Google has officially begun sending out email notices to site owners confirming their change from desktop indexing to mobile first indexing. And we do have some clarification on mobile friendliness being a criteria or not for sites changing over. Some people had speculated that a way to prevent mobile first indexing was to have a […]
Archives for April 2018
Google Sending Mobile First Indexing Enabled Notices via Google Search Console
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 […]
Switching to AMP Won’t Negate Other SEO & Google Algo Issues on a Site
The use of AMP is an interesting one. For many site owners, using AMP can result in a lift in traffic, but this is because AMP gets priority placement, such as the carousel placements. But it doesn’t specifically get an additional ranking boost outside of the regular mobile friendly one. But an interesting question came […]
Google: Major Redesigns & Issues With Search Traffic Loss
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: Dividing One Page Into Multiple Pages Often Dilutes Value for SEO
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 […]
Google: Do Not Link Hreflang to Redirecting URLs
For sites that are using hreflang, especially those who are utilizing 301 and 302 redirects for any reason, it is a reminder that all hreflang URLs should not be linked to redirected URLs. The question came up to John Mueller on Twitter, where he reminds site owners that hreflang URLs should be the destination URLs […]
Google Adds Manual Action for Google Job Postings Schema
Google has added a new manual action related to the recently added Google Jobs feature in the search results. Site that are utilizing the schema and not handling expired job listings properly. Here is what it says: Jobs that are no longer open for applications must be expired in one of the following ways. Failure […]
Google: Order of H Tags & Search Rankings in Google
Does the order of your <h> tags on a page make a difference when it comes to ranking in Google? Does something odd happen if Googlebot crawls a page and discovers that an <h3> tag comes before the <h1> and swap what each of those means? The question came up in today’s Google webmaster office […]
Google Adds “Mentioned on Wikipedia” Carousels in Search Results
Google has often shown carousels in the search results for both mobile and desktop for all kinds of searches. Google has added a new version for searches with a “mentioned on Wikipedia” carousel. Searchers, and site owners, have often complained about Google’s carousels not having data from where the information is taken from. So Google […]
Google: Adding Content to Image Heavy Pages
It can be hard sometimes for sites that are image heavy to rank in Google since Googlebot has fewer context clues to take from the content. Titles and tags are important but it can be harder to rank, especially outside of image search specifically. During last month’s AMA with Google’s John Mueller, he discussed issues […]