The Google ranking algorithm is composed of many smaller components, but the overall goal is to deliver search results people want to find. Understanding how Google search rankings work is a critical foundation to help you understand why rankings appear slippery and elusive. There are many reasons why rankings keep fluctuating. By understanding how the […]
Why Do Rankings Fluctuate? Explaining the Google Dance
How to Remove Old URLs from Search Results
Occasionally, you may change some pages on your website, eliminate pages altogether, or migrate to a new website platform altogether. You may notice that Google still has old URLs that no longer exist in the search results. How do you get the new web addresses indexed, and make the old outdated web addresses disappear from […]
Google Does Not Use Webspam Reports for Manual Penalties
Many people see competitors “breaking the rules” on Google guidelines and engaging in ranking manipulation. You may be surprised to learn, when you report your competitors using the Google webspam form, they don’t automatically slap a manual penalty on your competitors. There are an estimated 1.74 billion websites in 2020 (at the time of this […]
What You Need To Know About Mobile-First Indexing
Google is rolling out mobile-first indexing to all websites in July of 2018. This means that Googlebot will crawl and index the mobile versions of your web pages, and list those in search results. Here are all the things you need to know about mobile-first indexing, and how it will affect your SEO going forward.
Add A HTML Sitemap To Your WordPress Site
Most of you reading this already understand the impact of search engine rankings. If you can rank high in Google, more potential customers find your business. The more prospective customers that find you, the more paying customers you should have. Except most of you are frustrated by search engine optimization (or SEO). There are actually […]
Prevent Google From Crawling Old Sitemaps
As our websites mature, we often move from doing things one way to a different, more efficient way. But sometimes, the footprint of how our site used to work remains behind. Recently, I had a client come to me with a most intriguing problem. They had a large e-commerce site, that had gone through many […]
Google Needs to Crawl CSS and JS Files on WordPress Sites
Did you get an email from Google Search Console, telling you Googlebot cannot access CSS and JS files on your site? If you have a WordPress site with a robots.txt file, this may be the cause. Up until July 28th, 2015, it was common for Google to crawl WordPress sites with a robots.txt file that […]
Using Microformats for Structured Data
Microformats is a structured data markup system that was developed in 2005. It is used to add semantics to contact information, events, and calendars.
Understanding Schema.org Structured Data
What is metadata and why should you care about it? Metadata is data that describes other data. Though the ideas are old, the implementation of metadata has primarily been in the last five years. Though each method is a little different, each is structured markup language (like HTML) that helps computers better identify and classify […]
Non Mobile-Friendly Websites Facing Judgement Day
April 21st, 2015 is about to become Judgement Day for millions of websites that are not mobile-friendly or still use Flash animation. Google announced late on Febraury 26th, 2015 that search results will more heavily favor mobile-friendly websites beginning April 21st, 2015. Indexed apps will also be surfaced more prominently in search results for users […]