Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

Google’s John Mueller said he thinks, and he said he might be wrong, that the final mobile-first indexing batch will be done in the next couple of months. Desktop indexing…

Google is testing a more results button with a bit more design, the button expands or refines your query in the people also ask section. Normally you just see a…

Google is now testing adding labels to the product detail side panel when you click on a product in the Google Search popular products grid. The labels spotted include a…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if Google Search Console will show links from a redirected domain to the new domain in the links report in Search Console. The answer is…

Google has announced a new big search ranking algorithm update named the helpful content update – yes, Google named it that. This update will start to roll out next week…

Aleyda Solis posted a Twitter poll asking “in what area do you expect to allocate more resources/efforts in SEO this year?” She said you should base it on what you…

After initially going live on Wednesday morning, Microsoft did not officially announce the launch of Copilot Search in Bing until late Friday afternoon. Microsoft said, “Copilot Search seamlessly blends the…

Google announced new features and reporting for Google Analytics 4 including behavioral modeling in real-time reporting, custom channel reporting for data-driven attribution, and integration with Campaign Manager 360. Plus, Google…

Google Search had an incredibly volatile month of July and it ended the month with a huge bang. The volatility in the Google Search results yesterday, July 31st, going into…

Google’s John Mueller said that simply adding individual pages won’t impact how Google crawls your site. Crawl budget generally is only impacted by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of…

Google released only nine confirmed search ranking algorithm updates this year. Don’t worry, there were a lot more unconfirmed updates this year that we covered and it was a very…

Chris Silver Smith noticed how Google has updated its Google Maps contributed content policy and removed a line that prohibited review-gating. The line that was removed was “don’t discourage or…

Every year John Mueller of Google makes a big effort to help respond to both SEO-related questions and just to wish individuals in the community a Merry Christmas on Christmas…

Google announced on Twitter yesterday that the Search Console snapshot in the search results now also supports domain properties. This is a snapshot card of some of the higher level…

The updated Google Search Quality Raters guidelines last week and added an example of that it considers the “lowest quality pages.” In section 4.7 it states the only mention of…

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’s Search Off The Record podcast had Danny Sullivan, John Mueller and Martin Splitt on the topic of Google ranking updates. While most of what was talked about is not…

To start things off, I quickly covered the monthly Google webmaster report. Google also had some big unconfirmed update on or around October 28th. Google confirmed a search bug with…

I often post about Google ranking volatility and search ranking algorithm updates but I rarely post about them on a weekend. But I just had to this Sunday morning; the…

Microsoft is working to bring its new Deep Search feature to Copilot, formerly known as Bing Chat. The issue is, (1) Deep Search is only available to a limited number…

Google is in the process of reworking its popular SEO starter guide, which it initially released in 2010. The starter guide is about 8,500 words right now, but it will…

Today marks the two-week and one-day mark since the Google helpful content update started to roll out and by the time I am writing this (at 5:30 am ET on…

So we had Google confirm that the October 2022 spam update finished Friday morning, the morning of October 21st. The tracking tools and chatter were somewhat mild but that makes…

We had yet another biggish unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update on November 4th and 5th. Google also removed the annotation about the search features bug and added a Discover…

I’ve been checking for the past week, multiple times per day, and just now, Google has launched the Chanukah/Hanukkah decorations for the 2021 season. Chanukah starts this Sunday night, so…

Google’s John Mueller confirmed that the search company’s 2014 guidance with faceted navigation remains true today – do not use non-standard URL encoding. That means do not use commas, brackets…

It has been just about a year now since Microsoft launched Bing Chat (now known as Copilot) and Bing’s market share has only grown less than 1% according to StatCounter….

Some in the SEO industry have been asking if Google has been showing fewer links in its search results to Reddit over the past several weeks. So Mordy Obserstein pulled…

Google has confirmed it has fixed the search ranking bug that started over four days ago. The issue was first confirmed by Google on Friday morning, August 16th at around…

Google has made changes to a few of its Google search help documentation over the past couple of days. The documents updated include HTTP status codes, the Googlebot and job…

Yelp has officially filed a lawsuit against Google for allegedly using its monopolistic powers to give Google an unfair advantage in local search and local search ads. “For years, Google…

For the original iTunes version, click here. Well over a week after the Google August 2024 core update finished, we still have a ton of volatility. Apple Visual Intelligence was…

We are all expecting to see Bing Chat support third-party plugins really soon, and for now, Bing is testing it. We now see some screenshots of plugin support in Bing…

Google’s John Mueller was asked on Twitter if 301 redirected links pass full credit or not. John responded that “I wouldn’t see it as “full credit or not”, but rather…

Google’s John Mueller recommended the obvious (as I write this I am asking myself why write it but hey, sometimes the obvious needs to be reminded). If you have SEO…

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 its…

Google’s John Mueller was asked about thin content issues on the last webmaster hangout and John explained this generally applies to the site as a while and not a page…

The term, The Great Decoupling has really been catching on over the past couple of weeks. It is being used to describe what we are seeing with impressions and clicks…

Google has updated the Understanding page experience in Google Search results help document to clarify how page experience and core web vitals are used or not used as signals for…

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

Google’s John Mueller said on Reddit that when it comes to linking from your site to your social medial profiles you should not nofollow those links. He added that you…

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 now says…

I am seeing some massive volatility being reported today after seeing a spike in chatter within the SEO community on Friday. I have not seen the third-party Google tracking tools…

Google is testing showing two people also ask featured snippets in a single question expansion. This acts similar to the multifaceted featured snippets and the new featured snippet design we…

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 a…

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 Search now supports a new IPTC digital source type for images which seems to be about reading if an image was made in help with AI. Google added compositeWithTrainedAlgorithmicMedia…

I know we are coming off a heated and very nerve-wracking election day but I am noticing some big Google Search ranking volatility kicking up in the past 24-hours. It…

There is a Reddit thread I found via John Mueller that claims a site owner woke up to an additional $80,000 in monthly traffic. The person said that over the…

There may be another indexing issue in Google Search. None of the articles I posted this morning on this site are showing yet in Google Search, even when I search…

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…

When Google announced it is rolling out AI Overviews in the US search results and last year when Google launched SGE in labs, SEOs and content creators wanted to know…

There was a lot of speculation that Google would remove the Search Notes feature from the Google Search labs results last May after living past its official end date of…

Google Business Profiles seems to be expanding which businesses can add and edit the languages they offer support it. This is the language assistance option that Google first introduced in…

In December, we reported that Google was experimenting with something they call AI Mode. Well, now, we have more details and even screenshots of AI Mode in Google Search.

Typically, Google Discover shows content that is less than a day old, but it can show content that is weeks, months, or even years old. However, typically, Google will show…

Google’s John Mueller if a claim found on an SEO website that says “recognized by Google as an agencies as SEO specialists in SEO for Real Estates” is legit. The…

Google sent out emails to Local Service Ads advertisers notifying them that their Google Business Profile accounts are not affiliated to your Local Service Ads account. That means your reviews…

Google’s John Mueller responded to a complaint that Google’s search algorithms around crawling and indexing are being lazy. John said on Twitter “algorithms like those used for crawling & indexing…

Last week we reported on the early signs of big Google Search ranking volatility, fluctuations, chatter within the search results. We just don’t know if that was related to the…

Over the past few months Google has been auto-selecting background colors not just for image search results and not just for shading Google Shopping Ads but also for images added…

Google seems to be testing (or maybe it is a bug) the local panel sub-menu under the main search bar, under the search box. Normally, these sub-menu items would be…

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

Google is testing a new design for the mobile search result snippets. Google is boxing in the snippet, the description text, of a specific listing in a gray-shaded curved box.

Google’s John Mueller responded to questions around image SEO, specifically explaining that while the image itself and the alt text is useful, so is the page that image is embedded…

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 posted the…

Google’s John Mueller said in a video he posted yesterday that the feedback submitted and Google collected around the March 2024 core update has “been really helpful in evaluations and…

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

I am seeing a significant spike in chatter from within the SEO community about a possible Google Search ranking update and/or heavy volatility happening starting October 31st. Let’s call it…

For the past few days, Google Business Profiles has a bug when you try to edit existing Google Posts or Google Updates. I confirmed this myself when writing this story…

Google Maps announced a bunch of updates for the iOS and Android app including the prices of tolls, displaying traffic lights and stop signs on the map and additional iOS…

The new Google Search, the Google Search Generative Experience, now shows AI-generated answers for recipe queries. I am told it did not show in early releases of SGE but sometime…

An SEO asked Google’s John Mueller if it is okay or even a good idea to publish blank or empty pages so Google can find those URLs? John Mueller said…

There is no doubt that Google is going through a rough patch right now on many fronts. Between all the complaints about search quality, all the search bugs, the revelations…

Google’s John Mueller said that if you make your content creation decisions based off of keyword search volume lists, then those pieces of content will be mediocre, at best. John…

In February, we covered how Google’s AI Overviews really hurt the click-through rate of the search results and paid ads. Well, several more recent studies have come out that back…

If you are on an HTTP site and you decide to migrate the site to HTTPS, it is common practice to update all of your internal links from the HTTP…

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”…

When you create a Google Business Profile and now go into creating service areas, Google may now offer you a list of suggested service areas in your region. Just be…

A new data report from Rand Fishkin at Sparktoro says that Google Search has seen 21.64% growth in searches year over year. This comes after his study that showed 1/3rd…

On Friday, Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, shared some internal documents showing how he complies some of the feedback from SEOs online and then prepares that feedback to share with…

Google announced a new robots.txt report within Google Search Console and at the same time said it will sunset the old robots.txt tester tool. The new tool shows which robots.txt…

Google has rolled out a new interface to view your historical Google Posts within Google Business Profiles. Now the interface is a scrollable list view.

Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, was asked about if a business should always have a website and if so, should they also have a blog. Sullivan replied that he believes…

This week, we covered that Google told creators that a new search ranking update is coming fairly soon, but you shouldn’t expect to recover with this update. Google is now…

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

The SEO community is buzzing about some recent U.S. Department of Justice documents released that hint at some ranking concepts at Google. One slide is named “The 3 Pillars of…

Google’s John Mueller said in the last Google SEO office-hours from December 2023 that there is no such thing as perfect SEO. He said, “in fact no SEO is perfect.”

Google announced it has renamed the Google Ads extensions to “assets” plus it has released new workflows, tools and reports to “make it easy for you to deliver more engaging…

As expected, although it took a lot longer than we thought, Google announced it will be replacing the FID metric with the INP metric for its Core Web Vitals. This…

Google has confirmed that AI Mode reporting will be coming to Google Search Console. It is currently not yet in Search Console, but it will be coming as part of…

Google has finished rolling out both the September 2022 core update and product reviews update on Monday, September 26th – yes, there is a lot of confusion. Google fixed a…

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…

I am seeing signs of yet another intense Google search ranking update and intense ranking volatility yesterday and into today, June 4th and 5th. Many of the tools are showing…

Google’s John Mueller said on Mastodon that using AI or ChatGPT blindly for title tag generation is not a great idea. But he did add that if you are running…