GSQi Blog

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

How To Properly Set Up Pagination With Sorting Parameters Using Rel Next/Prev And Rel Canonical [SEO Tutorial]

Last Updated: October 2021 Update – October 2021Google just published new help documentation containing best practices for e-commerce sites, which included a section about pagination. In that section, Google explains that for category pagination, it recommends having each paginated url indexable and that each contains a self-referencing canonical tag. Google also emphasizes to not canonicalize … Read more

How To Export All Search Queries From Google Search Console To Compare Clicks And Impressions After An Algorithm Update (using Analytics Edge)

When experiencing a traffic drop due to an algorithm update, redesign, migration, or some other event, it’s important to dig into the drop to understand the queries and landing pages that saw the biggest change. When you do, you can have a strong feel for the pages impacted and the queries leading to those pages … Read more

The February 7, 2017 Google Algorithm Update – Analysis and Findings From A Significant Core Ranking Update

The fall of 2016 was an extremely volatile time from a Google algorithm update standpoint. Actually, I believe it was the most volatile fall I have ever seen. We saw numerous updates from Google, including partial rollbacks. For example, we had Penguin 4 in late September and early October, and then massive volatility in November (with … Read more

Google’s Algorithms Can Ignore Rel Canonical When URLs Contain Different Content. Here’s Proof.

Can Google ignore rel canonical? Yes, that can happen if Google believes the urls are not equivalent. Google’s John Mueller explained this in a recent webmaster hangout video and I have seen this happen a number of times while helping clients. My post below contains John’s comments along with a case study. Last year I … Read more

Google’s Mobile Popup Algorithm Launches – First Examples of Negative Impact (Updated)

Update 2/8/17: We are now a full month into the rollout of the mobile popup algorithm and I am still not seeing widespread impact. I did surface a few examples of urls being impact during the first week of the rollout, but there are still many sites employing mobile popups or interstitials that have not been … Read more