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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★★★ Why Does Google Sometimes Index Your Pages Without Fully Rendering Them?
On Twitter, Gary Illyes indicated that in certain cases, Google may choose not to perform a complete "rendering" of a page before featuring it in search results or on Google News. This happens when Go...
Gary Illyes Apr 04, 2023
★★ Are you losing thousands of organic visitors without even realizing it? Here's why your SEO analysis might be dangerously incomplete.
Analyzing each search type separately (Search, Google Images, Video, News) makes it possible to understand whether traffic decline is limited to a specific type of search results....
Daniel Waisberg Mar 29, 2023
★★ How can you analyze Search Console performance for Discover and Google News separately?
Google indicates that it is possible to filter Search Console data by different content types, including Discover and Google News. This feature allows you to analyze performance at the page level for ...
Daniel Waisberg Mar 15, 2023
★★★ Should You Use a 301 or 302 Redirect for a Temporary Domain Migration?
An SEO specialist asked John Mueller an interesting question on Twitter. Facing a situation dreaded by many experts, he is forced to migrate a domain from www.domain to newshop.domain, then return to ...
John Mueller Mar 14, 2023
★★ Should You Really Use ChatGPT to Rewrite or Translate Your SEO Content?
On Twitter, John Mueller engaged with several users about rewriting content via ChatGPT with the aim of modifying an article or facilitating its translation into another language. While he doesn't ope...
John Mueller Mar 06, 2023
★★★ Do All Google Bots Actually Render Your Website's JavaScript?
Not all Google crawlers use the same rendering system, and some bots don't even render websites at all, according to John Mueller. He was responding to a user's question asking whether all crawlers us...
John Mueller Feb 28, 2023
★★★ Should you really remove meta keyword tags from your website?
Meta keyword tags do not help with SEO. Google stopped using them long ago, as explained in a 2009 blog post....
Lizzi Sassman Jan 31, 2023
★★ Should you really separate news sitemaps and general sitemaps to avoid duplicate URLs?
Including the same URLs in both a news sitemap and a general sitemap causes no problems, although it's not ideal. It's generally simpler to have separate sitemaps....
John Mueller Jan 31, 2023
★★ Are strong product identifiers really the key to multi-merchant matching in Google Shopping?
The multi-merchant Shopping knowledge panel displays multiple sellers of the same product. This matching is more reliable if a strong product identifier is present on your product pages, allowing Goog...
Alan Kent Jan 17, 2023
★★★ Should You Add Multiple Supplier Links to Boost Your Google Rankings?
Alan Kent (Google) explained on Twitter that, in an article describing a product, linking to multiple suppliers/vendors offering that product could give a slight "boost" to the page in terms of rankin...
Google Jan 16, 2023
★★★ Do You Really Need to Optimize Core Web Vitals to Appear in Google Discover?
John Mueller indicated on Mastodon that to be present on Discover, it is not necessary to have good Core Web Vitals scores. Google's cherished "Page Experience" is not a relevance criterion for Discov...
John Mueller Jan 09, 2023
★★ Should you use a person or organization as your article author for SEO purposes?
It is perfectly acceptable to list an organization as the author of an article. You can specify either an organization or a person as the author in structured markup. Both are acceptable....
Lizzi Sassman Dec 29, 2022
★★ Do you really need to publish content every day to rank well on Google?
There is no absolute answer to how often you should publish content. You can decide how you want to engage your users, whether that's one article per day or multiple per week....
John Mueller Dec 29, 2022
★★★ Could Google Really Be Spammed From Its Earliest Days?
An amusing anecdote from Google's early days recently resurfaced on Hacker News, where Matt Cutts, former head of Google's webspam team, recounts how he had to battle with the two co-founders, Sergey ...
Matt Cutts Nov 28, 2022
★★★ Should You Change the Author Name When Updating an Article?
John Mueller explained on Mastodon (for a change from Twitter) that if an article's author name changes, it would be interesting to mention the previous author in addition to the current one, but that...
John Mueller Nov 22, 2022
★★★ Does word count really matter for SEO ranking?
There is no minimum or maximum word count for an article. Word count alone is not a ranking signal. What matters is creating quality content that covers all relevant details for your audience....
Lizzi Sassman Oct 21, 2022
★★ Are FAQs in blog articles really worth it for SEO rankings?
Adding FAQs to a blog article is neither good nor bad in itself—it's just a format. What really matters is thinking about your audience and answering the questions that actually matter to them, not th...
Lizzi Sassman Oct 21, 2022
★★★ Should you worry about reusing the same text blocks across multiple pages?
Reusing text blocks (header, footer, newsletter banner) across numerous pages is common and acceptable. A page may appear for this shared text in specific searches, but this doesn't negatively affect ...
John Mueller Oct 21, 2022
How can you optimize your feeds to make the most of Google Discover's Follow feature?
Google has added best practices for feeds intended for the Follow feature in Google Discover. This feature is currently available in English in the United States....
John Mueller Sep 28, 2022
★★★ Does Word Count Really Matter for SEO Content Anymore?
Google has removed errors returned by the Search Console for sites registered in Google News, specifically the "article too short" error. Any mention of text being too short has also disappeared from ...
Danny Sullivan Sep 26, 2022
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