Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

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

I have been continuing to update the May 9th Google ranking volatility story, but it is super unusual to see such heated volatility for such a long period within the…

Google is testing a new button for the Local Service Ads to “message multiple businesses” instead of just messaging one business at a time. We saw something like this before,…

Google’s John Mueller was asked when can a site expect to recover from the September 2023 helpful content update, assuming the site took all measures to “fix” their site. John…

A bunch of local SEOs are buzzing about a possible new local SEO Google ranking factor and are looking to confirm it. Darren Shaw posted on X that while setting…

Google AdSense planned on changing the minimum reporting thresholds for Custom Channels and Search Styles to 100 clicks per day on May 15th. But Google sent an email to AdSense…

There are many searchers who have been using Google daily that are heading to the Google Web Search Help forums to ask how they can turn off the new AI…

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 AI Overviews…

Google, as expected, has officially launched AI Overviews in the US and will expand the launch to other countries by the end of this year. AI Overviews were in Search…

Google not only announced that AI Overviews are rolling out in the US this week but a number of new AI based search features coming out later in Google Search…

In February, we caught Google testing a new search filter named “Web Results.” Well, last night it went live under the name “Web.” You can now filter search results to…

Bloomberg reports that Google has downgraded/lowered the search rankings of Deepfake porn sites. Bloomberg wrote, The company is lowering such content in search rankings, a spokesperson said, adding Google is…

Google may be showing more review stars in the mobile search results, according to some reports. RankRanger six-point lift in how often review stars are showing in mobile search, while…

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 I/O was…

Gary Illyes from Google confirmed that Google has “suddenly” dedindexed a “vast amount of URLs” from the Google Search index this past February. He said this was done because Google’s…

Six months ago, I covered the famous (non) “buckle up” comments about the changes coming to Google Search over the next several months. Well, Andy Simpson posted a recording of…

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, said yesterday on X that he has read the feedback from the community related to the March 2024 core update and the general feedback…

For over a decade now, I’ve been talking about Google adding an automated action viewer to Google Search Console to accompany the manual action viewer. This would provide a way…

About 45 minutes before OpenAI’s announcement of GPT-4o, Google posted on X a demo of new Gemini capabilities where you show Google Gemini something on your camera via a live…

Google announced and emailed advertisers that they are changing the functionality of Google Ads accounts that are suspended. These changes go into effect in June 2024 and will limited what…

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 explains the…

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, posted on X explaining the differences between algorithm updates, like core updates, and then data refreshes, the data that goes into those ranking systems. This…

Google Ads will be modifying its disclosure policy for event ticket sale. The update will say that the “disclosures should be easily visible and clearly explained in the top 20%…

Gary Illyes from Google said on LinkedIn that Google Search Console doesn’t “keep (almost) any data for un/de-indexed.”

About a week ago, we reported that Google began enforcing its new site reputation abuse policy by issuing manual actions and ranking penalties for those sites that violated those policies….

In April 2023 and December 2023 Google changed how it classifies what it would consider video pages. In short, the video on the page needs to be the main piece…

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 says site…

For the original iTunes version, click here. Google may have had two search ranking algorithm updates, one around May 9th and one around May 3rd. Google began its site reputation…

Mikhail Parakhin, the former head of Bing Search and Microsoft Advertising at Microsoft, confirmed he is no longer working on the Copilot project. He stepped down as the head of…

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, made it crystal clear that the site reputation abuse policy has zero to do with linking. This means that who you link to and/or who…

Google can show the owner of the business in the local panels in the Google search results. I suspect this is not new but I don’t believe I’ve seen this…

Google has updated its Local Services Ads help document on ad rankings to remove the line around “proximity to potential customers’ locations” is a ranking factor for those ads. Ginny…

Google has sent some Google Merchant Center e-commerce site managers notifications that a new annotation may begin to show up in the search results next to their site’s listing that…

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. There is another…

I am seeing signs of a possible Google search ranking update today, May 9th, between a spike in early chatter this morning within the SEO industry and many of the…

A week ago, we saw Google renamed the AI overview experimental results to simple “AI Answers.” Well, that didn’t seem to last long. Google renamed it back to “AI Overview”…

Google is testing a new button to add a note to the search results. As a reminder, Google launched Notes in Google Search and Discover last November as a labs…

Google Analytics has a new beta Google Ads report named “conversion performance.” This is a beta feature right now, so you might not be able to see it. But you…

Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, was interviewed by Emily Chang at Bloomberg before the big Google I/O event. They talked a lot about a lot of things, but there was 25-second…

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

Microsoft’s disclosure of search ads on Bing has not been the greatest, honestly, in many cases, worse than Google’s disclosures. Recently, however, Bing has been testing a clearer distinction between…

Here is a new SEO myth I have not heard before… Someone said that using the word “news” in your site’s name is bad for SEO and Google ranking. John…

Microsoft Advertising, the ads you see in Bing, have these “Marketing with Purpose Attributes” ad labels with carbon-neutral labels. Those labels used to be gray, but now Bing has them…

Google is now showing these short summaries of reviews by placing a label over the review with one or a few words. So the labels might show “low quality,” “compact,”…

Google has updated the page where you view, reply and report reviews for your Google Business Profile listing. Joy Hawkins spotted the change and she says it seems to be…

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 has started…

Google said it began to enforce its new site reputation abuse policy last night. The policy went into effect on Sunday, May 5th, but Google did not announce it would…

I am slow to report on this but figured I’d document it just in case some of you noticed ranking volatility and fluctuations on or around May 3rd and May…

Google Ads has launched Performance Max for Marketplaces. This is designed to help you sell your goods or services on specific marketplaces using Performance Max.

It seems Google has fully removed the number of results found, the results count, from the Google Search results page. It was removed from the Google Search Generative Experience last…

The Google Ads Liaison, Ginny Marvin, said the rumors of Google auditing 25% of Google Ads accounts are false. She wrote, “The rumor about Google auditing 25% of Google Ads…

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 says sites…

Google’s John Mueller said again this morning that sites hit by the old September helpful content update or even new core updates can recovery. He said on X and on…

Over the past week, many have been windblown by Statcounter reporting that Google lost significant market share in the US and worldwide from March to April 2024. It turns out…

Google’s John Mueller said on X that he believes Google will remove the disavow link tool “at some point” in the future. Bing dropped the disavow links tool from Bing…

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,…