Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

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

Does it matter how deep your subfolder URL structure is for SEO purposes and Google rankings? No, not really. John Mueller of Google said even recently on Twitter “I don’t…

How many times are you on client calls or meetings and then your Google Assistant device goes off. Then you scramble to say “hey Google — stop.” Well, now all…

Google has often said that if they shared the full details of how its search algorithms and ranking factors would work, it would lead to abuse and poorer quality results….

Lily Ray asked John Mueller of Google if the product reviews update work also for reviews of places or things. For example, think about comparing universities, online courses, vacation locations,…

Surprise, surprise – Google has decided to drop FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts), its cookie alternative, with something called Topics API. The Topics API will use browsing topics into 300…

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

Google has confirmed it is officially testing placing emojis in some search ads. Darcy Burk spotted a pizza emoji on a search ad for Uber Eats and posted the screenshot…

Last week we broke the news that Google does some form of deduplication of the top stories and web results in some situations. John Shehata released some data from his…

Chris Tweten posted a photo the other day on Twitter of a dental office sign with its company name – the company name is named “Dentist Near Me.” Of course,…

Brodie Clark posted a Twitter poll asking “is optimizing a website for search term variations that include “near me” good practice for SEO?” The results were pretty almost evenly split…

Google generally likes you to stick with one language per page, that isn’t to say you cannot use different pages throughout your site with different languages. But if you do…

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…

In part one Riley Hope and I spoke about her SEO career, how she did her thesis on ethics in SEO and we spoke about the automotive SEO space. In…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if there is a way to better control the images that Google shows in the web search results for product results. The answer is not…

Google has announced a brand new robots tag it will obey going forward, it is named indexifembedded. It lets you control if you want Google to index a page with…

I am not going to get into the 301 vs 302 redirect debate, covered that countless times here. But I found an interesting conversation on Twitter about the differences between…

Google on Friday sent out emails to those who have recorded videos for Cameos on Google that they are discontinuing the service. “Beginning February 17, 2022, you will no longer…

Google sent emails to YouTube publishers that their YouTube AdSense payments will be separated from their other AdSense payments. So if you get paid through Google AdSense for AdSense ads…

Again I am seeing signals, both a lot of chatter from the SEO community and tools lighting up around a possible but yet unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update. Yes,…

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

The Federal Vampire & Zombie Agency is no longer showing up in Google Search, is it some sort of conspiracy or technical bug? Well, it is a technical issue with…

In this show we got everything for you from creepy crawling to blood sucking vampires and and walking zombies. First, we had a few unconfirmed Google search algorithm updates this…

Everyone panic – Google might not just make larger updates to the Google Webmaster Guidelines but also rename the guidelines. Gary Illyes from Google said over time the Webmaster Guidelines…

Google has updated its product structured data help documents to say that you need both product and car structured in order for Google to display ratings and review snippets in…

Google’s Gary Illyes said on the last Search Off The Record Podcast that Google in 2022 is looking to make crawling more efficient and environmentally friendly. And while Google is…

Google is rolling out a new Google Ads experiments page that promises to “help you create, manage, and optimize your experiments in one place.” There is a new summary page…

Google Ads confirmed some sort of bug with Discovery and Performance Max campaigns that are a “significant subset of users.” It is unclear what this bug is, but it started…

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

As you all know, I have been with Search Engine Land and SMX since the company was founded and the company has been through many changes over the past dozen…

Google’s John Mueller said in an SEO hangout last Friday that it is impossible for Google to understand that one piece of content is equivalent to another piece of content…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that “anecdotally, it feels like we’re already doing much better with getting languages & location right, even without hreflang or geotargeting settings.” This was…

Google has been busy over the last couple of weeks after being taking a bit of a break with the new years. It seems we are seeing again signs of…

Ben Fisher spotted an update to the Google Local Service ads help documents around the screening and verification process for businesses. Google added a section that says businesses can request…

Google’s John Mueller said again that a spike in crawling activity on your site is unrelated to an upcoming search ranking algorithm update. John Mueller said on Twitter “it’s unrelated”…

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 no longer supports time ranges for cook prep and total times times within recipe schema markup and structured data. Google said it removed the “guidance about specifying a range…

Glenn Gabe noted that he is seeing some weird Google Googlebot activity recently, saying he is seeing “crawling spike across a number of sites” that started on January 12th through…

John Mueller is out with another #AskGooglebot Google SEO video, this one is on site migrations and URL changes. It is a short two minute video on one of the…

Google’s Danny Sullivan and John Mueller both said that the search company does not generally launch or begin the rollout of a search algorithm update right before the weekend. Danny…

We know Google has deduplication efforts for when a featured snippet is displayed so that it might remove the snippet from the main web results. Google may do the same,…

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 Maps, the map interface, is testing displaying review snippets, short selected reviews, directly under the name of the business or organization in the map interface under the pin. This…

Google’s John Mueller confirmed that the search company’s 2014 guidance with faceted navigation remains true today – do not use non-standard URL encoding. That means do not use commas, brackets…

As promised, Google has released the desktop version of the page experience report in Google Search Console. The desktop version is pretty similar to the mobile version, as you’d expect….

With Google’s new effort to get business owners to manage their business listing in web search and not in the Google Business Profile manager, formerly Google My Business, Google is…

The other day I wrote about how Google said fluff content is hard for search engines to understand and thus rank. I explained how Google does rank content that is…

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. There may be…

Google’s John Mueller posted one of those PSA tweets this morning asking hosting companies that trigger robot detection interstitials to not use a 200 status code. John also said not…

In part one Riley Hope and I spoke about her SEO career, how she did her thesis on ethics in SEO and we spoke about the automotive SEO space. In…

Friday and Saturday, January 14th and 15th there may have been another unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update. This comes a few days after the unconfirmed January 11th update. There…

Google’s Ginny Marvin via the AdsLiaison account on Twitter confirmed that target CPA, tCPA, is not being cancelled in 2022. She wrote “we have no plans to sunset tCPA in…

Google’s John Mueller was asked a series of questions around the product reviews update on last Friday’s video hangout. In short, it will expand to other languages and countries, it…

Google is testing a new layout for location packs that show things to do, airports and transit stops based on the location you are looking at. This is Google mobile…

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…

A Twitter poll with over 1,320 votes shows that 90% of SEOs are vaccinated. Well, at least 90% of the SEOs who took the poll are vaccinated. Although, I’d think…

Microsoft Bing is testing placing the related searches list on the left side of the search results page. Normally, Microsoft places these related searches on the right side of the…

We had our first unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update of the 2022 year…

Most SEOs often look at titles tags when browsing web sites, I mean, I do, while the average person does not. So you’ve probably seen numbers in the tab bar…

When IndexNow was first announced by Microsoft Bing in October, it was not yet at a point where the participating search engines we co-sharing URLs – but that is no…

Steve Plimmer posted a screenshot from the Google Ads console’s change history log showing how Google has named the RSAs, response search ads, versatile text ads. It makes you wonder…

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

Aleyda Solis posted a Twitter poll asking “in what area do you expect to allocate more resources/efforts in SEO this year?” She said you should base it on what you…

Google has been pushing the limits of its user interfaces in the local search results in web search and some of the other filters. I don’t know or even think…

Google’s John Mueller the other day said on Twitter the example given to him was “less about duplicate content, and more about fluff.” He said when it comes to fluff…

Google’s John Mueller posted a short post on Twitter that needs to be highlighted. He said “the quality raters guidelines are not guidelines for SEOs though.” We often forget that,…

Google is putting new Google Business Profile owners and managers into a sandbox, penalty box or a waiting room for seven-days before they can manage all of the features in…

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. We now have…

It is probably not the best advice to block slow countries or regions with the goal of improving your Google search rankings. Yes, Google has a page experience algorithm that…

Alan Kent from Google posted an “informal poll” on Twitter asking SEOs “how confident are you in giving advice or planning strategies for Google Discover?” The poll only had 161…

There may have been a Google search ranking algorithm update on January 11, 2022. This would be the first real unconfirmed update for the 2022 year. I am seeing both…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter “disavow the whole domain if you know there’s an issue with some of its links.” He said there is “no need to be exact…

In the most recent Search Off The Record podcast, John Mueller, Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt debate about if and what they should share when it comes to the Google…

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

This is just a reminder that the Google Page Experience Update for desktop pages is coming to a Google search ranking algorithm soon. Well, technically it is coming next month…

Did you know that your local campaigns in Google Ads can now be scheduled to turn on or off on certain days or time of the day? Anders Hjorth posted…

Google Ads has a new scaled ad auditing tool set of code you can download at GitHub and use in your own software systems for managing your ads. The Disapproved…

Google is testing displaying web stories in place of YouTube videos for searches on NFL games. Personally, I still see the YouTube videos but some folks, like NFL enthusiast Mordy…

Danny Sullivan of Google confirmed on Twitter that there is or was a backlog of manual actions issued by Google. Google has been slow and delayed in responding to those…

Google said it is okay to ignore toxic links that some tools are reporting but why? Well, we know that for a link to be counted by Google the page…

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. Many SEOs said…

Riley Hope came to visit me at my office in October to talk SEO. Riley started in SEO by doing unpaid internships for non-profits after high school…

Google is testing a new trending videos section in the mobile search results. This one was spotted by Khushal Bherwani and he posted a video cast of a list of…

Tim Soulo from ahrefs posted a Twitter poll asking will you pay money to get links in 2022? Sadly, someone spammed the poll but I recreated it and it clearly…

Google’s John Mueller said you can ignore threats and blackmail emails from people who demand do-follow links. John said on Reddit when asked about these threats “ignore it, it’s just…

Google Ads, as of this past Saturday, January 8, 2022, is allowing certified and state-licensed entities in New York to run ads for sports betting. This was previously disallowed but…