Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

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

For the past few months now, Google has been saying there are big improvements coming to address some of the search quality issues we’ve all been seeing in the Google…

The Google Search team has made a number of relatively minor changes to its JavaScript documentation and also removed much of the dynamic rendering documentation, as it has been deprecated…

Google seems to have this loophole where you can essentially hijack or destroy a Google Business Profile that is also using Local Service Ads. What happens is if someone else…

Google seems to be having a bit of an issue with spam getting into its popular products section. This may be fed in through Google Merchant Center or normal rich…

Microsoft Advertising published its monthly what’s new feature announcing changes and new features to its advertising platform. Microsoft announced enhanced conversions is rolling out to more markets, new targeting options,…

Google Ads will stop supporting Commissions (per Stay) and Commissions (per Conversions) bid strategies for Hotel Ads in October 2024. Google says this is because third-party cookies are being phased…

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, the Google Search Liaison, gave a good analogy of the differences between ranking systems, ranking signals and ranking factors. He said signals and factors are the same, the…

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, said we should expect to see more clarification from Google on its creating helpful content page, specific to the section “Get to know E-E-A-T and…

Google is sending some domain holders who were with Google Domains and who are automatically being migrated to Squarespace notices that their Search Console verification may go away. This is…

Google is testing adding the ability to search for just web results, like you would filter by just video results, just image results, just news results, just shopping results and…

Last November, Google told its AdSense publishers that it would be switching how it pays them for the Google Ads they embed on their websites. Now, it seems like many…

Google Ads has some new bugs today, one that Google confirmed over advertisers received a notice for “confusing text” for their ads and the other not yet confirmed around advertisers…

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 doesn’t say…

Google’s Danny Sullivan said on Friday, “We don’t confirm any of the things [page experience or core web vitals] as a direct ranking factor.” He added, “But to reiterate we…

Google might be having some weird bug with XML sitemap files that have hyphens within the final name. So if your sitemap file name is /sitemap-10.xml it will trigger a…

On Friday afternoon, I was able to play a bit with Bing Deep Search, Microsoft’s “enhancement” to Bing Search that provides a “deeper and richer exploration of the web.” And…

As expected, Google has finally released its updated SEO starter guide and it was cut down in a big way. Google said this update was aimed at making it work…

Microsoft is officially testing a new version of the base model of Copilot (formerly known as Bing Chat), which they code-named Deucalion. Mikhail Parakhin from Microsoft confirmed this over the…

A couple of months ago, I documented how some Googlers have been removing some of their old posts (tweets) from X (Twitter). John Mueller from Google didn’t really comment on…

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

This week, we covered another Google Search indexing issue, plus this ongoing issue with recipes in the Google Search results. I suspect we will soon have a very big Google…

Are you ready for the big Google Webmaster report – well, here is the February 2024 edition. This month, Google confirmed an issue with teetering in and out results over…

Google seems to be testing two lines of text for sitelinks within the mobile search ads interface. So yea, double-line sitelinks in the search ads in the Google mobile search…

Google has released three new changes to its Google Ads Responsive Search Ads. First, Google may now show a single-line headline instead of two. Second, Google now lets you associate…

Google Search on the mobile interface can show a store button with an arrow on it, that if you click on it, it overlays a filter to filter results by…

Google announced it is testing generative AI technology to answer local specific questions within Google Maps. “Starting in the U.S., this early access experiment launches this week to select Local…

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

Google has announced that March 12, 2024 will be the official date for when Interaction to Next Paint (INP) will replace First Input Delay (FID) as a Core Web Vital…

Not only is Google having indexing issues this morning, but Google has been having issues with showing recipes in the carousel and images of recipes in search over the past…

Google’s John Mueller said that you don’t need to worry about those spammy emails you get asking to buy or trade links based on a certain DA or other link…

Google Business Profiles now lets you add products to your business profiles and merchant centers section using a barcode scanner; Google will even mail you a free barcode scanner. This…

We all have been seeing Google Search become more and more e-commerce and shopping-heavy. Well now we are seeing Google testing a specialized menu just for shopping features in the…

Google has confirmed it is working on resolving an indexing issue that it says is “affecting a small number of sites.” Google said that some “sites may experience slower than…

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

Google has a newish section named “Related categories nearby” that shows you various categories of products, when you click on the categories, it then shows you local stores nearby that…

Google is testing showing a “highly rated” label on the Google Local Services Ads (LSAs) listings. These are also named Google Screened, as you can see. I guess this filters…

Both Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising revenue were up this past quarter, year over year. Google ad revenue was up 11% and Microsoft Advertising revenue was up 8%. The previous…

Lily Ray asked Google’s John Mueller what does Google do with all the ranking signals from the content syndication partners when Google Search decides which URL should be the canonical….

Google seems to be testing a new option under the Google Ads “bulk actions” named “solutions.” Solutions gives you account summaries, ad performance and account anomaly detection options.

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

Google may have officially rolled out and launched the clippable feature for product snippets. We saw variations of this in the product results before and I thought it went live…

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, replied to with very specific feedback on a specific article on how to make that article more helpful. I figured I’d share those details,…

Google is testing showing a section in its search results titled “Results from the web” and “More results from the web.” I mean, why? Aren’t all Google Search results from…

Google has been launching changes to its search results in the European regions to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). We’ve seen tests of how this will change the…

Bing seems to be testing displaying ads on the left side bar of the Bing Search results. Previously, Bing had organic free listing details on that left side bar but…

Google Ads may be testing a new ad format that look more like those perspectives, where the ads are in these tall boxes or cards and those cards are on…

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

It has been almost 12 weeks since the last confirmed Google search ranking algorithm was released. That was the November 2023 reviews update. Before that was the November 2023 core…

Google seems to have launched a new feature for some restaurants to make corrections and updates to the feedback customers leave about their menus and dishes. This feature is called…

A new report says that custom Google Business Profile services also impact rankings, maybe to a lesser degree than normal services. This report was from the folks at Sterling Sky…

Google seems to be testing moving the reports around in the Google Ads advertiser console. There is a bit of a debate amongst advertisers if this is a good change…

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft introduced Copilot Pro, the paid premium version of Copilot, formerly known as Bing Chat. And on Friday, Microsoft finally added support for Copilot Pro…

Google has added the “add note” search labs notes feature to the URL bar and in SGE while browsing. This makes it way more visible to add a note to…

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 is cutting…

Google has confirmed that issue where sites would rank during the week and then not rank on the weekends – just wild. We had an unconfirmed Google ranking update this…

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…

Google is testing a price slider for some queries where narrowing by price may make sense. We’ve seen Google show price range sliders for products and price slider filters for…

Gary Illyes from Google said that the HTML structure for your web pages does not matter much for rankings. He said this on the latest Search Off The Record podcast,…

Just like Microsoft has been testing swapping out the Bing Chat link with the Copilot link within the Bing Search results pages, now Microsoft is testing swapping out the Bing…

Earlier this week, we reported that Google said we should expect a decline in the number of driving directions reported in the Google Business Profiles performance reporting tool. Well, the…

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

Google’s John Mueller had a nice one-liner again on X; he said, “Nobody can guarantee you traffic, sorry.” This means you can’t say making X changes will result in Y…

Google does not read or use the content within your HTML comments for Google Search or ranking purposes. Google’s John Mueller confirmed this once again saying, “Googlebot doesn’t understand your…

It looks like Google is testing an update to the Google Business Profile design where Google shows new icons and a slightly updated layout from the old version. The new…

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, said that Google may soon target or penalize recipe collection pages using recipe structured data, when recipe structured data should be used on pages that…

Google is testing showing video results on the right side of the search results page. Google tested this a few years ago, in a different format and now seems to…

After a couple of months of testing, it seems Google has now removed the cache link from the search results page. I no longer see a link to the Google…

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

I see signs of another unconfirmed Google Search ranking algorithm update. Right now, there is only one tool showing volatility, and that would be Semrush. The other tools are all…

Google has officially and fully launched the Google Ads AI conversational experience to all advertisers globally in English. Plus, it is now using Gemini, Google’s latest multimodal generative AI model.

Google has posted a notice within the Google Business Profiles performance report that it will stop sharing as much data under the driving directions report. Google said, “Starting in January…

Google is testing a “Chat with a live agent” button in the search result snippets. We have seen Google place the “Chat with a live agent” button in the local…

Microsoft is testing two new changes to the Bing Search interface. One is a bubble style for the search bar menu and the other is using bullets for the sitelinks…

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

Ever since December 2019 when Google removed the requirement for publishers to manually apply for inclusion into Google News, publishers have been pretty upset about the lack of transparency around…

Google has updated its Search Console performance reports to change how it evaluates impressions and clicks metrics with job listing and detail pages. Google said nothing has changed with how…

Google is now sending emails to publishers, app owners and others if their sites and apps are not compliant for GDPR EU User Consent Policy. The email says, “We may…

60% of SEOs are worried about the impact that the new Google Search Generative Experience will have on their jobs and performance. About 30% are not worried about Google SGE…

Google is showing a “viewed” label on product results that you recently viewed or visited within the Google Search results. Google has also launched the “you visit often” label a…

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 search ranking…

Google’s flexible sampling solution that replaced the first-click-free solution for gated, subscription or paywalled content launched in 2017. Since then, many publishers use the structured data to communicate to Google…

The big news from the weekend is that Google has terminated its contract with Appen, one of the largest sources of its third-party human search quality raters sources. Appen announced…

For the past few weeks Google has been testing out a new local search box titled “Nearby events and deals.” This box contains links to local stores and places that…

Google News now lets you filter news by publisher for a specific news search query. I think it works the same way as a site command, which Google News has…

For years now, Google has shown phone numbers on some search result snippets when Google thinks you want to call that store. We have screen captures of this from 2016…

We have had intense Google search ranking volatility over the past few weeks over the weekends. That weekend trend kind of stopped when we had a mid-week Google update around…

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

This week, I reported about a weird ranking pattern that has been emerging with these weekend ranking Google updates. Google Search Console shows a spike in 404 errors for URLs…

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, responded to the article from 404 Media titled Google News Is Boosting Garbage AI-Generated Articles. In short, Sullivan said that the way they filtered…

Microsoft will soon bring Copilot Pro, the premium $20 per month version of its AI search features, to the Copilot iOS and Android app. Microsoft’s Mikhail Parakhin said the app…

A couple of months ago, Google launched course info rich results in the Engish regions but now it may be rolling out beyond those regions. Some SEOs in India are…

Google seems to be testing a new interface for the job search results. The old interface was more like a boxed in module, the new interface seems to flow more…

I spotted a complaint where Google was showing a paid real estate listing in the Google News portal, not just the Google News search results. The issue was that the…

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

Google Search seems to be ranking some websites just fine during the weekdays and then removing that ranking over the weekends. It seems to be focusing heavily on non-standard TLDs,…

Google announced two new search features, the first being circle to search and the second is AI-powered multisearch experience. Both seem like upgrades to Google Lens, let me take you…

We have seen Google show product images in snippets in many variations over the years. Now Google is at it again but not just with products but also local listings….

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….