seo

How To Quickly Remove A Rogue Subdomain From Google Using The Remove URLs Tool In GSC – And Then Make Sure It Stays Out (Case Study)

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

Should You Remove Low-Quality Or Thin Content Versus Improving It? Seeing The Forest Through The Trees

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

Enter The Hornets’ Nest – Exploring The Wild Google Algorithm Updates and Volatility In The Fall of 2017

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

From Inbound Links To The Rater Guidelines To AdSense, 7 Important Facts About Google Algorithm Updates As Told By Googlers

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

The August 19, 2017 Google Algorithm Update – Analysis and Findings From A Summer-Ending Quality Update

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

Can You Retain Google Featured Snippets During Site Migrations or Domain Name Changes? [Case Study]

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

How To Use Facebook Pixel Reporting To Identify Who Is Secretly Using Fetch And Render In GSC On Your Site

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

How To Remove Rel Canonical From Noindexed Pages In WordPress Using The All In One SEO Plugin [Tutorial]

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

Google’s Featured Snippets Algorithm Is Smart Enough To Detect Third Party Image Manipulation and Act Quickly [Case Study]

Ever since featured snippets landed in the SERPs, I’ve been heavily analyzing their impact. They have always fascinated me based on their unique SERP treatment, the amount of traffic they can drive, and how the featured snippets algorithm works. And If you’ve read any of my posts about featured snippets, then you know the algorithm … Read more

The May 17, 2017 Google Algorithm Update – Frequency of Quality Updates, Surfing The Gray Area, and Reversals

We’ve seen our fair share of major core ranking updates this year with an update in early January, then the February 7 update, then Fred on March 7, and then more movement in late April and early May. And just a few weeks from the last update, we witnessed another big core update that rolled out on … Read more

Beyond the UI – How to filter Google Search Console (GSC) data using regular expressions in Google Analytics (GA)

Update: April 2021 Google has finally rolled out filtering via regular expressions (regex) directly in Google Search Console! That’s great news and it’s something the SEO community has been requesting for a long time. You can access the filters in the Performance reporting directly in GSC. You can still do this in Google Analytics like … Read more