Google is deprecating discontinuing support for those who host websites on Google Drive, a little known feature that has been available for three years, but one that has definitely caused issues. “Websites” had been hosted via Google Drive with a googledrive.com/host/[doc id] address, but that left plenty of room for some confusion when it came […]
Displaying Rich Snippets in Google Search Results Doesn’t Impact Rankings
As Google has been displaying more and more types of rich snippets in the search results, people have questioned whether having them displayed on a site in the search results meant the site had a ranking boost associated with it. And it is common to see the top ranked sites displaying them for many types […]
Structured Markup Does Not Affect Google Search Rankings
The question came up in today’s Google Webmaster Office Hours about how Google handles sites that use structured markup versus those that don’t, and whether sites that use it get any kind of extra ranking boost when it comes to Google’s search results. Google’s John Mueller confirms that they do not consider the use of […]
Google Can Display Large Featured Snippet & Expanded Knowledge Panel on Same Page
Google can display both a large featured snippet with image alongside a Google knowledge panel on the right side. What makes this most noticeable is that the featured snippet – with an image and a table – is very lengthy and is actually longer than the knowledge panel with the related projects in it. On […]
Google Reaching Out to Larger Third Party Sites to Get Embedded CSS & JS Unblocked
Ever since Google sent out the alerts asking webmasters to unblock all Javascript and CSS on their webpages, it has been a struggle with all the third party resources – including some from Google itself – that show up as an error in Google Search Console. While Google has said that webmasters don’t need to […]
Organic Search Results No Longer Displayed Above Google Local Pack Results
Google seems to have made yet another change to how they present local search results with 3-pack results and it will hurt those who aren’t in the top 3. One of the saving graces for some businesses with the switch to the 3-pack is that if the business ranked #1 for the search query, they […]
App Indexing Ranking Signal Applies When Users Do Not Have App Installed
Google is experimenting showing app indexing results to users who do not have the app already installed, if Google feels the app result is a good result for the particular search query. And the app indexing ranking signal applies to those results too, for searches coming from an Android. Google hosted a Webmaster Office Hours […]
iOS 9 Content Blocking Loads Pages 3.9X Faster
There has been a lot of talk about the upcoming iOS having content blockers – aka ad blocker – and TheNextWeb has brought attention to some interesting tests being done with iOS beta and focusing on ad blocking technology that is included with it… and it should scare anyone who makes money with online advertising. […]
Tweets Appearing Real Time in Desktop Google Search Results Now
You might want to be a bit careful about what you tweet about, because Google has made tweets front and center in the search results for both personal names and company names. Google now displays tweets in real time for a wide variety of searches now. While tweets have been appearing in mobile search results […]
Referral Spam Hitting Google AdSense Publishers Too
It seems as though those annoying Google Analytics referral spammers have a new target – your Google AdSense account. Last week I noticed that there were some new sites that popped up under the “Sites” report that show all domains that ads are displayed on. Semalt has been the largest referral spammer in Google Analytics, […]