Summary: From Maccabees to celebrities to doorways to affiliates, Google took it all on in December of 2017. There were several dates leading up to the holidays with significant movement from an algorithm update standpoint, including December 5, December 12, December 15, December 18, and December 26 (with possible connections between some of those updates). … Read more
This is NOT a normal post for me to publish, but I wanted to quickly document what I’m seeing. I’m in the middle of heavily analyzing some larger algorithm updates that occurred in December (there were several), and I came across a very interesting situation. I noticed that some celebrities aren’t ranking anymore for their … Read more
In October of 2016, Google announced its plan to move to a mobile-first index. Gary Illyes first explained this at Pubcon and then Google officially published a blog post covering the subject. It’s an important move and a 180 for search. Until now, Google has used the desktop URLs and content for ranking purposes, even for mobile rankings. … Read more
I’ve written about Murphy’s Law for SEO before, and it’s scary as heck. And that’s especially the case for large-scale websites with many moving parts. Murphy’s law is an old adage that says, “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” For example, no matter how much you plan and prep for large-scale SEO changes, … Read more
Google’s quality algorithms are always at work. And Google’s John Mueller has explained a number of times that if you are seeing a decrease in rankings during algorithm updates, and over the long-term, then it could mean that Google’s quality algorithms might not be convinced that your site is the best possible result for users. … Read more
Google has been busy, that’s for sure. Since the August 19 update, we’ve seen a number of significant updates causing serious volatility in the SERPs. Sure, Google pushes many updates per year, typically between 1,000 and 1,500 annually, but some are small updates that many don’t even notice. But then there are larger changes that … Read more
While helping companies deal with major algorithm updates, I tend to field a lot of questions. For example, marketing teams, developers, designers, and even c-level executives tend to pepper me with questions about quality updates, Panda, and other disturbances in the Google force. When answering questions about topics like these, it’s great to respond with … Read more
Nothing says “end of summer” like fading tans, empty propane tanks, sunscreen aversion, and… a fresh quality update. Yes, here we go again… As I mentioned in my post about the May 17, 2017 update, Google seems to be pushing quality updates almost monthly now (refreshing its quality algorithms). That’s great if you are looking to … Read more
If you have been following my posts over the past few years, then you know I’ve heavily tracked Google featured snippets. They are fascinating to me, take up a large chunk of real estate in the SERPs, and can drive a ton of traffic. You can read my previous posts about featured snippets to learn … Read more
I can see you, and now you can see me. :) A few months ago, Dan Sharp from Screaming Frog wrote a killer post about how to use fetch and render in Google Search Console (GSC) on almost any site. Fetch and render in GSC enables you see how Googlebot is rendering any page on … Read more
When performing SEO audits, it’s not unusual to surface pages being noindexed that also contain rel canonical. And that setup does’t make sense. Using the meta robots tag or x-robots-tag with noindex tells the engines to not index the page, while rel canonical tells the engines which is the preferred url for indexing. You can … Read more
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