Google is testing a disambiguation box which shows up on the mobile search results for a local pack.  Disambiguation features in the search results show up when Google isn’t entirely sure which meaning of a word someone is trying to search for. Here is what it looks like: Google is asking whether someone is searching […]

In Google Search Console, you can add and remove sitemaps from your site, and Google will include information related to the sitemap files such as any warnings or errors, as well as pages indexed from the crawl.   While Google can discover and crawl sitemaps on its own, submitting makes it faster and easier, and it […]

Ever since Google dropped the length of the descriptions in the search results last week, many SEOs have been freaking out about the fact they rewrote meta description tags to 300+ characters and now, Google has dropped that back down to about 160 characters in length. The important thing to note is that Google has […]

Two years after Google initially increased the length of descriptions in the search results, and six months after increasing it for most results, Google is reverting back to the old shorter length.  For some SEOs, this means a lot of work is required to change over description meta tags from the longer version to the […]

At Google I/O yesterday, Google detailed some issues surrounding the use of JavaScript when it comes to both crawling and indexing content.  One thing they revealed is that Googlebot will process JavaScript heavy pages in two phases – an initial crawl, and then a second one a few days later that will render the JavaScript […]

Tom Greenaway from Google spoke at Google I/O yesterday about how Google handles JavaScript pages, and he mentioned something pretty significant – Googlebot treats indexing and ranking of JavaScript pages much differently than non-Javascript rendered pages. More specifically, when Googlebot crawls JavaScript sites, it does so in waves.  And the result is it will have […]

At Google I/O yesterday, Google clarified the types of links that Googlebot will follow.  While “a href” is the standard link type, they also covered various other link types and whether Googlebot would follow them or not. In particular, they clarify some uses of the JavaScript onclick attribute within links and which ones Googlebot will […]

At yesterday’s Google I/O John Mueller revealed that Google is still using the older version of Chrome – Chrome 41 – for their official rendering by Googlebot.  This means that some newer coding features available in the newer versions of Chrome and other browsers won’t be rendered properly by Googlebot. What’s not immediately clear from […]