Google is shutting down the goo.gl short URL service called the Google URL Shortener, and replacing it with Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL). Here’s what you need to know about this change: [Read more…]

Google’s John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst and Developer Advocate, is responsible for connecting the internal search engineering teams with the real world outside of Google. That means that he responds to questions on Twitter that SEOs and others have. Today, though, he was kind enough to do an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit. The technical SEO subreddit on Reddit is technical and development focused. So, those were the questions that he responded to first. He took an hour to answer the questions. [Read more…]

Google has just announced that the Mobile First indexing is officially rolling out. What is Mobile First and why should you care? Well, traditionally Google has based their crawling, indexing, and ranking on the desktop or laptop version of your web site. But now, that’s changing. And it’s going to have an effect on your web site, it’s rankings, and your web site traffic. Here’s what you need to know. [Read more…]

The past few days, I’ve been seeing what I can only describe as a glitch in Google’s site search operator. When you search for all of the pages in a web site using the site: search operator, Google normally shows you the pages that they have indexed. They have an estimate of the number of pages (which can be way off) but nonetheless it’s there. [Read more…]

As an experiment of sorts, I decided to delete and completely removed the disavow file that I had uploaded to Google’s Disavow Tool. For the past several years, on an off (about every 3 months or so), I have been reviewing the backlinks to this website, BillHartzer.com, and disavowing links to the site. When disavowing links, I would sometimes see some good results–but nothing to write home about. Nothing that would make the website suddenly rank really well for the keywords I’m targeting on this website. But nothing negative would happen, as well–the site didn’t generally lose any search engine rankings or traffic from organic search. That’s kind of expected, though. [Read more…]

Google, LLC lost their appeal of two final written decisions of the United States Patent and Trademark Office Patent Trial and Appeal Board involving the way banner ads are cached. One of the arguments was that one of the patents did not reference blockable versus un-blockable URL requests. [Read more…]