In a recent Search Engine Land article, Patrick Stox explains what HTTP/2 is, and what it means for SEOs. After all, Google has publicly stated that their search engine crawler, called Googlebot, is going to be supporting HTTP/2 soon. As you might recall, I moved this website to HTTPs a few days after Google announced […]

Someone is sending out email notices to domain name owners, telling them that their domain name has been suspended for “violation of the Google Inc. Abuse Policy”. The email then states that your website has been suspended. It appears to be a domain suspension notice from Google But it’s not.

While I was looking at the search results for the title tag of a post that I recently posted today, I noticed that Google’s grammar is less than to be desired. You’d think with all those PhDs at Google the grammar would be better. Dear Google, please fix the bad grammar in your search results […]

The problematic website Ripoff Report has been completely removed from the Google Index. Based on a Google search for site:ripoffreport.com, I can now confirm that RipoffReport.com has been removed. See the screen capture below:

Google has been very aggressive about sending out warnings in Google Search Console that says that your site is blocking CSS and JavaScript files on your site. Today I received a warning message from Google regarding my site’s blocking of CSS and JavaScript files. But when I first looked at the message, I thought that […]

I was searching and looking through the SERPs of some of the people I hung out with last week at SMX Advanced in Seattle. I noticed a rather odd thing showing up in the search results for David Iwanow, where the word “none” is showing up several times in the SERPs (search results pages). Take […]

Updated March 26, 2025. May is small business month, so as a follow-up to a blog post I wrote recently, I tracked this small business owner, Ira Zoot, the former owner of TicketStub.com, and interviewed him. Mr. Zoot originally claimed that he, as a small business owner, has been crushed by Google. He’s been only […]

An interesting post was written by a small business owner, sharing his experience about being crushed by Google. In the article, he claims that after working hard for 12 years building his online business, Google reduced the site’s traffic from 2000 visitors a day to a few hundred a day: all without warning.

In Google Webmaster Tools, Google is reporting Bing’s search result URLs as actual backlinks to a website. Google has as history of sometimes making a mistake and indexing Bing’s search results, like I found a while back. But this is the first time that I have seen that Google is actually telling webmasters that there […]

I am not sure if anyone has noticed, but today I was looking through the search results and am seeing a new tag in the search results called “April Fool’s Prank”. This appears to be similar to the “Mobile Friendly” tag, whereas Google is flagging certain sites that are “mobile friendly.” Here is a screen […]

The Not Provided keywords are NOT being expanded to Google Webmaster Tools. In only what I can call an “April Fools prank posted days before April Fools”, Search Engine Watch posted this article that says that Google is expanding the Not Provided keywords to Google Webmaster Tools, taking away even more keyword data from site […]

Well, um, this is embarrassing. Especially at a time when Google is pushing the mobile version of websites, wanting all of us to make sure that our websites are mobile friendly by April 21st. A recent search this morning revealed that the mobile version of Google.com is ranking well in Google’s own search results. I […]

I was just granted access to the new Google Webmaster Tools Search Impact report, which is going to be available in Google Webmaster Tools. The Search Impact report is currently in Alpha (not even in Beta yet), but it offers a lot more insight into what’s going on with your website. If you’ve been granted […]

If you are using structured data on your website, or marking up your website’s code using schema.org code, it could ultimately cost you page views and visits from Google. By allowing marking using structured data on your website, you are allowing Google to use the data in any way they see fit–and Google is taking […]

Google recently released a new tool for website owners called CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA. Google claims that if a site owner uses their CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA tool, it will be able to distinguish between a human and a bot:

According to a Google Plus post today, Freebase is shutting down, and will no longer be available after March 2015. The current Freebase data will be ported over into WikiData.

Google has removed the Google Carousel from the search results. A search for keyword phrases such as Dallas Hotels, Chicago Hotels, and New York Hotels, popular searches that previously showed the Google Carousel, now shows a different type of search result, which is similar to the traditional map pack. This has been phased out, and […]

Google has decided to shut down its operations in Spain, and will no longer include any Spanish publishers in Google News. Google’s reasoning behind this is the new Spanish law that requires every Spanish publication to charge services like Google News for showing even the smallest snippet from their publications, whether they want to or […]

While searching Google today for a random search query, I noticed that the first search result was kind of odd. The Instragram post was a travel photo and it had nothing to do with the query that I just searched for. But that’s actually what didn’t surprise me. I’m not surprised by Google showing off-topic […]

Google has started displaying new mobile friendly tag in the search results to show which sites are mobile-friendly and which sites are not. So, if your site is mobile-friendly, and someone is searching on a mobile device, and your site shows up in the search results, it will get a special tag in the search […]

Google just updated or “refreshed” the knowledge graph data within the past 24 hours. I have knowledge graph data showing up for a search for my name, Bill Hartzer, and I’ve been constantly watching the data, as it was previously incorrect: and it appears that they just updated the information within the past few hours. […]

The new Inbox by Gmail, launched just recently, does not work with email accounts set up through Google Apps. My company, for example, uses our Gmail accounts for our email. And, I use Gmail even on my phone for email. So, I was kind of excited to try the new Inbox by Gmail. But, when […]

Starting yesterday, Google started showing Knowledge Graph results from Freebase in the search results for my name, Bill Hartzer. What’s interesting to note is that this is the first time that I’ve seen a direct example of Google using Freebase data. We’ve known for quite some time that Google owns Freebase, but for the first […]