Microsoft Bing announced that the popular WordPress SEO plugin Rank Math is integrating the IndexNow instant indexing protocol. A publisher doesn’t even need to have an API key or a Bing Webmaster Tools account to enjoy the advantages of instant indexing. Getting started with IndexNow by using Rank Math SEO plugin is easy, especially with … Read more
Local businesses that want more traffic from search must improve their local rankings. But can prominence, distance, and relevance affect your organic search rankings? Read on to learn whether there is any connection between prominence, distance, and relevance, and improved Google rankings. The Claim: Relevance, Distance, And Prominence Are Ranking Factors What are relevance, distance, … Read more
Content marketing is tough to get right, but once you do, the results can be incredible – especially for ecommerce brands. More traffic from Google? Check. More leads? Check. More trust built with prospects? Double-check. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as blogging randomly about topics you pull out of a hat. With a strategy in … Read more
John Mueller answered a question about why a site that ranked for one keyword phrase didn’t rank for what they said was a synonym for the same phrase. John answered the question in general terms, explaining how what’s important is the full context of the search query. Synonyms and Search Results Before Google Hummingbird Google … Read more
Reconsideration requests are indirectly related to search rankings, as they’re an essential step in the process of recovering from a Google manual penalty. They make the difference between a site getting reinstated in search results or remaining deindexed. Reconsideration requests play an important role in SEO when rankings are manually held down by Google, but … Read more
Over the last few years, Google has made several changes to the way their crawlers understand how content answers queries. Most recently, those changes have included more algorithm updates that include sophisticated enhancements to natural language processing and machine learning models like BERT and MUM. These updates help Google better understand how people are searching … Read more
Google’s John Mueller received feedback about a bug in how Search Console validates rich results. Google will drop images from rich results because of an error in how a CDN that hosts the images handles a request for a non-existent robots.txt. The bug that was discovered was in how search console and Google’s rich results … Read more
This week’s Ask An SEO question comes from Renee in Iowa, who writes: “I read somewhere that you should submit your sitemap every month. When you provide an XML URL, isn’t it just that – a URL and therefore updates are always in place? I’m using RankMath which generates my XML file. It didn’t seem … Read more
As the web grows, more and more enterprises are now looking to SEO to help provide insights into how users interact with search engines and how they (and other sites) communicate autonomously. This article highlights four trends and ways for Enterprise SEO marketers to stay ahead of change and the evolution of the web. In … Read more
Does it seem harder to attract new customers lately? Ecommerce is filled with so many incredible opportunities, yet there is so much competition. The good news – we know it’s possible to thrive! Large ecommerce sites are doing it – you’ve seen the proof. Successful, large ecommerce companies approach their SEO in a way that … Read more
1. Toxic Backlinks Are From Spammy Sites Most people are smart enough to know a Nigerian prince doesn’t really want to give them $10 million, but are you just as smart when it comes to noticing spammy backlinks? There are entire websites dedicated to selling illegal or irrelevant products and these sites are usually packed … Read more
A huge part of the link building process is outreach. This is the step where you approach other websites and see if they will link to you. They may link to you for a range of reasons such as you’ve created a great piece of content or you’ve told them about a broken link and … Read more
What if we said you could use the power of search intent for more than just getting visitors to your site? Traditional search intent tells us how people are searching on Google – but it can also tell you how users are searching on your site and what they want to do now that they … Read more
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are major priorities for organizations in 2022. But DEI has to be more than just a buzz term – and it needs to happen at every level of the organization, starting at the top. McKinsey finds that those companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams are 25% … Read more
Today’s Ask an SEO question comes from Aswin from Silver Spring, USA, who asks: “Hi, I am a beginner SEO with basic knowledge. I am doing SEO for a startup car rentals company. I thought I should start with off-page SEO rather than on-page and started trying to acquire backlinks. However because the company is … Read more
Anyone who has done SEO for a period of time has heard the myth of Google’s 200+ ranking factors. To be fair, the 200 number may have been somewhat accurate, when first mentioned by former Googler Matt Cutts, over a decade ago. A lot has changed since then, and it’s unlikely that anyone knows the … Read more
Google’s John Mueller discussed various scenarios of how the page experience ranking factors did and did not influence rankings. He didn’t downplay Core Web Vitals (CWV) as a ranking factor but rather he added context for the kinds of situations where the Page Experience ranking factor makes a difference and examples of why it would … Read more
There are multiple ways to redirect a webpage or an entire website, the two main ways being either a 301 or 302 HTTP response code. Choosing the right one for the appropriate situation is important for SEO because it sends a signal to Google about how to respond to the redirected webpage, including whether to … Read more
