Is Google required to list your business or your website in their search engine results? When I mention the word “list”, I am referring to whether they are indexing your website in their search results or whether they are listing your business in the Google Maps listings, for example. Being listed is different than ranking. Let me also explain that this post, and anything in this post (such as comments from others) in no way should be seen as legal advice, as I am not a lawyer and don’t claim to be one. You should always consult the advice of a qualified lawyer or solicitor about your unique situation. If you are a lawyer and would like to make a comment (and I can quote you), get in touch with me and we’ll talk about it. I may update this post. That said, though, let’s get back to the question: Is Google (or Bing or Yahoo!) or any search engine (or website) obligated to list you? [Read more…]

Should Google link out to SEO websites from the official Google Webmaster blog? That’s the question that is a hot topic right now: on the official Google blog, should Google link out to a website that offers search engine optimization or digital marketing services, no matter how good the resource is, and how much it will help website owners. [Read more…]

If you advertise with Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords), does it impact your website’s search engine rankings in Google’s organic search engine results? This question has been one that so many have debated over and over again for years. In fact, I even recall it being discussed back in the early days of Google. Some still, to this day, swear that you’ll get better rankings if you advertise with Google Ads. Let’s put this myth to rest once and for all: advertising with Google (giving them money) essentially has no impact on a website’s organic (natural) search engine rankings. [Read more…]

Google My Business recently rolled out a new feature called Google My Business short names. Each verified Google My Business listing can add a short name, which is essentially a URL link to their Google My Business listing, along with a link to the listing’s reviews. A sample Google My Business is one that I set up recently, which is g.page/hartzer-consulting/, which redirects visitors directly to my company’s Google My Business listing. This is certainly a welcome new feature, as it makes it easier for businesses to promote their Google My Business listings both online and offline. It’s easier to ask for reviews, as well, as g.page/hartzer-consulting/reviews/ redirect directly to reviews for the business. I analyzed these new URLs and redirects, though, and I see a few problems and potential issues. [Read more…]

Pamela Lund on Twitter described this scenario perfectly: “this is a nightmare come true. I cannot imagine waking up to find that in an account. That kind of spend in 1 day with only fake conversions could easily put a client out of business and into bankruptcy.”. Despite the fact that a Google Ads customer had their daily spend set to a maximum $500 per day budget, Google spent $225,000 (two hundred and twenty five thousand dollars) in one day. [Read more…]

Google Calendar is down. As in inaccessible using a web browser. This is actually the first time I’ve personally seen Google Calendar down, at least since I’ve been relying on it more and more–over the past few years. [Read more…]

Update: June 12, 2019 – On June 11, 2019, I reported that AMP was having an issue where users could not click thru to the website where the content originated, as described below. This actually turned out to be a “bug”, and it was not intentional by Google to not allow users to click thru to the website when viewing an AMP page. This has now been fixed, and I do not think it was an intentional change in AMP.

In a recent change to the Google AMP interface, Google is not making it easy for users to click thru to the website where the content originates. In the latest AMP UI changes, it appears that users can only share the AMP URL or page that they’re on–they can’t click thru to the site that created the AMP content. If this is the case, and it very much so appears that it is, then Google has essentially made a change that keeps the users on the Google domain. Google has literally taken the content (even though the site allows them to), they’re serving the site’s content up to users, and Google won’t let the visitors go directly to the site. Of course I could be totally overreacting, but let’s look at an example of this. [Read more…]

A recent major outage of Google Cloud was caused because of a misconfiguration, not only because of network congestion, like Google initially reported. The outage was described by Google as “network congestion issue in eastern USA, affecting Google Cloud, G Suite, and YouTube”. It also caused services such as Shopify, Snapchat, and Discord to go down. Some people reported that they could not control the temperature in their home or apartment through Google Nest. [Read more…]

Do you often wonder what Google knows about you? I mean, how much are they tracking, do they know whether or not you visit certain websites, when you visited them, how long you visited them? If you add in Android and you have a smart phone that uses Google Android, do you know how much data they are collecting about you? [Read more…]

Google’s organic search engine listings can looks like Ads, but they are not actually Google Ads. Instead, the site owner has updated the favicon on their website to display an Ad logo. That Ad logo image similar to the black and white Ad symbol Google currently displays to designate that a search engine result listing is a sponsored Ad. As an experiment, I updated the favicon on this website to display a graphic that I personally created–which looks similar to Google’s Ad graphic they display next to Google Ads. An example of my site appearing in the Google organic search results on a mobile phone is shown below: [Read more…]