Google confirmed an outage in business profile reviews that has resulted in missing reviews for many local business profiles and is working toward fixing the problem. Google Business Profile Google Business Profiles are a way for local businesses to add their business to Google and have it show up in local search and Google Maps. … Read more
Google’s John Mueller shared Jeffrey Zeldman’s Bluesky post reminding publishers and SEOs of proper alt text usage, including a link to the W3C decision tree for guidance. The most important takeaway is that the decision process for alt text is not primarily an SEO decision. The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is an international standards … Read more
Google confirms widespread search indexing delays affecting a “small number” of websites. Google Search is experiencing indexing delays. The company says only a small number of sites are affected and is investigating the root cause. Google will provide an update on the situation soon. Source link
Google’s John Mueller answered a Reddit question about how to lower a website’s spam score. His answer reflected an important insight about third-party spam scores and their relation to how Google ranks websites. What’s A Spam Score? A spam score is the opinion of a third-party tool that reviews data like inbound links and on … Read more
In a recent LinkedIn exchange, Google’s Senior Search Analyst John Mueller confirmed that core algorithm updates impact the search engine’s AI-powered overviews. This info gives us a clearer picture of how AI is being woven into Google’s search results. Responding to a question on LinkedIn, Mueller stated: “These are a part of search, and core … Read more
Researchers analyzed SearchGPT’s responses to queries and identified how it may impact publishers, B2B websites, and e-commerce, discovering key differences between SearchGPT, AI Overviews, and Perplexity. What is SearchGPT? SearchGPT is a prototype natural language search engine created by OpenAI that combines a generative AI model with the most current web data to provide contextually … Read more
Google’s Gary Illyes and Lizzi Sassman discussed three factors that trigger increased Googlebot crawling. While they downplayed the need for constant crawling, they acknowledged there a ways to encourage Googlebot to revisit a website. 1. Impact of High-Quality Content on Crawling Frequency One of the things they talked about was the quality of a website. … Read more
Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed a common observation that robots.txt has limited control over unauthorized access by crawlers. Gary then offered an overview of access controls that all SEOs and website owners should know. Common Argument About Robots.txt Seems like any time the topic of Robots.txt comes up there’s always that one person who has to … Read more
Google’s Gary Illyes answered a question about a ranking preference given to sites that use country level domain names and explained how that compares to non-country domain names. The question occurred in the SEO Office Hours podcast. ccTLD Aka Country Code Domain Names Domain names that are specific to countries are called ccTLDs (Country Code … Read more
New research by enterprise search marketing company BrightEdge reveals dramatic changes to sites surfaced through Google’s AI Overviews search feature and though it maintains search market share, the data shows that AI search engine Perplexity is gaining ground at a remarkable pace. Rapid & Dramatic Changes In AIO Triggers The words that trigger AI Overviews … Read more
Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, has confirmed that the search engine hasn’t launched algorithmic actions targeting site reputation abuse. This clarification addresses speculation within the SEO community that recent traffic drops are related to Google’s previously announced policy update. Sullivan Says No Update Rolled Out Lily Ray, an SEO professional, shared a screenshot on Twitter … Read more
Google’s SearchLiaison confirmed that Google’s site reputation abuse update started on Monday May 6th. Many sites from across the web took down webpages that could be perceived as hosting third-party content for the purpose of ranking in search engines. Site Reputation Abuse An old strategy that’s made a recent comeback is one in which a … Read more
Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed at a recent search marketing conference that Google needs very few links, adding to the growing body of evidence that publishers need to focus on other factors. Gary tweeted confirmation that he indeed say those words. Background Of Links For Ranking Links were discovered in the late 1990’s to be a … Read more
WordPress security researchers at Patchstack published their annual State of WordPress Security whitepaper that showed an increase of high and critical severity vulnerabilities, highlighting the importance of security for all websites on the WordPress platform. XSS Is Top WordPress Vulnerability Of 2023 There are many kinds of vulnerabilities but the most common by far was … Read more
SEO professionals have long discussed the concept of a “crawl budget,” which refers to the limited number of pages search engines can crawl daily. The assumption is that sites must stay within this allotted budget to get pages indexed. In a recent podcast, Google search engineers debunked some misconceptions about crawl budget and shed light … Read more
Google’s filetype search operator went missing early Wednesday morning. Other search operators continue to function. SearchLiaison responds that it must be a bug. Filetype Search Operator The filetype: search operator is a way to search for results that are constrained to specific kinds of files like text, pdf, .doc files and many other kinds of … Read more
Google investigating indexing delays affecting some sites since Monday night, working to identify and resolve root cause. Google confirmed an indexing issue affecting some websites. The issue started around 11:30pm ET Monday night. Google is investigating the root cause and working to fix it. Source link
Recent findings by SEO professionals suggest that Google has recalibrated its local search algorithm, placing more emphasis on a business’s listed hours of operation as a key ranking signal. According to Joy Hawkins of Sterling Sky, the trend became noticeable after the November 2023 core update, leading to businesses that appear as closed being significantly … Read more
