Google’s John Mueller answered whether having two sites could negatively affect search rankings. His answer is surprisingly applicable to different ways of interpreting the question. Can Having Two Sites Affect Rankings? A person submitted a question to Google where they wanted to know if having two sites could negatively affect their rankings. The question as … Read more
Google’s Gary Illyes answered if switching web hosting platforms could result in a negative outcome for rankings and SEO. It’s a reasonable question because migrating a site to a new web host involves multiple technical factors that can go wrong and have an immediately negative effect. What Does Changing A Website Host Entail? Changing web … Read more
Google’s John Mueller answered a question on Reddit about whether showing different content based on IP address of the site visitor affected SEO. His answer offered insights into Google’s crawling and indexing. Showing Banners For Specific Countries The person asking the question managed a website that wanted to show a banner on the side of … Read more
Someone on Reddit posted a question about their “crawl budget” issue and asked if a large number of 301 redirects to 410 error responses were causing Googlebot to exhaust their crawl budget. Google’s John Mueller offered a reason to explain why the Redditor may be experiencing a lackluster crawl pattern and clarified a point about … Read more
Google’s John Mueller answered a question about what happens to the signals associated with syndicated content when Google chooses the partner as the canonical instead of the original content publisher. John’s answer contained helpful information about the murky area of ranking and syndicated content. The question was asked by Lily Ray (@lilyraynyc) on X (formerly … Read more
Google published a video about what to do get Google to automatically re-index an entire website. The answer to the question presumed that the context was a major change to an entire website, necessitating a complete crawl to expedite updating Google’s index. The person asking the question wanted to know if there’s a way to … Read more
Google’s Martin Splitt answered a question about how Googlebot responds to a pre-render meta tag that has the value of 404 page not found. It’s a good question because this is the kind of meta tag, a non-standard meta element, isn’t often encountered so it’s good to know what to do when something like this … Read more
Google’s Gary Illyes answered the question in an Office Hours hangout about whether a double forward slash in a URL has an impact on the SEO for a website. A double forward slash happens for a number of reasons that are often related to a coding issue on the CMS or in the .htaccess file … Read more
Someone on X (formerly Twitter) asked if domain age impacted search rankings. Google’s John Mueller sets the record straight. The person asking the question tweeted: “Does the age of a domain name impact Google search rankings?” SEOs have for a long time noticed that older domain names correlate with top rankings. But correlations are generally … Read more
In a post on X, Google AdsLiaisons answered the top questions about automatically created assets (ACA). Now that automatically-created assets (ACA) for responsive search ads have rolled out in 8 languages, I wanted to answer some FAQs we’ve heard…. — AdsLiaison (@adsliaison) November 20, 2023 Google recently rolled out ACA for Responsive Search Ads (RSA) … Read more
Microsoft announced a new conversational question answering model that outperforms other methods, answering questions faster and accurately while using significantly less resources. What is proposed is a new way to rank passages from content using what they call Generative Retrieval For Conversational Question Answering, which they named GCoQA. The researchers write that the next direction … Read more
As a hiring manager, asking questions like, “What’s the greatest challenge you’ve overcome?” is important to learn about an applicant. But what creative interview questions will help paint a fuller picture of a potential candidate? Imagine you ask your candidate: “If you were a pizza delivery person, how would you benefit from scissors?” The question … Read more
Google’s John Mueller answered a question as to whether the “ARTICLE” semantic HTML element has an impact on Google Search. This is a good question because the use of semantic HTML is generally regarded as a good practice. But does it have an SEO impact on Google Search? What is the HTML Element? The HTML … Read more
Google’s John Mueller answered a question in Reddit about whether it’s okay to no-index a webpage in order to keep it from being shown in the sitelinks. Sitelinks, which are clustered links in the search results from one domain and are are typically shown when someone searches for the name or URL of a website. … Read more
Google’s John Mueller answered the question of why a site with “good SEO” doesn’t rank, even when there’s low competition. His answer might seem controversial at first but his words are worthy of consideration. Good SEO But Lackluster Ranking? There is no one definition of what constitutes good SEO. It’s a subjective judgment call that … Read more
Google’s John Mueller, in an SEO Office Hours session, answered a question about whether the semantic HTML element has an impact on Google. John answered the question directly but there is a fair bit of nuance that was left out of his answer that needs to be addressed. Does the Element Have an Impact on … Read more
It is no secret that social platforms such as TikTok and Facebook raise interesting questions from time to time. The most recent question, “What are the most attractive things men do when in the driving seat” It’s safe to say this one blew up and took the internet by storm. Our team recorded our findings … Read more
Google’s John Mueller answered if it’s a reasonable idea to match the title element to how Google rewrites them in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Someone on Mastodon noticed that Google was changing the title elements on their webpages, most of the time removing the site name from the title. That seem to indicate … Read more
