31
votes
Site was hacked, need to remove all URLs starting with + from Google, use robots.txt?
My website was hacked which is now recovered but the hacker indexed 5000 URLs in Google and now I get error 404
A 404 is probably preferable to blocking with robots.txt if you want these URLs dropped ...
- 43k
20
votes
How to change which image from website is shown in Google search result?
You can indicate to Google which image you'd like used for your property using Schema.org markup. Here's a quick company website example:
<script type="application/ld+json">
{"@context" : "http:...
- 4,023
20
votes
How unique should articles be for better Google SEO
It is critical! If it's not unique in some way you become another of the useless, pointless, needless web sites that are among the millions thinking they can make money repeating what others do but, ...
- 4,639
20
votes
How unique should articles be for better Google SEO
Let's be upfront about this. This is blackhat.
The very concept you are pursuing is what I call "city-state spamming". That is, creating "content" (to use the term loosely) for every possible of ...
20
votes
Shield Icons on Google Results Page
I am almost certain that those shield icons are not a Google Search feature, as I have never seen or heard of them before and cannot find any mention of them on the internet. If my hunch is correct, ...
- 16.3k
19
votes
Accepted
What are the friendly/rich URLs in Google Search result snippets called?
This is Google's Breadcrumb Markup, that renders this in the google search result rich snippet.
More information can be found here:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/breadcrumbs
- 1,714
15
votes
Shield Icons on Google Results Page
This looks similar to the Avast Browser Extension, as mentioned on Sitepoint:
Only people who have this extension will see these shields. If I recall, it's not difficult to accidentally install this ...
- 390
14
votes
Site was hacked, need to remove all URLs starting with + from Google, use robots.txt?
I'm going to answer the 2nd question.
I was wondering if there is a quick way other than to manually remove
these URLs from the google webmaster tools?
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/...
- 156
13
votes
Accepted
Which one does Google prefer, Microdata or JSON-LD?
The document that recommends JSON-LD is more recent and it clearly states that Google recommends using JSON-LD where possible (over Microdata) specifically for the following reasons:
"The markup does ...
- 2,644
12
votes
Should Schema.org Organization data about my company be on every page?
A quick point on this. A site I work on recently got a manual action penalty from Google for having organization JSON-LD markup across every single page on their domain. It didn't affect rankings of ...
- 141
11
votes
How unique should articles be for better Google SEO
You need original content for each page of your site. Even 300 words sounds a light to describe places in the world. There are entire guidebooks written about different places in the world.
...
- 99.3k
9
votes
Accepted
Page blocked by robots.txt showing up in site: search results with a description that is a mix of Chinese, English, and German
Google includes uncrawlable pages in the index when they are linked from other sites.
That means that a link to the website like<a href="domain.com/en">[CHINESE] - Hey nighthawk</a> can ...
- 99.3k
9
votes
How do I get Google to mark my website as "safe" in the search results with a small green icon?
This looks like the output of a browser extension, which means only users with the extension installed will see the badge.
For example, Mcafee SECURE Safe Browsing place a similar badge next to "safe"...
- 191
9
votes
Find pages that link to another URL?
Webmaster Tools has a feature that allows you to see which sites link to your site.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/external-links
It should be a comprehensive list of all links that Google ...
- 4,813
9
votes
How does Google judge page performance if audience is from one specific region & server is also in same region
Google measures speed from the US. However, for SEO, Google doesn't actively penalize sites unless they are very slow. Unless your pages (without JS, CSS, and images) takes more than 7 seconds ...
- 99.3k
9
votes
Special characters from ISO-8859-1 encode website come out mangled (�) in Google search results
Google is getting confused because while the page is ISO-8859-1, some content is loaded into the page in UTF-8. This causes Googlebot to have to re-encode the content page content as UTF-8 so that it ...
- 99.3k
9
votes
Shield Icons on Google Results Page
Traced them to AVG! According to their Getting Started guide:
The AVG Online Security browser extension displays information about the browsing quality of the websites you visit based on ratings from ...
- 189
8
votes
Accepted
How do you get Google to show wiki information about your site in the right side bar of the search results?
You are talking about a branded "card" which comes from the knowledge graph.
In essence, you have to think in terms of RCS (real company [****] stuff) which is something Google says they looks for. ...
- 32.9k
8
votes
Does Google expand searches to include terms in first results?
Nope - what you're seeing is the result of an out of date index.
Things to notice:
The dates in the results. Notice that they're from September.
One of the results clearly displays the barcode in the ...
- 201
8
votes
Accepted
How do I "noindex" a text (.txt) file?
The solution is the same as for X-Robots noindex a folder of PDFs and Prevent XML sitemaps from showing up in Google search results. You use the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header rather than a meta tag. ...
- 99.3k
7
votes
Page blocked by robots.txt showing up in site: search results with a description that is a mix of Chinese, English, and German
robots.txt prevents pages from being specifically unindexable
You read that right.
Make the page crawlable and unindexable
To make sure a page does not appear in Google search results, make sure it is ...
- 529
7
votes
Is it possible to outrank Google for a search term on their own search engine?
This question is very subjective, but anyway...
Is it possible to rank higher than Google for the keywords "webmaster forum".
Yes, I imagine it's possible, but extremely difficult. You're going to ...
- 43k
7
votes
Accepted
How to change which image from website is shown in Google search result?
The issue you've cited is because Google is unable to determine which is your main image and that is why, it randomly pics an image on that page to show on the SERP result.
It is also dependent on ...
- 866
7
votes
Accepted
Why does Google change / mispell my very site name?
Radiom is not a term. Radio is. Google is using n-gram analysis and term ontologies trying to understand your domain name for semantic value. The best it can come up with is radio and M. If, for ...
- 32.9k
7
votes
URLs with 'NoIndex` in robots.txt are being indexed by Google
"noindex" directives should not be used in your robots.txt file, instead a noindex meta tag should be added to any pages that you don't want indexed in Google.
A NOINDEX tag looks like the below and ...
7
votes
After verify site ownership is it ok to remove html meta tag from index html file?
After verifying site ownership, is it ok to remove the <meta name="google-site-verification"> tag?
No. If you want to remove it and remain verified, you'll need to use another form of ...
- 582
6
votes
How to find all the pages on my site with URLs all start with this same prefix
You are using the site and inurl operators incorrectly.
Start with the site operator, and add your domain name without http/s and www prefix:
site:neduet.edu.pk
Then use inurl to specify the URL ...
- 6,147
6
votes
Accepted
Is it possible for Google to disregard my canonical tag?
Early 2018 update to Google Search Console will now tell you if it's overridden a page with a different canonical:
Google chose different canonical than user: This URL is marked as canonical for a ...
- 3,207
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible