Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

Google’s John Mueller said in this past Friday’s hangout that in rare situations some sites can get stuck in some sort of algorithmic penalty limbo or black hole state and…

The other day we shared a screenshot of an email of an email notification when a website is no longer in violation of Bing’s webmaster guidelines and thus is no…

Google has once again said that if you see significant changes in your Google search visibility it likely has nothing to do with how fast or slow your site is….

This is a very special vlog, I interviewed the very person who has been editing these videos for the past couple of years, Joseph Goldsmith. And we did it overlooking…

Google has this interesting Christmas looking Doodle on its home page today with the alt tag that says Seasonal Holidays 2021. When you click on it, it goes to a…

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web…

I am sure you’ve all seen websites that have a section on their website for “As Featured On” or something like that, then a carousel or listing of logos from…

Happy Thanksgiving – we had a surprise from Google again, where the second wave of the Google November 2021 core update happened on Wednesday and Thursday – yes, the busiest…

Google’s John Mueller said that semantic HTML is not a quality signal used in Google Search for ranking purposes. An SEO said “Proper HTML semantics and tag hierarchy must be…

Do you want to use the same design theme on multiple websites? Well, Google’s John Mueller said it is fine to do that, in fact, he said many sites do…

A couple of months ago, Google upset the automotive industry by adding more data sets to its search results for automobiles. As a reminder, Google said it licensed that data….

So now that we know that bolding works for SEO and rankings in 2021, we need to start bolding everything. Or maybe we need to be more random about our…

Google has updated the Google Business Profiles Get Reviews help document to explicitly say that having a mix of positive and negative reviews are more trustworthy, than I guess just…

We are seeing big volatility again in the Google Search results as of yesterday and today, which might be the tail-end of the November 2021 Google core update. Yep, talk…

Remember the Google Ads bug where CPC, cost per click, prices soared out of control on a Friday night? Well, about two weeks later, Google started to issue credits to…

Google has another bug, this time with Google Search Console’s crawl stats report. The report has a gap in the data, missing data on November 19th and November 20th. Google’s…

I’ve been checking for the past week, multiple times per day, and just now, Google has launched the Chanukah/Hanukkah decorations for the 2021 season. Chanukah starts this Sunday night, so…

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web…

After several months of testing variations of what Microsoft Bing is calling “Page insights” – it is finally live. The lightbulb and page explorer snippet tool is now live for…

Google Image Search on mobile is testing a new related images carousel feature for image previews. This was spotted by Brian Freiesleben and posted on Twitter yesterday.

Google’s John Mueller confirmed Google had a crawling issue – specifically saying “crawling for the caches had slowed down for some sites.” Google said it was fixed “a while” ago…

Google announced that it is shutting down the AdSense Matched content ad unit types beginning on March 1, 2022. This is due to “decreasing usage of the content promotion service”…

Google Ads posted an update that you a no longer to promote sports betting services or ads in Florida using the Google Ads platform. Google said this is effective as…

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…

Olivier Papon from Seolyzer, a log analysis toolset, reported the other week that Google seemed to slow or stop crawling most of the web between around November 11 and November…

Did you know that the Google Shopping results can show products with $0 prices? That is, I think, if there is a promotion for let’s say a monthly ongoing fee…

Marie Haynes posted a Twitter poll (which I reshared a couple times yesterday) asking what you (mostly SEOs) are seeing five days into the Google November 2021 core update. About…

Google’s John Mueller confirmed that when it comes to sites that host their images (or likely other files) on an external CDN, like we do here, Google will have a…

If you go to Google Search on desktop and type in some local businesses, then click on the first photo in the local knowledge panel – Google will load a…

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…

In part one, Bryan Cush, the co-founder of Tidal Health Group, and I spoke about how to use health data for content and search marketing and in part two we…

In 2013, Google launched its Structured Data Markup Helper tool to help site owners mark up their content with structured data without having to know how to code. Well, the…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that Google Search does not hold a grudge for SEO technical issues you have on your site. When you fix those issues and Google…

This morning at about 5:30am ET, the Google Search Console team rolled out a new facelift and design for Google Search Console. The new design, according to Google’s Daniel Waisberg…

Danny Sullivan, the Search Liaison at Google Search, confirmed there is a bug with the sort by date feature in the Google Search news tab. Danny said on Twitter “if…

Google has added a few new features to the Google Ads mobile app. The new features work on both the iOS and Android app and include that you can see…

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web. Check out the…

What a week – Google actually launched a broad core update days before the big online holiday shopping season – the Google November 2021 core update is live and rolling…

Google added to its help docs an explanation on how to opt out of Google Read Aloud with a meta tag, although the meta tag is not new. Google also…

Google has confirmed a bug with some users not seeing the users and permissions in Google Search Console. There are also complaints about the performance reports being a bit delayed,…

Google is testing adding the Google Lens button in the mobile search results bar. This camera icon, Google Lens logo, would trigger your camera to come up and you can…

So we know Google has manual actions where a site can be impacted in terms of how it ranks in Google Search. Well, Microsoft Bing doesn’t necessarily have manual actions…

How cute is this, Microsoft Bing Search is testing placing this animated snowman next to the Shopping tab under the search bar. I personally cannot replicate this but Frank Sandtmann,…

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web…

Google has published two new help documents around translation. The first is on how Google can automatically translate your search result snippets to a different language. The second is after…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if it is helps after doing a big URL migration to keep the old XML Sitemap file up for a bit. John said “the effect…

As you know, Google started to rollout the November 2021 Core Update yesterday, November 17th at around 11am ET. Below is a recap of the early chatter and data we…

Google has updated its logo structured data markup requirements again, this time to say your logo has to look good on a “purely white background.” So you need to test…

Google has produced a new interactive SEO checklist with “specific things you can do to improve the SEO of your website.” It is interactive in that you can select if…

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web. Google is now…

Right before the big Thanksgiving Black Friday and Cyber Monday holiday season Google decided to flip the switch and roll out a core update. Google just announced that it will…

Yesterday, Google began to rollout the revamped and new PageSpeed Insights at its new home at pagespeed.web.dev. It has a bunch of user interface changes to make the reporting easier…

Last week, I included in my recap a link to a Reddit thread that seems to have got some attention. It has John Mueller of Google saying a site with…

Google said it is now promoting more local news in its search results and news results, including top stories. Google said they would be doing this earlier this year and…

As you know, we are all awaiting the next big Google core algorithm update and while we know it will be coming, we are all wondering if it will come…

Edward Snowden, former computer intelligence consultant who leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency, has said it is a fact that Google Search is “totally unusable” in a…

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…

Google announced that Customer Match is now “widely available” and also a new preview tool to help you figure out errors or issues with using the tool. Google is opening…

Google is testing a new a new video carousel titled “found in video.” If Google can detect that your answer is found in a video it has indexed, Google may…

Google has been placing images and product images in the search results for a while and been testing on and off showing them in the desktop results. But over the…

Not to be outdone by Google, Microsoft’s Fabrice Canel announced that it has published BingBot’s IP addresses in this JSON file. This is in addition to the methods to verify…

Google had added a bunch of Google Maps features today including more Pickup with Google specifically at Krogers, restaurant price ranges, indoor map navigation and how busy venues are in…

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…

In part one, Bryan Cush, the co-founder of Tidal Health Group, and I spoke about how to use health data for content and search marketing and in part two we…

Sites hosted on SiteGround last week found themselves not being crawled by Googlebot, Google’s crawler. The issue seemed to have been an DNS issue between the provider’s partners (AWS) and…

Ever see a chart in your page experience report or core web vitals reports that shows core web vitals data and then doesn’t and then does again? If you do,…

Friday evening, Google Ads had a bug of some sorts that caused the cost per click (CPC) prices to skyrocket on many Shopping Ad campaigns. Google confirmed the issue on…

Google’s John Mueller confirmed again that bolding words and “important points on a paragraph” does help with SEO and rankings. But it is all relative, if you bold everything on…

Google has updated its Google Merchant Center policies to allow the sale and listing of medical tests kits in both the paid and free Google Shopping search results. This includes…

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…

I start off announcing the winner(s) of the Squid Game contest I had last week. Google finished the rollout for the November spam update after 8 days. That Google November…

Google now has the scroll-to-text feature for sitelinks in the Google Search results. Google launched these with featured snippets in 2020 but has been testing it since 2018, and it…

A few days ago in the Black Hat World forums I spotted a thread that I honestly thought was trying to fool me. It showed a screenshot of the Google…

Here is a fun podcast from Googlers John Mueller, Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt on the future of SEO. The group spoke about HTML, JavaScript, web app, structured data, crawling…

It took about eight days for Google to rollout the November spam update. This update targeted content spam efforts that went against Google’s webmaster guidelines. It seemed to have a…

Google added to the help documentation for the logo schema/structured data that you can now use ImageObject type to specify an organization logo. This is in addition to just the…

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web…

Google Ads has a policy that it can immediately and without notice, suspend your Google Ads account, if you violate the Google Webmaster Guidelines. This is not a new policy,…

Google has a legacy Search Console feature to let you limit, or slow down, how fast Google can crawl your site under the crawl rate setting. This feature, as we…

Google has renamed Google My Business to Google Business Profile on November 4th. Starting on November 9th, I saw Google begin to swap out the Google My Business logo with…

Back in 2007, Google came up with a mechanism for SEOs or site owners to verify that Googlebot is who it says it is through reverse DNS checks. But now,…

Google’s John Mueller posted a two minute video answering four SEO related questions on the topics of blocking CSS files, how to update a sitemap, deleting RSS files and reintroducing…

Today is Veterans Day in the United States and to pay respect to the day, a bunch of search engines have special logos or themes up for the day. We…