In part one, we learned more about Fabrice Canel of Microsoft Bing and spoke about indexing quality. In part two we dig more into the concern around content generation through generative AI tools and IndexNow. Then in the final part, we spoke about sitemaps and While IndexNow is the best way to submit changes to […]
This week in search, we had yet another week of heated Google search ranking volatility without a confirmed Google search ranking update. Google said it would drop the Ping endpoints for Google Sitemaps later this year. Some are seeing the new index coverage report in Bing Webmaster Tools. Google said word count is not an […]
Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that Google does indeed check to see if an XML sitemap has a change in it before reprocessing the XML sitemap file. The reason Google does this is because it doesn’t want to waste resources parsing and processing a file that is not changed from the last time that file was […]
John Mueller of Google has always downplayed the importance of HTML sitemaps over the years, he is a fan of XML sitemaps, but HTML sitemaps, not so much. On mastodon the other day, he really showed his dissatisfaction with HTML sitemaps by saying that HTML sitemaps “should never be needed.” He wrote, “I changed my […]
Google’s John Mueller said that pinging Google that your sitemap file has been updated can help Google index your new content quickly. He said it is simply Google practice to ping Google with when your sitemap file is updated. Of course, this does not guarantee indexing. Google still does not index everything, so just because […]
Before there was Google Search Console there was Google Webmaster Tools, before there was Google Webmaster Tools there was Google Sitemaps. To tell you that story, John Mueller and Lizzi Sassman interviewed the original creator of this tool, Vanessa Fox. It brings back such great memories for me of the early days of Google Search […]
Google’s John Mueller posted a two-minute video that answers four SEO-related questions about blocking CSS files, updating a sitemap, deleting RSS files, and getting a website back into Google search. Most of them are pretty straightforward SEO questions, so I think that’s why he answered them all in about two minutes. Here is the video: […]