What does Google say about SEO? /
This category compiles official Google statements regarding Google Discover and Google News, two critical content distribution platforms for publishers. Google Discover has emerged as a significant traffic source, operating on a personalized recommendation model without user queries. Official Google positions on these topics are vital for understanding content selection criteria, eligibility factors, and necessary technical optimizations. SEO professionals will find guidance on E-E-A-T quality requirements, technical specifications including structured data markup, AMP formats, and editorial policy compliance. Google News maintains strict inclusion standards, while Discover prioritizes engagement metrics and contextual relevance. Mastering these official guidelines enables publishers to optimize visibility within these feeds, maximize referral traffic, and align content strategies with recommendation algorithms. These declarations also illuminate algorithm updates specific to these platforms and evolving journalistic standards expected by Google. Understanding the nuances between these two services helps publishers differentiate their optimization approaches and capitalize on opportunities for increased content distribution beyond traditional search results.
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★★★ Should You Include a Date in Your Web Page URLs for Better SEO?
Google's webmaster Twitter account explained that including a date in web page URLs does not pose any problems....
Google Sep 30, 2019
★★★ Does Paying for Google Ads Give You Access to Privileged SEO Support?
Danny Sullivan reminded on Twitter that Google does not provide "SEO support based on business relationships (Editor's note: for Google Ads customers). It would be unfair to those who don't advertise....
Danny Sullivan May 13, 2019
★★ Should You Really Add Text Content Below Product Listings in E-commerce?
John Mueller explained during a hangout that adding a block of text below product listing pages on an e-commerce site, while only displaying the category name in H1 above the list, was not necessarily...
John Mueller Mar 11, 2019
★★★ Should You Really Worry About Toxic Links and Negative SEO?
When a user complained about a Negative SEO attack from one of their competitors, John Mueller responded on Twitter that they didn't need to do anything special because Google's algorithms ignore toxi...
John Mueller Feb 25, 2019
★★★ Will Google refuse to index your content if too many pages already cover the same topic?
John Mueller explained on Twitter that Google crawls and indexes content on a given topic, even if the search engine already has numerous pages covering this topic extensively in its index. No matter ...
John Mueller Dec 31, 2018
★★★ Did Your News Site Temporarily Disappear from Google News?
Google News recently experienced some indexing issues with certain sites, which were no longer appearing in search results. Googler Lisa Wang indicated that the bug has now been fixed and that the sea...
Google Nov 19, 2018
★★★ Is Mobile First Indexing Really Behind Google's Recent Search Result Fluctuations?
John Mueller explained on Twitter that the latest major changes and Google algorithm updates we've seen over the past several months, even weeks, were not related to Mobile First Indexing....
John Mueller Oct 15, 2018
★★★ Should You Drop Standout and Editors' Picks Tags for Google News?
Google has indicated that, as part of the launch of the new version of Google News, the Editors' Picks feed and the Standout HTML tag - which allowed highlighting certain articles considered to be of ...
Google May 21, 2018
★★ Can You Really Harm a Competitor's Site with External Canonical Tags?
A method of performing negative SEO based on "canonical" tags issued from low-quality sites has resurfaced recently following an article on this subject. John Mueller has, for his part, indicated that...
John Mueller May 02, 2018
★★★ Does Having an RSS Feed Actually Improve Your Google Rankings?
John Mueller indicated on Twitter that having an RSS feed on your site does not help it rank better in the SERPs, neither in Google nor in Google News....
John Mueller Apr 16, 2018
★★★ Are Schema.org Structured Data Really Essential for Your SEO in 2024?
Gary Illyes indicated at the Pubcon conference that structured data tags (Schema.org) were here to stay because they allowed Google to better understand the content of a page....
Gary Illyes Feb 26, 2018
Should You Use Google Tag Manager for SEO Testing?
John Mueller indicated on Twitter that he does not recommend using the Google Tag Manager tool to perform SEO tests on a number of tags, as a recently published article suggested. But he didn't explai...
John Mueller Jan 08, 2018
Should You Really Mark All Guest Blogging Links as Nofollow?
John Mueller also indicated in a hangout that, in his opinion, all links from guest blogging practices should be nofollow, which wouldn't prevent users reading the articles from clicking on the links ...
John Mueller Dec 27, 2017
★★ Is it true that no one at Google fully understands the algorithm anymore?
A persistent rumor that has been flourishing in numerous articles for several months claims that "no one at Google would understand the search engine's algorithm globally anymore, as it has become so ...
John Mueller May 22, 2017
★★ Can a Brand New Page Really Rank for Highly Competitive Keywords?
John Mueller indicated in a hangout that a newly created page can, despite its young age, rank well in Google's results, even for highly competitive queries. He takes as an example a page that would p...
John Mueller Mar 13, 2017
★★ Can Google's Advertising Bots Actually Discover New Pages for Indexing?
John Mueller indicated on Twitter that Google's robots used for Adwords and Adsense advertising (examples: Mediapartners-Google, Mediapartners, AdsBot-Google and AdsBot-Google-Mobile-Apps) are not use...
John Mueller Feb 13, 2017
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