Google – Rapid Purple

Google Confirms: Too Many 5xx Errors Will Slow Down Your Website’s Crawl Rate

Errors on your website are generally a bad thing – and while Google has always said that website errors aren’t a good thing – they’ve never specifically stated that those errors will play any role in your website’s crawl & indexing rates. However a recent question has gotten confirmation that 5xx errors will cause a slow […]

Is My Website Indexed By Google Yet?

The Internet moves really quickly – and these days nobody really wants to wait for anything. As such one of the first questions I hear from business owners in regards to their new websites is “How do I get my website onto Google?” The answer is extremely simple. All you need to do is setup […]

Google My Business Now Allows Video Uploads

Visual media goes a long way with Google My Business listings – with some businesses reporting that their photos produce the majority of their business listing views. A fact that only makes sense when you consider the importance that photos play when selecting a restaurant for a dinner date, a beauty salon for hair treatment, […]

Google Starts Rolling Out Messaging for Businesses

Back in November of 2016 Google began testing out a new chat feature for local businesses. Successfully letting businesses message their customers directly from a Google SERP. The initial test pilots must have resulted in some positive feedback because business messaging is now being rolled out for all businesses nationwide! To see if your business […]

Google’s Multi-Billion Dollar Fine Bad News For Company, Good News For Everyone Else

Google got hit with one of the largest fines in corporate history with the European Union demanding 2.42 billion euro (2.7 billion dollars). So what’s the cause? Google has been favoring its own “Google Shopping” service over other similar services, a practice which the EU has determined to be anti-competitive. These services allow users to […]

Google Promises to Give Webmasters Voice Search Analytics

Those of you who follow me on Facebook probably saw my post a few days ago talking about the effects that voice search is having on the world of SEO. Fact is that voice search popularity is steadily increasing. Even Forbes has stated that 2017 is the year of voice search. As such you can […]

Google Rolls Out Verified Customer Reviews

Reviews are a great way to make sure your business stands out on Google, and Google just changed the game. Verified Customer Reviews lets your users leave a review directly after making a purchase from your website. These reviews then go to grow your overall review rating on Google, as well as your seller rating […]

Google Confirms: SSL Ranking Boost Won’t Be Getting Any Stronger

Way back in 2014 Google announced the SSL ranking boost which gave a small ranking boost to all websites who switched over to HTTPS instead of HTTP. Since then talk about the SSL ranking boost has never really subsided – with people constantly looking to SSL as a quick way to increase their website rankings, […]

Google Confirms: Domain Name Age Doesn’t Affect Search Rankings

The SEO community frequently talks about domain name age and debates it’s importance within the Google algorithm. As such it was inevitable that someone would finally ask John Mueller for an official answer, and John responded with his usual detailed reply: “no“. @_newsbulletin @methode no — John ?.o(???)o.? (@JohnMu) April 12, 2017 Check out more SEO […]

Submit New URLs To Google Straight From The Search Results Page

Remember the days when you would utilize various online services to submit your website to search engines? Thankfully this isn’t really required anymore and in-fact Google has made it easier than ever to submit your URL to them. Simply run a search for “submit to Google“, or anything similar. You will then be be shown a […]

reCaptcha Is Becoming Invisible

Seeing a reCaptcha on a contact form has become pretty standard these days, and while the overall process of passing the captcha is rather harmless – it can still be rather annoying at times. Luckily Google has found a way to make the entire captcha process entirely invisible! Well as invisible as it can get. […]

Google Confirms: Quality Blog Comments Signify A Healthy Website

It’s always great to hear a confirmation from Google that helps showcase a positive ranking signal – and Gary Illyes latest tweet essentially gives us just that: DYK quality comments can be a signal of a healthy website? pic.twitter.com/Yugh9AhBWz — Gary Illyes ?( ? )? (@methode) March 10, 2017 Comments on a blog have always […]

Google Confirms: Don’t Use URL Fragments

The SEO community has long known that URL fragments such as http://www.example.com/page.html#something cannot be properly crawled by Google. As such Googlebot will only see page.html, regardless of what content may be dynamically displayed via Ajax as part of the #something fragment. This was confirmed by Google’s John Mueller via a Twitter post early this morning: @ryansiddle […]

Google Confirms: PageRank Is Still Being Used

Google’s PageRank came about, as we know it anyway, has been around for almost two decades – and Google’s Gary Illyes recently reminded us that it’s still very much alive. In a “DidYouKnow” tweet he states “DYK that after 18 years we’re still using PageRank (and 100s of other signals) in ranking?“. Check out the tweet […]

Google & Bing Raise Sitemap File Size Limits to 50mb

Google and Bing both announced today that they have raised the file size limits on their sitemaps from 10mb up to 50mb. The 50,000 URL limit hasn’t changed however. Here is an excerpt directly from the Sitemap.org protocol: You can provide multiple Sitemap files, but each Sitemap file that you provide must have no more […]

Google Testing New Chat Feature For Business Listings

Google has rolled out a brand new pilot program letting local businesses chat directly with their customers straight from their search result listing. Go look at your Google My Business dashboard right now, and imagine all of those people who were viewing your business on Google every month had the opportunity to chat with you. If […]

Are Spaces In My URL Allowed?

For those of us old-timers on the web – we may feel weary about creating file or directory names with spaces in them. See back in the days of Netscape Navigator and the early days of Internet Explorer – spaces were treated by browsers and servers as the end of a URL. So something like […]

Google Confirms: AMP Pages Don’t Require XML Sitemaps

Google’s John Mueller confirmed on Twitter that AMP pages do not require an XML sitemap to be picked up by Google. Simply making use of the rel=amphtml link is all that Google needs to find your AMP pages. @Kfowler325 @Kfowler325 No need for sitemaps for AMP pages — the rel=amphtml link is enough for us. — […]

Google Rolls Out New Tool to Test Your AMP Pages

Now that Google search results are fully AMP powered – blog owners will want to make sure they run valid AMP pages for their latest posts if they wish to obtain the display boost given to AMP-powered pages on mobile devices. To help all the new webmasters make sure their AMP pages are utilizing the […]