The IRS has revised its Free File agreement with online tax return software providers, which will require them to allow their Free File landing pages to be indexed by search engines and backing out of its pledge not to enter the e-file service marketplace. This news was reported on December 30. By using robot directives strategically, [...]
Screaming Frog, a search marketing firm, has released version 12.0 of its popular SEO Spider tool on October 22. In this update, you'll find PageSpeed Insights integration, auto-saves for database storage mode and a customizable GUI, along with other improvements. Website crawler tools are a valuable resource for analyzing sites, understanding how search engine crawlers navigate [...]
In an announcement made by Google, beginning in December, the company is going to update its user agent to represent the version of Chrome that GoogleBot is running. It is important to update any code you have that may look at the user agent of GoogleBot to suggest this change going forward. After the Evergreen GoogleBot [...]
In an announcement made September 27, people who use Yoast SEO are going to be opted into all of its snippet features by default. The update that contains this change, version 12.2, will roll out on October 1. A few days before, on September 24, Google announced new snippet settings to provide site owners some options that [...]
https://youtu.be/kDs-MufuiAg “You no longer need to do anything special for hash-bang URLs,” Google’s John Mueller said on the September 17 edition of #AskGoogleWebmasters, “we’ll just try to render them directly.” Here is a question that was asked during the September 17 episode by Twitter user, @olegko - “What is the current status of #! AJAX crawling? [...]
During the September 9 edition of #AskGoogleWebmasters , John Mueller said that Google might select a canonical URL based on your site's perceived preference and the URL that is more useful for the user. Here is the question: “You can indicate your preference to Google using these techniques, but Google may choose a different page [...]
In an announcement, Google said that a number of the testing tools available within Google Search Console or the Google developer portal are now using the new evergreen Googlebot for crawling. Google launched what is being called evergreen Googlebot three months ago, and basically, it means that Googlebot will crawl the web using the latest [...]
In Barry Schwartz's next video interview, he sat down with Paul Shapiro, the Senior Partner, Head of SEO of Catalyst, to discuss his thoughts on going beyond technical SEO, as in looking past simply crawling and indexing when it comes to technical SEO. Paul also talked about using natural language processing for improving content development [...]
Google will stop supporting unsupported and unpublished rules in the robots exclusive protocol. This will take effective on September 1. This announcement came via the Google Webmaster blog. Basically, Google won't be supporting robots.txt with the noindex directive listed within the file. “In the interest of maintaining a healthy ecosystem and preparing for potential future [...]
On July 1, Google announced that it posted a Request for Comments to the Internet Engineering Task Force to formalize the Robots Exclusion Protocol specification. This is happening after an informal 25 year old standard for the internet. Google had this to say on its blog: “Together with the original author of the protocol, webmasters, [...]