Google has finally confirmed what many of us suspected… they have made a change to their core search ranking algorithm, and it is being dubbed as the Quality Update or the Quality Algo, and formerly referred to as the Phantom Update, or Phantom Update 2. Changes were first noticed at the beginning of the month […]
Search Results for: search console
Blocking Googlebot from CSS & JavaScript Can Hurt Google Rankings
Many webmasters block Googlebot from crawling both CSS and JavaScript for ranking purposes to try and combat things such as the page layout algorithm. But Google has been advising webmasters not block Googlebot from crawling either, and it has now officially been added to Google’s technical guidelines that blocking CSS and JavaScript so can hurt a website’s […]
Criteria for Google Mobile First Indexing is Matching Content Not Mobile Friendliness
Google has officially begun sending out email notices to site owners confirming their change from desktop indexing to mobile first indexing. And we do have some clarification on mobile friendliness being a criteria or not for sites changing over. Some people had speculated that a way to prevent mobile first indexing was to have a […]
Google Doesn’t Crawl to See What is On 404 Pages; No SEO Benefit
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Google Sends Outdated WordPress Alerts to Site Owners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’s New Mobile Friendly Test Available to All Users
Google has officially launched their new mobile friendly test to all users. This coincides with the recent increase to Google’s mobile friendly ranking boost this month. The new mobile friendly test actually started showing up earlier this month to some users. But it is now in the process of rolling out to all users. The […]
Google Prioritizes Links in Partial Sitemaps for Crawling
With so many sites autogenerating sitemaps, we don’t hear a lot about custom sitemaps or sitemaps where only a part of a site is on it. In yesterday’s keynote with Stone Temple, Gary Illyes from Google brought up an interesting aspect with sitemaps and how Google prioritizes crawling. If you use a sitemap that is […]
Which Manual Action Notice Does Google Send the Most?
Google has been sending out a wide variety of manual actions to webmasters for several years, ranging from invalid links to thin content warnings. But when it comes down to which manual action notice Google sends out to webmasters the most, the answer is somewhat surprising. Because the largest number of manual actions Google sends […]
Google Now Including App Indexing Results for Current News Stories
Google seems to be stepping up their app indexing game. They are now app indexing content that is less than an hour old and is giving searchers the option of either opening it in the app, or continuing to the regular website instead. Here is one showing a news example from 35 minutes before. You […]
Google Penalizes Japanese Link Network
On the Japanese Webmaster blog today, Google announced that they have penalized a Japanese link network for violating webmaster guidelines. They haven’t detailed which link network was penalized but I expect that information will be publicly available soon after penalized SEOs start talking about being hit with manual actions from this link network removal. この一環として、Google […]