Google sends its crew of crawlers, Googlebot, from the United States. That is where 99% of the crawling originates from. If you are not allowed to show your website to users based in the United States, then you also cannot show that website to Googlebot.

Google has updated the help document on how to verify your business to say “we may require you to verify by more than one method.” So if you verify using one method, Google might decide it needs you to verify again but using a different method.

You may end up confusing Google when you have “garbage” parameters trailing in your URLs, espesially when it comes to translated content parameters. There is this interesting conversation when a large multilingual site found its translated content excluded from Google Search with a “crawled currently not indexed” status.

It is time for the March 2022 Google webmaster report, where I look back at the past 30-days of SEO news related to Google and highlight the most important changes over that time period. This month we had a confirmed rollout begin of the page experience update for desktop, we learned about an update to the Pirate update, a new shopping ranking factor and more.

Greg Sterling, a search industry analyst (amongst other things), posted a poll on Twitter asking where will Google be in ten years from now. The vast majority of responses said Google will still be dominate in 10 years from now, while only 13% said it will have been replaced by something else.

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. IndexNow has grown more support over the past week…

Allie Margeson from Whitespark noticed that the Google local pack in the search results is no longer a static map. The map is now interactive and lets searchers zoom in and out, move the map around, hover over businesses to see the names and reviews and even click on the map to go to a specific local business.

Last week, Microsoft Bing announced over the course of three days that IndexNow gained support from Duda (a sponsor here), the All In One WordPress plugin and Rank Math SEO Plugin. This brings support for IndexNow to millions of sites, up from well under a million sites using it last time we checked.

Google’s John Mueller said again that Google does not use the link disavow files for discovery of spammy link networks. He said on Twitter “usually problematic link networks are easier to recognize in other ways. I don’t think the disavow tool would be a very useful signal there.”

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter “it’s never that site A always ranks above site B.” He was asked if Medium articles always rank better than articles found on LinkedIn and John said no. He added “there’s no special search ranking for any particular site.”

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter “we generally don’t use color as a factor.” He then added “but CSS tweaks can include a lot more than just color changes.” We know that making site changes can impact your rankings but John has said numerous times before, just making color changes should not impact your rankings.