Google has launched some new websites that are essentially shortcuts for starting a new Google doc. Instead of going to Google Drive to create a new spreadsheet, slide, document, or form, you can use a .NEW domain name to immediately create one. For example, if you type sheet.new into your web browser, it will create a new spreadsheet in Google Docs. Here are the new domains that will create new docs: [Read more…]
Based on some photos that my friend Daniel posted today, it appears that Google has quietly opened (expanded?) up a Dallas, Texas area office. As you might recall, Google has had offices in the Dallas area previously, and it has been years since Google had an office in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. With the amount of business that I know Google has been receiving from Dallas-area businesses over the years, I’m surprised that Google hasn’t officially had an office here. Google closed their Dallas office 10 years ago, in 2008. [Read more…]
It’s not that often that you see a server error on Google’s search results. For the past hour or so, if you search Google for the keyword phrase “compare the market”, you’ll see a server error. [Read more…]
That’s a really good question. Does Google have a date problem? Well, Garry Illyes (@methode on Twitter) tweeted, kind of admitting that he doesn’t like dates. That was back on September 5th, and looking at that tweet, and knowing what he’s really referring to, yes, it appears that Google still has a date problem. [Read more…]
Note: Don’t always believe everything is posted on Twitter, or any other social media website. In this case, DejanSEO and John Mueller from Google were joking about rogue bots and cloaking. Parts of this post have been edited.
There was a recent Tweet from DejanSEO to John Mueller from Google about technical SEO. Apparently DejanSEO has rogue crawlers that disobey his robots.txt file. They crawl the website even though the robots.txt file says that they can’t crawl the website. Dan Petrovic asked John how to deal with rogue crawlers. [Read more…]
Google recently renamed Google AdWords to Google Ads recently. Today, when you go to the former Google AdWords page, which was https://adwords.google.com, it redirects you to the new Google Ads page, which is https://ads.google.com/home/. This makes sense, as Google AdWords is now Google Ads. [Read more…]
For certain search queries, Google is suggesting HTTP URLs over the preferred HTTPs URLs in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Certain search queries, such as when an HTTPs URL is put in the search box, will prompt Google to ask if the searcher meant the HTTP URL instead. With all of Google’s emphasis on HTTPs, and moving your site from an HTTP URL to an HTTPs URL, does it makes sense for Google to recommend an HTTP URL instead of an HTTPs URL? [Read more…]
I don’t take negative SEO lightly–it’s something that is certainly something that can be difficult to deal with and identify if your website is the victim of a negative SEO attack. In the past week, I’ve had several different people I know tell me about the same issue they’re having. They all have had the same thing happen to them: someone supposedly reported their website as having malware. But, their websites do not have malware. Google apparently has flagged the websites with a malware-like notice in the search results, and notified the website owners of the malware in Google Search Console. [Read more…]
According to Google, this Tweet above is a video.
According to Google, tweets that contain animated GIFs (very short videos, usually a few seconds long) are considered to be videos. In the search results, Google is showing a Tweet from someone. That Tweet, along some of the replies to it, contain animated GIFs. Google is listing that tweet as a video in the organic search results. I typically don’t think of animated GIFs as being videos, let alone Tweets that contain animated GIFs. This is new to me. [Read more…]
Google has had enough when it comes to the Google My Business scammers. They’re taking legal action against Kydia Inc. d/b/a BeyondMenu, Point Break Media, LLC (and affiliated entities), and Supreme Marketing Group, Inc. d/b/a Small Business Solutions. There have a been a lot of complaints that businesses get calls from these scammers, claiming to be Google or Google representatives, threatening that their Google listing will be removed or taken down if they don’t pay a fee. [Read more…]
Occasionally we all have something go awry with our websites. It could be something related to not closing a tag properly on your site, something wrong with the website’s .CSS file, or even a WordPress plugin that’s causing something else not to load properly or render properly on your website. On my own website(s), I try to make sure that whenever I make an update or write a new post I manually check it to make sure that it looks OK. Sometimes, though, you come across an error or website issue on even the largest, most important websites. [Read more…]
There have been three major flaws and exploits of the Google search algorithms recently, and they all involve negative SEO. The problem is that all of these three exploits (bugs or holes) in Google’s organic search algorithms allows others to attack a website, causing severe search engine ranking drops, and a loss of business. If you’re a business whose website has been attacked by one of these exploits in Google’s algorithms, there currently is no easy recourse to “recover” from such an attack. Google’s not providing a way to recover from negative SEO attacks, and one Google rep even went as far as stating that it “can take up to a year” for it to all be straightened out. [Read more…]
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…]
Google has officially rolled out AI (Artificial Intelligence) auto ads for publishers in their Google AdSense program. The AdSense auto ads look at the web page, figure out where AdSense ads can be placed, and automatically insert the ads on the page. Google AdSense Auto ads use machine learning and artificial intelligence to make smart placement and monetization decisions on behalf of the publisher. [Read more…]
How did the Google Chrome web browser get a name like Chrome? Well, according to Glen Murphy, a Design Lead for Google Chrome, one of the leads on the Google Chrome project decided on the name. [Read more…]