In a long dispute between Google and the State of Mississippi’s Attorney General Jim Hood, Google’s most recent request for a rehearing has been denied. The Times Standard reported back in April that the appeals court had overturned a ruling against the Stage of Mississippi. Google has appealed that ruling, which has now been denied. [Read more…]

Google Search Console’s Search Analytics feature, the feature that allows you to see the keywords, impressions, clicks, and average position of your website’s pages, has not been updated since May 3, 2016. Usually, Google allows verified website owners to see their search query data up to the past two days (the data is delayed two days). However, this week, the Google Search Console Search Analytics data has not been updated since May 3, 2016. [Read more…]

Google is showing multiple domain names in its search results when the site: command is used if domains pointing to the main domain include the canonical tag. Let me explain by giving you an example. [Read more…]

In the Google search results, I’m still seeing some alternative characters show up at the beginning of the title tags in some results. Looks like the cases I have come across are all search engine spam results, but the fact that these characters are even being allowed is a mystery to me. Let’s look at an example: [Read more…]

Google has added a share button to knowledge graph entries to encourage us to search more at Google. Whenever you search using a desktop (not mobile) device, and you see a knowledge graph entry on the right side of the search results, Google is displaying a share button, like this: [Read more…]

Google’s organic search engine algorithm is made up of a lot of different search engine ranking factors. When it comes to certain search queries, not all of those search engine ranking factors are applied. In other words, Google may apply certain parts of their algorithm to certain keyword queries and might disregard other parts for other keywords. In a recent post at the SEM Post, one Google employee indirectly verified that this is the case. [Read more…]

A while back I wrote about my utter frustration with Google and their Change of Address Tool. I wrote about how their Change of Address Tool is broken. Well, honestly, I’m still frustrated. After 3 months, it’s still broken. [Read more…]

I don’t recall anytime recently when Google showed such a horrible, misguided, completely wrong search result lately. I am stunned that Google would even possibly show a result such as this. Or, perhaps this is a sign of yet another change to Google’s search engine algorithm? [Read more…]

Uh oh, Google just announced that a new mobile-friendly update is coming in May 2016. And, as such, I’m going to personally be the first one to call this Mobilegeddon II. Not because of the fact that the first mobile friendly update back in April 2015 was catastrophic–just because this is the second mobile friendly update for Google that they’ve announced ahead of time, and, well, the first one was called Mobilegeddon. [Read more…]

Adding Google AdSense to your website hurts the mobile user experience on your website and violates Google’s own suggested guidelines.

I have been working on my own site, this site, to optimize it for page load speed. Using Google’s own Pagespeed Insights tool, I found that there is one particular section of the results, under User Experience, that gave me a score of 99 out of 100. That problem is Google AdSense. [Read more…]

About a day after I made my website Google AMP compatible, I am now seeing data in Google Search Console for Accelerated Mobile Pages. Turns out that the official WordPress Plugin, for some reason, is generating errors, though. Let’s take a look at the errors that are generated, and see if there is a way to fix them. [Read more…]

We just got word that Google’s AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) project is live. That means that if your website can serve up Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) versions of your content then you will probably see more traffic from mobile. Google will be encouraged to show your site more often in the mobile search results. So, how do you make your WordPress site compatible? Well, luckily there’s a WordPress Plugin for that! Here’s how to make your WordPress Site Google AMP compatible. [Read more…]

Well, this is disappointing. Either that, or the person reviewing the suggested changes I had to a spammy listing on Google Maps isn’t doing their job. I recently made a suggestion to what I consider a VERY spammy listing in Google Maps, which appears to violate a several of their guidelines. And even though I submitted a recommendation or edit, it was apparently reviewed. However, it got even worse, and still violates Google’s guidelines for keyword stuffed Google Maps listings. [Read more…]

Last week, I wrote about Google allowing those who have knowledge graph entries about themselves or official representatives of a knowledge graph entry to request an update. As you may recall, if you’re logged into Google you’ll typically see something like this: [Read more…]

I have run across some confusion recently about the Google Change of Address Tool, which I wrote about recently. While the Change of Address tool is still broken in my opinion, it’s important to note that the tool is only really meant for moving from one domain name to another. [Read more…]

It looks to me like Google has, just recently, remove the link: search operator on Google. If you search for any website’s links using Google, there aren’t any search results. So, for example, a search for link:google.com shows no results: [Read more…]

The Google search results of a search query for my name shows information from the Knowledge Graph or Knowledge Base of data. I know that this data was originally pulled from Freebase, as I entered it several years ago when I was very active in editing and adding data to Freebase. I regularly monitor the search results for my name. Today, Google started asking me if the data if the info was up-to-date and if I had any suggestions. This is new, at least for me. Take a look at what this looks like: [Read more…]

Let’s think about Google’s current product offerings, what services they are offer us as business owners, online merchants, and website owners. You can submit your website to get crawled, but you can also pay for inclusion. Over the years, Google says that it’s free to get listed. But really, is it? You can get included, but the options are very limited. It seems as though that Google just won’t send you a lot of traffic to your website unless you pay for it. Is Google quietly embracing paid inclusion? [Read more…]

Google will soon publicly use the Google Chrome browser to give unsecure websites a Scarlet Letter. When visitors use Chrome to visit an unsecure website, it will be very clear that the site is unsecure. The site will be marked with a red X mark whereas a secure website will show a lock symbol. [Read more…]