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 […]

Does Google treat adult sites differently in the search results when compared to non-adult sites?  The question came up last week at SMX West during the AMA with Google’s Nathan Johns, who is part of the search team at Google. Here is the question: How are adult sites evaluated for ranking?  Given that most of […]

We don’t hear too much from Google about nofollow anymore, aside from how it relates to the disavow file and scenarios when Google suggests website owners should use it. Nofollow is a link tool webmasters can use on-page to be able to tell Google that they are unwilling to vouch for a link, or that […]

Google is now showing zero search results for some types of specific use cases.  Zero results search results pages are search results where there is simply an answer in the answer box /  featured snippet style, with zero organic search results on the page. For example, if you do a search for “time” or time […]

Using rel=canonicals on webpages has been the default standard for referencing canonicals.  But for larger sites, some have been utilizing sitemaps for showing Google their canonicals.  Google has updated their help page on canonicals and it now includes information on how it views canonicals in different formats. Most notably, Google now states officially that canonicals […]

Google has been warning site owners that Google Chrome will begin flagging sites as being “not secure” in a future version of Chrome.  And now we know when it will officially begin. Google posted today and both the Google Security Blog and the Chromium Blog that beginning in July 2018, sites that are not HTTPS […]

Google has updated their AMP help articles that changes the minimum image size requirements for AMP articles, increasing the size of the image significantly. Originally, Google asked for the image size to be a minimum of 696px wide.  The new size is a minimum of 1200px wide, almost double the width. Google also changed the […]

Google has added a new alert to Google Search Console, this time for favicons for sites that are still utilizing the older and smaller favicons for their site. Paul Macnamara shared the screenshot of the new alert. For sites with favicons that are lower resolution, Google is sending this alert out asking site owners to […]