Google’s John Mueller made it sound like making site changes in the spirit of accessibility won’t result in a Google penalty or violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. John said on Twitter “I don’t see a problem.”

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that mobile intrusive interstitial elements won’t generally impact indexing but it can have a ranking impact. This goes back to the old Google Intrusive Interstitials Mobile penalty.

I’ve been asking Google for a month now how big of a change was the title change – where did it go from and to? Well, Google did tell us it uses HTML title tags 80% of the time but it didn’t tell us what that number was before. Now Google changed it to use it 87% of the time. What was it before the change, I am not sure.

Google’s John Mueller was asked on Twitter if the sitemap ping tool still works or not. John said that he is “not aware of any changes there, and the URL seems to be responding to get requests as usual.” In fact, the official documentation still has this as an option.

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that he doesn’t think that Google does “anything special with all-caps headings.” So if you want to shout your headlines in UPPERCASE, go for it.

Last weekend we saw a long and large Google search ranking update lasting for about four days…

Google’s John Mueller said in one of his #AskGooglebot short video answers that changing your WordPress theme can directly impact your rankings in Google Search. It obviously depends on what is changing with the website when you change the theme, but in general, it can impact your Google rankings.

Google’s John Mueller said that the search company has been working towards providing more “clear guidance” with its help document. This is as opposed to more “handwavy” types of documentation.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web. Google said that website theme changes can impact rankings…

We’ve seen Google ask searchers if they were or are happy with the search results. But I’ve never seen Google send a push notification to a searcher, after a search was done, asking them if the search was helpful. @SeoKristal received one the other day that asked her “how helpful was Google?”

Google has dropped the “website” button in the Google hotel search listings. Previously, if you clicked on a hotel listing, the listing detail page would show a “website” button. That button would take you to the hotel’s website landing page, to potentially book there…

When you go to Google Maps on desktop and place your cursor over a business listing, Google will overlay more details on that business. If you then move your cursor over the business images, you can navigate through the images in a carousel format.

If you search for [bbc news] and some other queries on Google Search you might run into a weird bug with Google’s pagination. Scroll down to the footer where you can go to the next page of results (like anyone does that) and you will see only a few pages, when there should be probably countless pages.

Microsoft is testing a new “compact view” in the Bing search results interface. It is a toggle you can turn on and off that makes the search results page, um, more compact.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…

This is just a programming note that I will be 100% offline starting Wednesday night (September 15th) through Thursday night (September 16th) for Yom Kippur. I am scheduling stories on Yom Kippur, anything posted would have been written prior to Yom Kippur. We have a white theme going up today around 3pm ET through all of Yom Kippur (as a reminder, so check it out).