While most SEOs who do disavows for clients have their own ways of making sense of their files, whether adding comments or making multiple files and combining them later into one before uploading to Google, John Mueller from Google was asked about advice on structuring disavows files to submit to Google. While some of the […]

Negative SEO is always a hot topic, since the idea that a competitor can merely point a ton of crappy backlinks at a site to see it penalized is always a scary one to site owners.  John Mueller was asked about spammy backlinks from a negative SEO perspective, specifically as it relates to Penguin. Since […]

In yesterday’s webmaster hangout, the question was brought up about whether site owners need to disavow links from hacked sites. If a website identified as hacked by google (such as example.com) shows as linking to a site in webmaster tools, do we need to/should we disavow it? Or is google automatically not counting this? If […]

URLs were a popular topic in yesterday’s Google hangout with John Mueller.  Along with how important keywords in URLs are, he was also asked about the overall length of a URL and if shorter versus longer URLs played a part in ranking. What definitely plays a role here is when we have two URLs that […]

If you have been in the search industry for a long time, you will likely remember the days when having keywords in the URL was extremely important, and seeing page URLs like www.example.com/buy-keyword-keyword-keyword-online-now.html was pretty common.  Obviously, much as changed with SEO since that was important 10-15 years ago. In yesterday’s hangout, someone asked how […]

Does Google view pages or websites with a higher number of reviews as higher quality than those without?  John Mueller answered this question in yesterday’s hangout. Do note that when he answers, he does add the caveat that this may be different from how the local search results do their rankings, such as in the […]

Last week, there was some drama over whether or not title tags were a ranking factor.  While the headline stated that titles were not a critical ranking factor, what John Mueller had actually said was that “it is not the most critical part of the page.”  This is true, while it isn’t THE most important […]