Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

Google Search seems to be testing showing only local listings from Google Business Profiles for many “near me” types of queries. So when you search for [dentist near me] or…

A year ago, Google Gemini (formerly known as Bard) began linking to sources as citations and we rejoiced. Well, it looks like in most cases, Gemini has stopped linking to…

The new AI advanced version of Google Search, aka Google SGE or Search Generative Experience, provides wicked smart AI answers to your queries. And if you ask it how to…

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

I am deeply sad to report that Mark Irvine passed away unexpectedly last night. Mark was deeply involved in the search marketing community, known as being a brilliant paid search…

This week, we covered how the Google March 2024 core update finished back on April 19th, and Google forgot to tell us. I also posted the May 2024 Google webmaster…

One of the big worries for Google investors was the cost of running AI to show within its search results. The AI overviews, now AI answers are costly to run….

Gary Illyes from Google said he has heard from the SEO industry that hreflang can be “annoying” and complex and confusing. So he is open to ideas on how to…

Google has to crawl the web to build its index for it to provide search results. And since webpages and documents get updated, Google needs to recrawl those URLs from…

Google Search is testing custom filters and pre-define search filter templates. It appears you can save your custom filters and reuse those filters for future searches. This is showing up…

Google AdSense has removed reference to your privacy policy as a place to withdraw consent. AdSense now has clarified that the revocation link at the bottom of the page should…

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

In the past month, in Google-land, we have spoken a lot about the March 2024 core update, which ended on April 19th, a week before Google notified us it was…

Google’s John Mueller responded to some questions around why sites hurt by the September 2023 Google helpful content update have not recovered with March 2024 Google core update. He said…

Over the past week or so, I’ve seen two signals that OpenAI will launch its own search engine of sorts soon. The first is that search.chatgpt.com is showing in the…

Google Ads will automatically pause low-activity keywords starting in June 2024. That means campaigns with keywords that were created over 13 months ago and have zero impressions over the past…

A couple of weeks ago Forbes blocked its coupons directory on its website from being crawled by Google. Now Forbes has completely wiped out all the coupons from its site,…

Google Ads, Shopping Ads, Admob, and other Google Ads products will soon disallow deepfake sexual content, synthetic sexually explicit content, or synthetic content containing nudity services. I mean, this seems…

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 Ads posted…

Google Ads has posted its first new features announcement in its help section in over two months. This was to announce several Performance Max campaigns features, which we will get…

If you search for [flag GIF] on Google, click on the “waiving” refinement, you are taken to images of Nazi flags. I waited a full week to report on this,…

Fabrice Canel from Microsoft confirmed Microsoft has fixed a bug with Bing Webmaster Tools showing inaccurate and/or irrelevant notifications in the notifications and insights section. Fabrice wrote, “Happy to report…

Google is now labeling or using the title of its SGE, Search Generative Experience, “AI Answer.” This replaces the title “AI Overviews” and “Al overviews are experimental.” This change happened…

Google opened up its feedback form after it announced the Google March 2024 core update was completed and it seems most SEOs did not send Google feedback. Why? Maybe because…

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

Microsoft announced the general availability of Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform. This means you can now use Copilot (Microsoft’s AI) natural language conversational chat, asset recommendations, and image asset…

Last week, Shameem Adhikarath shared an example of an individual that shows up twice as two different entities in Google Search. It is like maybe Google was fed two distinct…

Tuta Mail, a popular encrypted email service, complained to European Union tech regulators that Google dropped its rankings for all sorts of keyword phrases with the Google March 2024 core…

One of my pet peeves is when people send me screenshots of pages they want me to read and do not include the URL to that page. Well, the Google…

Google has renamed the Product Sites search filter to Product Websites. These only really show up in the European regions and starting last week, Google renamed “Sites” to “Websites.”

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’s March 2024…

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, said that the search company will add the upcoming site reputation abuse policy to the spam reporting tool when the policy begins to be enforced.

A week ago, Anu Adegbola wrote a fabulous piece on some new privacy changes that may be coming to Google Chrome in the future named Chrome IP masking and how…

Google is auto-translating some of the content within the Google Knowledge Panels and blocks. So if you are in a location where you don’t only speak English, Google may show…

Apple Business Connect now lets you add links to your local listings that show up in Apple Maps. This is under the “actions” section that enables customers to order food,…

Google has for a long time used AI to write some knowledge panels. But now Google is labeling some of these AI written knowledge panels with “Al overviews are experimental”…

This is a programming note that I will be completely offline for the last days of the Passover holiday. The last days of Passover are on Monday and Tuesday…

The Google March 2024 core update finished a week ago and Google did not tell us until today. It finished officially on April 19, 2024, and took 45 days to…

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

Google’s core update is still rolling out over 7 weeks later and yes we are seeing more fluctuations and chatter. Forbes blocked its coupon directory in preparation for the Google…

Google has removed the feature to add publications manually to the Google Publisher Center. Instead, publications will be automatically added when Google’s algorithms decide to.

Google is testing placing the date in the snippet on the same line as the URL in the snippet. This is instead of placing it before the snippet’s description section.

Google is now sharing the Googlebot IP ranges for the User-triggered fetchers. User-triggered fetchers are from Google tools and product functions where the end user triggers a fetch.

Google and Microsoft both reported very good earnings, driving both stock prices up after hours. I like to dive into the ad revenue side, and it looks like Google Ad…

Google Ads is showing yet another new and fun notice to some advertisers. This one shows an impression issue for “Low keyword quality.” As a reminder, as for diagnostic insights,…

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

Over the past few days, while I was offline, the SEO chatter around the Google search ranking volatility continued to be super heated. The Google tracking tools seemed to calm…

Ed Zitron wrote a piece named The Man Who Killed Google Search. It goes through in detail how Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s former head of ads – led a coup so…

Google has updated its favicon documentation for Google Search to add definitions for each supported rel attribute value in the Google Search favicon documentation.

Google released version 16.1 of the Google Ads API yesterday. The update includes query assets for Demand Gen, more location service details, more support warnings, Target ROAS bid simulation and…

Want to scare an SEO? Just tell them they need to manage a site migration. Want to make an SEO faint? Tell them they need to manage to split a…

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

Google may be testing a new design for the Google Image search results. This design looks like a tablet-like interface that is more boxes, and, honestly, it seems like it…

Google’s John Mueller said the link best practices SEO documentation on its website are still “good guidelines” for both SEO and overall “accessibility & UX reasons.” The guidelines are only…

Google is testing placing the year the company was established on Google Ads. The ads have “established in” next to the ad description, so these seem to be ad extensions…

Microsoft is testing moving the lock icon in the Bing Search results snippets from the left of the URL to the right of the URL. Well, most of the time…

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

I am not sure how many times Google has said that you do not need to disavow spammy links, that you can ignore link spam attacks and that links pointing…

Gary Illyes from Google said on stage at the SERP conference last week that Google has taken steps to combat what some of us call parasite SEO in the most…

As you may remember, Mustafa Suleyman became the CEO of AI at Microsoft and then shortly after we heard that Mikhail Parakhin stepped down as the head of Bing Search…

Google Business Profiles now lets you select your preferred menu source. You have three options for your restaurant: create or copy a menu, copy from a website, or pick a…

When it comes to crawl budget and Google not crawling your site too much or too little, Google takes into account all Googlebot activity across all verticals. So that includes…

This is a programming note that I will be completely offline for the Passover holiday. Passover is on Tuesday and Wednesday…

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

Gary Illyes from Google spoke at the SERP Conf on Friday and he said what he said numerous times before, that Google values links a lot less today than it…

Google is testing showing answers in the Discussions and Forums section within the search results. Google will show the question and then add a shaded box with one of the…

Forbes has blocked its coupons section of its web site at forbes.com/coupons using an x-robots-tag: noindex directive prior to Google enforcing the upcoming site reputation abuse policy. As a reminder,…

Google is testing showing a “Post” button in the carousel of buttons in the Google Business Profile local listing panel. So when you view your owned business in Google Search,…

It is good to have choices but too many choices might not be good, said some wise man. Well, here is Google giving you 16 choices of bikes in the…

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

The Google March 2024 core update is still rolling out, almost 6 weeks now, and we saw two shifts of ranking volatility, both mid-week and the weekend before. Google’s Danny…

Google is testing another ad format, another card like format, for its search ads. We previously saw the vertical and tall ad cards, then the carousel horizontal card format and…

Google was asked if having two websites and Google finding out about them would cause the websites to drop in rankings. John Mueller from Google said that is “not likely,”…

Gary Illyes from Google said in the recent Google SEO office hours the Google Indexing API may work for unsupported content formats, but that you shouldn’t be “surprised if suddenly…

The topic of using hyphens in domain names is one of the oldest SEO topics we have in this space. Heck, in 2004, SEOs said there was a specific Google…

Fabrice Canel from Microsoft announced that BingBot now fully supports Brotli compression and will soon be testing zstd Zstandard compression, a lossless data compression, for its crawler.

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

There have been some people noticing that the Google Notes On Search labs experiment has an end date of May 2024 and thus they are expecting Notes on Search to…

Google has announced a number of new travel features with Google Maps and Travel around driving alternatives, trains and buses, travel impact mode and then some new EV driving direction…

On August 31, 2021, Google notified advertisers it would drop support for expanded text ads for responsive search ads. Google is now reminding advertisers that Ad customizers for text ads,…

Google has discontinued its support for video carousel markup and has thus removed it from its video structured data help documentation. Initially, Google tested video carousel on a limited number…

Google sent out emails a couple of days ago to businesses asking them to register their Automated External Defibrillator (AED) with Google Business Profiles. Google said, “you could save lives”…

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

I know we just reported on more volatility this Monday, possibly related to the Google March 2024 core update, but we are seeing even more volatility over the past 24…

Google Maps will soon stop supporting drafting reviews for local business listings and Google Business Profiles. Google said that starting July 16, 2024, review drafts will no longer be supported.

Google Search Console has a new security feature under user and permission management to help you manage your unused ownership tokens. Basically, it helps you manage who has permissions to…

Google Ads announced that Demand Gen campaigns are getting generative AI tools to create image assets. This is rolling out to advertisers around the world in English with more languages…

Google Search is testing horizontal lines under the sitelinks and the people also ask elements in the search results. This is a long horizontal line that goes across the while…

Martin Splitt from Google posted a one-line question asking, “Should we do something to explain the crawl stats report in GSC?” This was posted on Mastodon, which has a small…

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

Google’s new spam algorithm update also introduced new spam policies including the upcoming site reputation abuse policy that won’t go into effect until May 2024. Google has confirmed it will…

Google launched the style recommendations with thumbs up and down buttons not long ago after testing it in January. Now Google is showing this thumbs up and down buttons in…

Google has a similar products section and carousel for Google Ads sponsored listings. We have seen similar products and similar shopping related results from the organic / free listings but…

Google has clarified in its image search help documentation that images are only extracted from the src attribute of img tags in Google Search. This is not new, but Google…

Google AdSense announced a new auto ads format named “Ad intents.” Ad intents places links and anchors showing organic search results with ads into existing text and pages on your…

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

Recently, we covered some of Google’s rationale for ranking forums like Reddit and Quora so well in the Discussion and Forums box for many queries. Just a few days ago,…

Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of the Verge posted a new article with the intent to both rank for [best printer] in Google Search, as well as mock Google for how he…

On Friday, Google responded to a pending bill in the California state legislature, the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), that would require Google to pay a link tax to publishers…