When you have a 404, regardless of whether it is a default 404 or a custom 404, Google doesn’t crawl the content of the 404 once it sees the response is a server 404. Why is this important? Many have been creating custom 404s for SEO specific reasons. So if we see a 404, then […]
Google Sends Outdated WordPress Alerts to Site Owners
WordPress updated to WordPress 4.7.2 a week and a half ago and many site owners have already updated. But WordPress later announced that this update fixed a serious vulnerability that they delayed disclosure of, in order to allow sites to fix the vulnerability before others tried to take advantage of it. Google is also trying […]
Google Testing New Call Only Style Ad
Google is testing a new variation of their call only ads, ads which are meant for searchers to simply phone the business rather than click through to the site. And these ones make it much more obvious that searchers should be calling them. Here is what it looks like: Usually the call icon is on […]
Google Adds Category Filters to Organic Search
Google is testing a new category filtering carousel for some search queries. And while the intent is good, the actual results make Google search results even worse. Here is what it looks like for a search: However, the narrowing down doesn’t quite seem to work. It only narrows it down to product type, without adding […]
Google Makes Low Quality Content Algo Change in Japan
Google has made a change to their search algo in Japan to lower the rankings of low quality sites in the search results. The Japanese Google Webmaster Blog made a post about improving search quality in Japanese search. As a part of this, we made improvements to the quality evaluation method of the website this […]
Google’s Other Googlebots Don’t Affect Google Search
Gary Illyes from Google posted a couple of tweets on Twitter about Google’s use of Googlebots, and particularly other parts of Google that may also use Googlebots for their own programs. The software called Googlebot is used by many many teams at Google, not just search. Better not let every engineer reinvent the wheel pic.twitter.com/Ov8hSOJaKP […]
Google Local 3-Pack Drops Organic Listing for Local Ad
Google My Business is testing a bold new change. Google is now testing their local 3-pack to include one local ad and only two organic local results. Until now, Google has been using ads only in the new sponsored local panel or including an ad in addition to the 3 organic listings. Here is what […]
Google Sends New Round of Outdated Plugin Warnings
Google has been sending out a new round of Google Search Console warnings for site owners using outdated WordPress plugins. Casey Markee posted a screenshot of the latest warning. Revolution Slider was the reason why hundreds of thousands of WordPress blogs were exploited by hackers back in 2014. And one of the problems was that […]
Google Adds “Watch Live” Link to Sports Scores Box in Search Results
If you are a sports fan, you have probably seen sports score results in the top of Google search results when you search for a team while a game is happening. Google has now added a new feature of a link to “Watch Live.” Here is what it looks like: When you click to “Watch […]
Google Testing Card Style Product Listing Ads
Google is testing out the card style format on their Product Listing Ads now on desktop. This format stands out quite a bit against the regular formatted search results. Google is testing the card style PLAs at both the position at the top of the search results and the ones that appear in the right […]