Google clarifies ‘Destination not working’ ad policy with more examples
Google expanded its “Destination not working” guidance to help advertisers diagnose and fix ad disapprovals
Topic: HTTP 404
What server logs reveal that SEO tools miss
Search engines leave behind a detailed record of every visit. Here's how that data helps uncover hidden SEO issues at scale.
How soft 404s and indexing issues caused a 90% traffic collapse
When Google stops indexing your pages, traffic can vanish fast. Here’s how one publisher reversed the decline after a migration went wrong.
Why the answer in SEO is almost always ‘it depends’
SEO rarely has universal answers. From schema to domain age and 404s, context determines what actually impacts rankings and visibility.
Google explains JavaScript execution on non-200 HTTP status codes
Google noted that if the HTTP status code is non-200 (for example, on error pages with 404 status code), rendering might be skipped.
Google Business links policies and guidelines updated
Google added new dedicated landing pages, direct action completion, social media sites and a new business links crawability policy.
Crawlability 101: Fix SEO to get seen by search engines
Crawlability refers to how easily search engines access your site. Learn what it is, why it matters, and how to fix crawl issues that hurt SEO.
Technical SEO post-migration: How to find and fix hidden errors
Migrations can break your site in ways you never expected. Address SEO issues before they cost you rankings, traffic, and conversions.
Billions of Google redirects to stop working next year
Google announced its URL shortener service will stop working completely on August 25, 2025.
404 pages: Best practices and examples from 50+ brands
Check out real-world examples and FAQs to help you create useful 404 pages that align with UX best practices.
Mitigating technical SEO issues by empowering engineers
Engineers are at the forefront of web development. Here's how their understanding of technical SEO can be transformative for an enterprise.
Improving or removing content for SEO: How to do it the right way
Here's a step-by-step process for determining whether you should improve or remove older content – and how to do it.
SEO during website development and post-launch: Key considerations
Learn key SEO steps during the website development (or replatform) phase and why optimizing for search needs to be an ongoing process.
Google warns against using 403 or 404 status codes for Googlebot crawl rate limiting
Instead, Google recommends you use Google Search Console's crawl rate feature.
The Search Engine Land mentorships have been announced; Monday’s daily brief
Plus, on the hunt for something new in 2021? New job opps in search
Google now does soft 404 detection by device type
This can lead to Search Console showing you everything is fine but in reality, some of your desktop pages may not be indexed.
How to gain value from broken backlinks
A guide to reaping the benefits of broken backlinks — both yours and your competitors’.
Google updates the Search Console coverage report
The updated report now gives you very specific categories and labels for errors and responses.
Google Search Console launches new removals tool
The new tool temporarily block URLs from showing in Google, it shows outdated content and content filtered by SafeSearch.
SMX Advanced Overtime: Your questions answered about webspam and penalties
Bing's Frédéric Dubut and ex-Googler Fili Wiese covered a wide range of questions in Seattle and will be sharing more insights at SMX East.
SMX replay: SEO that Google tries to correct for you
Patrick Stox explains the processes to pay attention to and the ones to leave to Google.
Need to expedite page removal in Google’s search index? Try a temporary sitemap file
Do you need to remove a lot content from Google quickly? Here is how to do it if you own the site.
Google’s Mueller spent New Year’s helping SEOs tackle hacked content, slow website issues
Google is helping webmasters and SEOs on New Years and other holidays.
Google fixes the cache 404 issue with mobile-first indexing
After several months, Google has fixed the bug that caused the cache page to fail to load.
3 ways to improve link equity distribution and capture missed opportunities
You've worked hard to accumulate as much link equity as possible from external sources, but is your internal linking structure diluting that equity? Columnist Chris Long details how to reclaim your lost link value.
16 common on-site SEO mistakes you might be making right now
Columnist Pratik Dholakiya shares the 16 technical SEO issues he sees most frequently. Even the most experienced SEO professionals can sometimes overlook these common issues!
Google has explained how you can remove your AMP content from Google search
Not that Google wants you to take these steps, but if you really wanted to drop supporting AMP on your site, here is how to do that.
Brace yourself: The benefit and shock of analyzing Googlebot crawl spikes via log files [Case Study]
Site owners really don’t know the full story about who, or what, is crawling their sites until they analyze their server logs. Columnist Glenn Gabe shares a case study that illustrates some insights to be gleaned from a server log file analysis.
Google Place Actions Rich Snippet Markup Documentation Posted & Then Removed From Developer Portal
Google's book an appointment, place an order or make a reservation rich snippet markup was available on Friday but then removed over the weekend.
Up Close @ SMX: Avoiding SEO Disasters
Contributor Russell Savage recaps Mark Munroe's presentation at SMX East, in which he discussed common SEO disasters, as well as ways to detect and prevent them.
Google On How They Know When To Slow Or Stop Crawling Your Web Site
Today at SMX East, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst, Gary Illyes shared with the audience two technical ways Google determines when GoogleBot, its crawler, should slow down or stop crawling your website. One of the more important factors with SEO is to ensure the search engine crawlers can access your web pages. If they cannot access your […]
What’s Tops For “Offers” On Google? Google Offers – Which No Longer Exists
If you search in Google for [offers] Google will return the shuttered Google Offers page as the first search listing. But if you look carefully, you will see that Google has blocked the page from spiders within their robots.txt file and the page itself says “This site is no longer being supported.” Here is a […]
Google’s Matt Cutts Explains How Google Search Handles 404 & 410 Status Codes
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a video today explaining the difference in how Google handles 404 and 410 error status codes. Both 404 and 410s are errors for a web page or document not being available, however a 410 is defined as “gone” forever. So 410s are more of an explicit response […]
Google’s Matt Cutts Gives SEO Advice For Times When Your Products Go Out Of Stock
Google’s Matt Cutts answered in a video what webmasters and site owners should do about their out of stock products on their e-commerce sites. Matt Cutts basically said it depends on the size of the e-commerce site. He broke it down into three sizes: small sites with tens of pages, medium sites with thousands of […]
Google Launches Improved URL Removal Tool For Third-Party Content
Google has released an improved URL removal tool that the company says was specifically designed to improve the ability to remove third-party content from its search engine. John Mueller, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, announced the change on the Google Webmaster Central blog. Google’s long had this tool, so what’s new? We checked with Google directly and were […]
Google Webmaster Tools Adds Smartphone Specific Crawl Errors
Pierre Far, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, announced a new feature within Google Webmaster Tools that shows webmasters crawl errors specific to smartphone devices. The issue is: it is often hard for webmasters to detect and thus fix errors that happen on smartphone devices. Google decided to add a section to the crawl errors report that […]
New Alerts For Crawl Errors Via Google Webmaster Tools
Google announced they are now sending out Google Webmaster Tools alerts for crawl errors. Google grouped the errors in two buckets. (1) Site Error alerts for major site-wide problems (2) URL Error anomaly alerts for potentially less critical issues The Site-Wide Problems Alerts Can Include: Your DNS server is down or misconfigured. Your web server […]
How Microsoft Removes “Junk” From Bing Search Results
Dr. Richard Qian from Bing’s core search team wrote a blog post on the Bing Search blog named Bing Search Quality Insights: Reducing Junk. This is part of Bing’s ongoing effort to provide search quality insights on how Bing works. Bing here explains how they handle removing bad links from the Bing search results, and […]
Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors: How To Get Detailed Data From the API
Earlier this week, I wrote about my disappointment that granular data (the number of URLs reported, the specifics of the errors…) was removed from Google webmaster tools. However, as I’ve been talking with Google, I’ve discovered that much of this detail is still available via the GData API. That this detail was available through the […]
Google Webmaster Tools Revamps Crawl Errors, But Is It For The Better?
Google has just revamped the crawl errors data available in webmaster tools. Crawl errors are issues Googlebot encountered while crawling your site, so useful stuff! I originally started this article by writing that in most cases, these changes are for the better and in only a few (really maddening) cases, useful functionality has been removed. […]