A recent Google News audit shows that the top 3 news outlets, CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, is favored by Google in their results a lot of the time. According to the audit, the top 20 percent (136 of 678 news sites) accounted for 86 percent of article impressions overall. Furthermore, “62.4 percent of article impressions were from sources rated by that research as left-leaning, whereas 11.3 percent were from sources rated as right-leaning. 26.3 percent of impressions were from news sources that didn’t have ratings”, according to CJR. [Read more…]

From time to time, people come across various exploits, holes, or problems with sites or services. Google’s not immune to such occurrences, just like a lot of other sites out there. Certainly Google’s had its issues in the past, and I’ve pointed out a few of them out in the past. I honestly haven’t heard a lot about Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) issues lately, which is a good thing. But a blogger named Josh wrote about an interesting Google Ads exploit that he and his Aunt Sue discovered. [Read more…]

Can links from a social media website, such as Reddit, cause a website to get a manual action penalty from Google? Well, according to the example links provided to a site owner recently, they can. Links from the website Reddit.com were provided as examples of unnatural links to a website by Google, which apparently was at least partly responsible for the unnatural links penalty given. [Read more…]

There are times when Google’s search results are wrong. Really wrong. So wrong that you start to question whether or not you should even rely on Google’s search results for information. Case in point: When you ask Google how many legs a horse has, it says that a horse has six legs. [Read more…]

Today I learned that Google will index a domain name that has not been registered. Ever. As in no one has ever registered the domain name, the domain name is available for registration by anyone, and someone could register it if they met the requirements by the domain name registrar. This one has me shaking my head a bit. This is a perfect example of Google going overboard in their crawling and indexing, and their policy of insisting to index (and potentially rank) web pages whose owners have specifically told them not to. But with all of the recent deindexing issues and the fact that Google has been dropping pages out of the index, them indexing domains that aren’t even registered is concerning to me. [Read more…]

We knew this was coming, and we even were told via popup messages in Google Search Console. I knew the end was coming. March 28, 2019 was the date that Google’s Fetch as Google tool would be removed from Google Search Console. Now I can confirm that Google Fetch and Render has officially been removed from Google Search Console. [Read more…]