Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

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…

Google gives every hostname its own allocated crawl budget. So that means each domain, subdomain, etc has its own unique crawl budget.

Many Google AdSense publishers have been reporting massive declines in their earnings and RPMs (page revenue per thousand impressions) since late February. This comes a couple of weeks after we…

As I mentioned briefly in my Friday video recap, I was starting to see renewed chatter on Friday morning around more Google search ranking volatility. I spotted some renewed chatter…

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

This week, we covered that the Google March 2024 core update is still rolling out 38 days later, but we saw more volatility this week. Just a reminder that the…

Google once again said that its indexing systems are completely independent of its ranking updates, like the core update. Gary Illyes from Google said indexing, canonicalization, and those types of…

Google has made some changes to its new Structured data carousels (beta) documentation to list the feature availability of this carousel and also to clarify where to place the markup….

John Mueller from Google said that ranking well in the Google Shopping or Google Image vertical boxes does not impact your ranking in the core web results. He said, “I…

Google is testing a “mentioned” button that shows other people mentioned in the knowledge panels in the Google Search results. We saw variations of “mentioned by” in Google Discover and…

Google has updated the Suggest an edit feature within Google Maps business listings. Google said the new flow is “easier” and should help make updates to the Google Maps data.

Last week marked the first-ever official Google SEO-focused event in Romania ‘” Search Central Live Romania ‘” on a sunny 4th of April in Bucharest. As a Search Central Product…

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

Over the past few weeks, Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, has been replying to complaints about some examples of search results being not just low-quality but also potentially harmful and…

The SEO topic of using a 404 versus a 410 error status code for pages not found is one of those topics that has been around for the past two…

We recently covered Google labeling the Google Ads with Related to your search labels and now we are seeing Google label ads with “People also consider” labels. Why is Google…

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, confirmed that the search company is now closing the site command search operator. He said this after there were some complaints about the operator not…

Google is testing replacing the “call” button in the Google Ads, including Local Service Ads, with a “get phone number” button. This is a much longer phrase to use, but…

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. I am seeing…

As the Google March 2024 core update hits the 36th day of its rollout, we are seeing more ranking fluctuations and volatility being reported both by the Google tracking tools…

As a reminder, with the release of the Google March 2024 core update, the old Google helpful content update is no longer a thing. As we reported, Google has incorporated…

Google’s John Mueller had another one-liner, this one he said, “keep in mind that SEO is not really about magic.” This was in response to trying to SEOs trying to…

Google Ads has a new warning notification within the Google Ads reports that reads, “The search location doesn’t match this campaign’s location targeting settings.” This is a way for Google…

Google has published its yearly update for its Merchant Center product data specification. Some of the changes listed below went into effect yesterday, April 9, while some go into effect…

Microsoft is testing removing the estimated number of search results count in the Bing Search results interface. This comes after Bing began testing removing the cache link from the search…

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 SGE is…

Google Image search now has pixel-level segmentation of objects in the foreground as you swipe from one image to the next. We saw this being tested on product images within…

Google is once again testing a larger font size in the search box in the mobile search results. We saw this back in 2021 with the mobile search box, also…

Google is testing adding a “short videos” option in the search menu bar, so you can filter your search results by shorter videos. This, I guess, is in addition to…

Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads Liaison, said again “Ad Strength is not used in the auction.” She wrote this on X in response to an article on Search Engine Land named…

Google is testing showing tabs within the AI overviews within Google SGE, the Search Generative Experience. When you swipe through the tabs, the generative AI changes based on the tab…

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. Bing is testing…

Bing is testing removing the cache link from its search results. This is something Google tested for a few months prior to officially dropping the cache link from its search…

Bing is testing showing what Google calls from sources across the web in its Bing Search results. Bing shows a listing of the various options based on your query and…

Since before last year’s holiday season, we have been seeing a “Shop All Deals” banner-like ad in the Google Search results for e-commerce and other queries. Boyd Norwood from nozzle.io…

Google is testing a sticky sponsored label in the Google Search results as you scroll down the search results and scroll past various Google Ads. The sponsored labels disappear as…

Google’s John Mueller recommended that you do not disallow your internal footer links. A Reddit thread asked, “Should I disallow some pages that are in footer?” John replied, “If you…

Today is the total solar eclipse and while we know about the neat Google Search solar eclipse easter egg, today, Google has a special Doodle for the total eclipse of…

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

This week, I posted the big Google Webmaster Report for April; it is an excellent place to catch up quickly on the news. Google’s March 2024 core update had some…

Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, explained that while SEOs hate to see Reddit and other forum threads show up so often in the Google Search results, searchers like seeing them….

Google is testing labeling product images in the product grid search results with a label that says “product.” I am unsure if this is Google mislabeling the percent discount tag…

Microsoft is testing showing more grouped cards in the Bing Search knowledge panel design that it launched earlier this year. Bing is showing four more cards, by splitting some of…

Google is testing showing local carousels, local search results to Business Profile listings, within the related searches section. It seems off but Google is sub-categorizing them with the types of…

Google is testing showing four images, instead of three images, in its search results. This is a small change but it does give more publishers a chance to show their…

Google has a special easter egg in its search results for the upcoming solar eclipse. When you search for solar eclipse, you are shown a sun that gets covered by…