Glenn Gabe

The March 7 and April 16 2018 Google Algorithm Updates [Part 2] – Analysis and Findings From The 4/16 Update

In part one of this series, I covered an overview of the March 7 and April 16 updates, what I think could be going on with relevance and quality, what Google has explained about the update, and more. Now in part two, I’m going to provide examples of specific drops and surges I analyzed based … Read more

The March 7 and April 16 2018 Google Algorithm Updates – Relevance, quality, reverse-Panda, and clues from the past [Part 1]

Update: This is part one of two in my series about the March 7 and April 16, 2018 Google algorithm updates. I published part two and that post can be found here. On March 7, 2018 Google rolled out one of the biggest algorithm updates I’ve seen in a long time, which I called The … Read more

More hreflang magic tricks revealed: Google can select one country hreflang url to index from across multiple urls in the same language

In my last post, I explained a fascinating hreflang situation where Google could surface urls that were canonicalized (and not indexed) in the SERPs by country. For example, if you had multiple urls in the same language targeting different countries, and those urls were all canonicalized to one url (let’s say the /us/ version), then … Read more

hreflang Magic Trick Revealed – Google confirms hreflang urls that are canonicalized (and not indexed) can be surfaced in the SERPs by country

If you’re using hreflang with pages written in the same language, but targeting different countries, you might be surprised to learn how Google can handle the situation (especially when multiple pages are being canonicalized to one). John Mueller confirmed this behavior in a recent webmaster hangout video, which is provided below. Read my post to … Read more

The Brackets Update – Analysis and Findings From The March 7, 2018 Google Algorithm Update (and March 14 Tremor)

I promised I wouldn’t but I just gave it a name. :) Actually, it’s based on a tweet from Marie Haynes saying, “It’s March Madness!” after I posted screenshots of the wild tremor starting on 3/14/18. More about that tremor soon. As many of you know, Google pushed a really big update starting the week … Read more

Chrome Ad Filtering In Action: The first examples of Chrome blocking ads on sites with intrusive ads (desktop and mobile)

Update: February 27, 2018 Until today, you could only see ad filtering in action using Chrome Canary (a version of Chrome that provides the newest features being tested). But I just spotted ads being filtered in the stable version of Chrome for desktop and mobile. Google has said that ad filtering will roll out gradually … Read more

Measuring Infinity – How to identify, analyze, and fix an infinite spaces problem using a powerful SEO software stack

If you are working on a large-scale site, you need to be very careful that you don’t create infinite spaces. That’s when a site generates a near-endless list of urls that Google can end up crawling. Google does not want to churn through endless urls and it can cause problems on several levels SEO-wise. That’s … Read more

M-Dot Versus D-Top: How To Hack DeepCrawl’s Test Site Feature To Compare Your Mobile And Desktop Sites SEO-wise

Last month I wrote a post covering a number of real-world mobile problems I surfaced on sites using separate mobile urls (like m-dot subdomains). With Google moving to a mobile-first index, it’s extremely important to make sure your mobile urls contain the equivalent content, structured data, canonical tags, hreflang tags, etc. as your desktop urls. … Read more

A Holiday Hornets’ Nest – Analysis and Findings From The December 2017 Google Algorithm Updates

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

It’s In The Stars – A Google Algorithm Update On 12/15/17 Is Impacting Some Official Celebrity Websites (Updated)

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

From m-dot to m-not. Real-world examples of mobile SEO problems with Google’s mobile-first index looming

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