Google Search Console

My personal site has been recently penalized by Bing, or if you prefer different naming for it - secretly blacklisted or shadowbanned. Don’t know exactly why but by the end of January 2023 I lost every indexed page that had been in Bing.

Do you have a website or blog where you publish new things, either daily or from time to time?

Do you know that you can publish them in Google News?

Recently, when I read one of the articles on 9to5mac noticed, that after their post they got this neat feature.

An option to follow their site through Google News.

It gives them an additional way to get more visitors but also convinces them to stay connected with their content.

My first impression was… I want this as well on one of my websites, so I start exploring how to do that. When I did that, I have been surprised at how relatively easy it was without any extra work from myself. By utilising the website RSS Feed and going through initial configuration and approval (that took approximately 2-3 days) my first site was live and posts were updated when published.

This is another reason to say that RSS is not dead and it still matters.

Here is how I did that and how you can do it as well!

Not so far ago I elaborated on adding copyright information for images on a Hugo-based website. Through this approach, I managed to learn how to get images per post, then list and use in Schema for Images.

Recently, when I read updated Google image SEO best practices I noticed a section called Use an image sitemap where we read:

“You can provide the URL of images we might not have otherwise discovered by submitting an image sitemap”.

I decided to see how I can implement that into my Hugo website.

Do you write on your website a series of frequently asked questions (FAQs) and try to answer them? Do you know that putting text on a website is not enough to gain traction? Even if your questions and answers are unique and could be desired by users, they may never find their audience.

Playing with the SEO aspect may help, but if we concentrate only on the surface – visible part, we will still be missing out. What is important is what beneath, just in the background. This is how we can simply describe what is Schema.

Structured data (Schema) is presented on a website in a way that is not visible to an ordinary visitor but processed, when found, by search engines.

Schema is very important and will be even more this year (2023), as mentioned directly by many people at Google.

To get your question-answers into search engines you should put your interest into the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Schema.

Here is how I did this on some of the websites that I made with Hugo.

When Google is releasing their search engine updates, there is always a lot of action and a lot of discussions around. Everybody is looking for the impact of the update on their website and position in search engines.

By the end of August 2022, Google comes with a Helpful Content Update (HCU). This highly appreciated (by content creators) update suppose to penalise low-content websites and those generated by AI. I have been happy about it and knew, that none of my websites will be affected, and I was right!

Just today, on the 23rd of July Yummy Recipes UK is celebrating the third month from the lunch of the website. We (me, from the development side, and my friend, from the content) didn’t see what was coming.

At the lunch the ambitions were high, but also reality brings us down a bit, as we saw plenty of cooking websites around that we will need to compete with.

During the first two months social media, mainly Facebook, dominates in popularity. Over 1000 people on average viewed each recipe that we shared, whereas our website got only a portion of visits.

It’s not very often that I am finding something new in a tool that I am using constantly, every single day. Unless it’s announced as a new feature, I would not expect to find something, that is like a holy grail!