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Google Sends Outdated WordPress Alerts to Site Owners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 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Google Sends New Round of Outdated Plugin Warnings
Google has been sending out a new round of Google Search Console warnings for site owners using outdated WordPress plugins.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 Previews to Structured Data Testing Tool
Google’s updated Structured Data Testing Tool now offers previews when you submit a URL or code snippet for testing. This means you can check and see what your markup would look like in the search results without having to wait for it to go live. The preview functionality only works for some types of schema […]
PopUp Size Allowed With Google’s Mobile Interstitial Demotion
When Google launched the mobile interstitial and popup demotion, where pages that utilize either an interstitial or intrusive popup, many speculated about just how big a popup could be, before the demotion was triggered. Because Google still shows a page as being mobile friendly, even with an interstitial or popup, site owners couldn’t use that […]
Google’s Mobile Interstitial Demotion Updates When Page Recrawled
Google launched their mobile interstitial and popup demotion earlier this month which would see sites with interstitials and obtrusive popups receive a demotion in the mobile search results. If you need to remove them, the demotion in the search results will not be removed until after Googlebot has crawled each individual page again. The question […]
No More Numbered Updates for Google Penguin
Since Google released the new real time Penguin, it has gone from “wait for the next Penguin update” to a Penguin that updates in real time. But what does this mean for significant updates? According to Gary Illyes, there are no plans for any more numbered Penguin releases. The last major update to Penguin was […]