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…]