GSQi Blog

Meet Newsguard, A Team Of Quality Raters For News Publishers – And Another Way To Check Site Trust, Credibility, and Transparency

Update: April 2022 I just published a post explaining how sites can use NewsGuard’s nutritional labels to avoid manual actions for violating Google’s medical policy (for News and Discover). This is based on helping sites that received manual actions in January of 2022. —– Based partly on the August 1 Google algorithm update, there’s been … Read more

Analysis and Findings From The August 1, 2018 Google Algorithm Update – A Massive Core Ranking Update

{Update July 2022: I just published my post about the May 2022 broad core update. In my post, I cover five micro-case studies covering drops and surges based on the update.} —– On August 1, 2018 Google rolled out one of the biggest algorithm updates I’ve ever seen. It was huge and many sites saw … Read more

Trapped In Google’s New Video Carousels – A Dangerous SERP Feature For Some Ecommerce Retailers [Case Study]

{Update 8/13/18: I started noticing a number of ecommerce retailers being released from video carousels when their category or product pages didn’t contain any video (or if the video just supported the main content on the page). The first signs of the change were on Sunday, 8/12/18 and I’m seeing the changes roll out more … Read more

How Sinister Mobile Popups Only Triggering For Uncookied Users (and Googlebot) Could Impact SEO, Usability, and Monetization

Users hate popups. But they really hate mobile popups. They are annoying, inhibit the user experience, and can cause serious user frustration. But mobile popups can also cause problems from an SEO standpoint. First, Google has a mobile popup algorithm that can demote pages using an interstitial or popup when users visit from the search … Read more

More data awaits: How to juice up your Index Coverage reporting by adding directories to Google Search Console (GSC)

Google’s new index coverage reporting is killer. For a long time, the SEO community wanted something more powerful than the simple index status report in the old GSC. You know, something we could really sink our SEO teeth into. And we finally received that in the form of the new index coverage reporting in the … 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