If you are hoping Google can do something on their back end to lift an algorithmic penalty, you are out of luck.  Google does not have something that can remove an algorithmic penalty – such as from impacted by Panda, Penguin, or the many other algo signals – so a site will rank better in […]

An interesting question came up in the most recent Google Webmaster Office Hours with John Mueller, specifically surrounding PageRank.  Google doesn’t talk that much about PageRank anymore, which makes his comments a bit interesting for SEOs. First off, Mueller doesn’t reveal any secret sauce for exactly how much PageRank might flow though a link.  If […]

Google has announced they have officially begin to roll out the mobile first index beyond the initial testing phase.  The mobile first index, which has been testing with some sites in their search index, sees Google crawl, index and rank a page based on the mobile version of the page instead of the desktop version. […]

How does Google choose the date – if any – that is shown within the search results description?  While it is often the publish date, sometimes it is an updated date.  And why do some sites display a date for their dated content, while others do not? The question came up on Twitter by someone […]

The question about Googlebot being allowed to crawl pages that had previously been blocked from Googlebot. Googlebot crawl activity, as shown in Google Search Console crawl stats, showed a huge spike one day, which doubled the next day and then tripled the third. But Google wasn’t necessarily hitting the “new to Googlebot” pages, but crawling […]

If you run WordPress, you have likely noticed that there are sometimes links placed within the code of themes and plugins that are links, although they are not visible links on the page.  While on the surface, they help people figure out where plugins originate from, there is also the question of whether these links […]

Sometimes when you do a Google search, you end up seeing the same site multiple times on the first page of the results, sometimes occupying the top 3 positions. Sometimes you see the same site many more times in the top 10, which is pretty common with some searches with Yelp results. But is this […]

When you make major changes to the quality of your website, whether increasing quality or removing low quality content or signals from a site, how long can it take to reflect those changes in the search results? If looking at it on a page level, you can begin to see improvements as soon as the […]

At SMX Munich yesterday, John Mueller gave some new insights into mobile first indexing during a talk dedicated to the Google Mobile First Index.  Specifically, he talked about what happens when sites switch over and what is upcoming in Google Search Console for mobile first. Here is the slide from Mueller’s talk, from David Epding. […]

Many SEOs were alarmed when Google began showing answer boxes in the search results without showing any additional search results.  The experiment, which began last week, was to serve searchers the answer up to half a second faster, especially since most searchers didn’t actually click through to any search results, as the answer box showed […]