Have you ever filed a Google spam report on a site yet never seen any impact on their search rankings after that, and wondered why? There are a few different reasons why Google may not act on a spam report. Not Enough Information If you are submitting a spam report, include as much information as […]
Google Working on Consolidating WWW, Non-WWW, HTTPS Properties in Search Console
One of the major pain points for webmasters with Google Search Console is the rather clunky way site owners need to verify – and check – www and non-www versions of their websites in Search Console. Many site owners can get along fine with simply verifying a single property in Google Search Console. In fact, […]
Googlebot’s Smartphone User-Agent Getting a New Name
On April 18, 2016 Googlebot will be debuting a brand new user-agent for the smartphone Googlebot. This means in your log reporting, you will see a different user-agent name for this bot after April 18th. Google’s new user agent reflects that it is evolving towards being more similar to Chrome, rather than Safari. The updated […]
Google Warns Bloggers on Promo Links But No New Manual Action Coming
On Friday the Google Webmaster blog warned bloggers who are engaging of the practice of trading free products for reviews with links. While this isn’t new – trading links in this kind of situation has always been against Google’s webmaster guidelines, since they aren’t natural links – Google is reminding bloggers who aren’t following this […]
You Can Now Bookmark Date Range Reports in Google Search Analytics
If you have ever tried to bookmark reports in Google Search Analytics with a date range, you have probably discovered when you go back to that URL that instead of seeing the date range relative to the current date, such as “last 7 days”, the bookmarked link actually saved the date range based on the […]
Google Reconsideration Requests Processed in Order Received
If you have ever submitted a reconsideration request, you have probably wondered how Google processes them. Are they batched together by manual action type, so that hacked sites could get their reconsideration requests processed quicker? Or simply first come, first served? It turns out it is the latter. At SMX West earlier this month, Juan […]
Google Working on Making AMP Compatible With Older Devices
If you have one of the latest mobile phones, you likely have seen AMP results when news results are displayed. But for those with older smart phones, AMP results might not be displayed… and arguably, it is those older – and often slower – phones could benefit from AMP even more than those with the […]
Google Adds Disambiguation Box to Medical Knowledge Panels
Many people are familiar with the custom style of Google’s medical knowledge panels. But Google has added something new – a disambiguation box. Disambiguation boxes appear for some Google search results where Google isn’t sure which meaning of a popular keyword the searcher intends to look for, such as Apple the company or apple the […]
All Google Manual Actions Send Warnings to Site Owners
If you have ever wondered if Google hands out manual actions in secret, without ever sending a manual action notice to the site owner, the answer is no. Google will always send a notice to a site owner when manual action is taken. Juan Felipe Rincón, part of the Google manual actions team at Google, […]
Sites Impacted by Penguin Cannot Request Manual Penguin Refresh
Some site owners who have been impacted by Penguin have been waiting for quite some time for a Penguin update to happen. While we know that the next Penguin will bring a new real-time Penguin, playing the waiting game in the meantime has been tough. In last week’s Google Webmaster Hangout with John Mueller, he […]