well as pages indexed from the crawl.   While Google can discover and crawl sitemaps on its own, submitting makes it faster and easier, and it […]

Ever since Google dropped the length of the descriptions in the search results last week, many SEOs have been freaking out about the fact they rewrote meta description tags to 300+ characters and now, Google has dropped that back down to about 160 characters in length. The important thing to note is that Google has […]

Two years after Google initially increased the length of descriptions in the search results, and six months after increasing it for most results, Google is reverting back to the old shorter length.  For some SEOs, this means a lot of work is required to change over description meta tags from the longer version to the […]

At Google I/O yesterday, Google detailed some issues surrounding the use of JavaScript when it comes to both crawling and indexing content.  One thing they revealed is that Googlebot will process JavaScript heavy pages in two phases – an initial crawl, and then a second one a few days later that will render the JavaScript […]

Tom Greenaway from Google spoke at Google I/O yesterday about how Google handles JavaScript pages, and he mentioned something pretty significant – Googlebot treats indexing and ranking of JavaScript pages much differently than non-Javascript rendered pages. More specifically, when Googlebot crawls JavaScript sites, it does so in waves.  And the result is it will have […]

At Google I/O yesterday, Google clarified the types of links that Googlebot will follow.  While “a href” is the standard link type, they also covered various other link types and whether Googlebot would follow them or not. In particular, they clarify some uses of the JavaScript onclick attribute within links and which ones Googlebot will […]

At yesterday’s Google I/O John Mueller revealed that Google is still using the older version of Chrome – Chrome 41 – for their official rendering by Googlebot.  This means that some newer coding features available in the newer versions of Chrome and other browsers won’t be rendered properly by Googlebot. What’s not immediately clear from […]

When content becomes outdated, sometimes site owners remove the old page and replace it with a new one.  And they don’t always remember to use a redirect when doing so.  The question came up on Twitter about whether it is best to replace the content or redirect from the old page to the new one. […]

There has been plenty of speculation about just how much Google uses machine learning when it comes to the search algorithm, especially outside of RankBrain itself.  During a recent Google Webmaster Office Hours, the role of machine learning in the algo came up. The question was specifically about Panda and whether it uses a machine […]

Does Google’s algo devalue sites that are ugly or with poor usability?  Are there any direct or indirect links between this and a site’s rankings on Google? We do know that usability and site perception plays a large role in the Google Quality Rater Guidelines.  Raters are specifically asked to look at how easy to […]

It seems Google has finally started sending out emails to site owners informing them that their sites have been switched over to mobile first indexing. The emails, sent via Google Search Console, advise site owners on changes they can expect to see now that their sites are being indexed by the mobile Googlebot. The emails […]

Some of the changes made by the site, which already had millions of pages, included a redesign as well as splitting up many millions of pages – including the homepage – into many smaller individual pages.  On average, each of these longer static HTML pages was split into roughly four new pages, a main page […]

Google has long advocated that having strong high quality pages is much better for Google search than many lower quality pages.  But in the quest to get more pages indexed in Google, some site owners are going for quantity over quality, and sometimes sacrificing the parts of the site that are high quality. For some […]