In May of 2023 Google wrote a blog post where it explained it was planning to update its systems to surface “hidden gems”, or content written from a “personal or expert point of view”. We eagerly awaited that update when the ‘fall of insane updates’ arrived including three core updates, a massive helpful content update,…
Google began enforcing its site reputation abuse spam policy on May 7, 2024 after announcing the policy two months earlier (when the March 2024 core update rolled out). At that time, we didn’t know if enforcement would be handled via manual actions, an algorithm update, or a combination of both. It ended up being just…
Google recently announced that it expanded translated results in the search results to more languages, which was great to see. Also, it’s important to understand the data is available in Google Search Console’s performance reporting (and available via the API with some added benefit). I’ll explain more about that soon. But while speaking with site…
In 2017 Google announced the Ad Experience Report in Search Console. I remember the announcement like it was yesterday. The overarching idea was brilliant. Provide a set of reports that let site owners know when their advertising situation yielded a terrible user experience. And they also announced that if a site was failing a review,…
Several site owners have reached out to me recently about a scary spike in indexing that then drops back down to normal levels. This is showing up in the coverage reporting in Google Search Console and the site owners thought it could be a sign of something terrible happening SEO-wise. For example, Google suddenly indexing…
This is my second post in a series about the March 2024 broad core update. Again, it was a huge update with many moving parts, so I wanted to cover several interesting things that went on versus writing just one post. For this post, I’m going to cover a very interesting case study that underscores…
Update: May 21, 2024 – My post is BACK in the AI overview, even when using nosnippet. I have provided more information below about that, including a screenshot. Update: May 22, 2024 – Google’s John Mueller replied to me after checking with the team working on AI overviews. The link card should drop out over…
I cover the old HCU(X) classifier, site-level quality algorithms, the counterbalancing of systems, and how the transition has been as smooth as a bed of razor blades… This is the first post in a series about the March 2024 broad core update. The update was one of the largest and most complex core updates Google…
Don’t settle for the one thousand row limit in GSC. In this tutorial, I explain how to get all of your Merchant Listings data from GSC, while covering some other ideas for working with the data via Analytics Edge. Merchant Listings can be incredibly powerful for ecommerce retailers. They are free product listings that show…
While helping a company that was heavily impacted by several algorithm updates in the fall of 2023, I started by scanning GSC reports to get a feel for the situation. And when digging into the inbound links report, I started noticing something funny across a number of links. There were some relatively powerful referring domains in…