Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

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….

Google announced it will be making changes to its search results to comply with the new regulation called the Digital Markets Act (DMA). This will result in some Google vertical…

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

A study released by the Leipzig University, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and ScaDS.AI in Germany asked if Google Search is getting worse. The 16 page paper, downloadable as a PDF over here…

Advertisers and agencies seem beyond frustrated by the lack of support from the Google Ads support team. Nicola Agius covered it incredibly well, she said, “Google Ads customer service has…

A recent post on Reddit asked about the impact of having a website where most of the text was within images. Would Google be able to read the text, what…

Google Search may not be showing news boxes, like top stories, for some election types of queries. So if you search for [iowa caucus] or [2024 United States primary elections]…

Microsoft is testing a new style for when someone hovers their mouse cursor over a search result snippet in the Bing Search results. Bing will add a shadow effect 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…

Did you know that you can search both Bing and Google (or other search engines) at the same time using the Microsoft Edge browser? Well, you can.

I am seeing an unusual number of complaints around the reported 404 errors within Google Search Console reporting. This is specific to your URLs having /1000 appended to the end…

Microsoft released Copilot Pro, a premium paid version of its Copilot service, formerly known as Bing Chat. But that doesn’t mean Bing Search or Bing Chat is getting worse, Bing…

Google Ads is either beta testing or slowly releasing a feature to let you add three campaign-level headlines and two campaign-level descriptions. You can also schedule the headlines and descriptions…

Google is testing showing one more product in the product grid layout. Google is testing showing five products across, instead of four products across.

Google has this timeline view for some knowledge panels in the mobile search interface. It seems related to the notable moments card we saw years ago, but this is in…

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

Google’s John Mueller said that changing from www to non-www for your domain shouldn’t change much. I suspect he means that doing that wouldn’t hurt or benefit your rankings that…

Google has updated its mobile Chrome following feed feature not just to show content from publications you follow but now also for topics you follow. So now you are getting…

A year ago I reported that the Google Search Console’s URL inspection tool can show a nofollowed link as the referring page. But it also seems that the URL inspection…

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 Assistant dropped…

We reported on three different Google algorithm updates this week, a bug one on January 9th and 10th, another one on January 5th and 6th, and also a local search…

A site owner posted on Reddit his concerns after noticing “hundreds of thousands” of backlinks from “AI-generated blog posts” directed to his or her site. John Mueller from Google said…

Google announced major changes to Google Assistant, removing close to 20 features and switching how the Google App works with the Google Assistant. This may be a win for Google…

Microsoft announced it is going to do away with Hotel Center subaccounts on February 6, 2024 and you should migrate to Lodging campaigns instead. “As we strive to improve and…

Google has updated its structured data documentation to now use hashtags for @id references. If you don’t use hashtags, it is fine, but Google said it is “schema best practice…

Google has posted a clarification of what it calls its sensitive event policy under the Inappropriate content policy within Google Ads. This applies to Google Ads, Google Merchant Center, Google…

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

Google has updated the auction insights box within the Google Ads console for Performance Max campaigns. The update now shows top advertiser data with comparison data and a new section…

Google Local Services Ads added a new setting named direct business search. This setting gives advertisers the option to show their ads when someone searches for your brand or business…

Google SGE, the Search Generative Experience, seems to have rolled out a search carousel named “Here are some products to consider.” This carousel shows you products from different vendors that…

Google has been battling with site name issues since it launched the site name feature in October 2022 for mobile and then site names for desktop results in March 2023….

Google seems to have rolled out the refine this search filter button that overlays a number of search filters. This seems to be the mobile version of what we saw…

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

For the past several unconfirmed Google Search ranking algorithm updates that we covered, those were almost all reported over the weekend. Now I am seeing search ranking volatility in the…

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, said that there is no such thing as a perfect formula for ranking a web page. Sullivan said this on X, saying, “There’s no perfect…

Google Search is now showing climate-friendly train alternatives under the flight search results box. So if you are looking for flights where you can take a train instead, Google will…

When Microsoft first launched its Bing Chat Personalized Answers, Microsoft said the history/memory would be based on 90 days of chat history. However, some chat users noticed it was going…

A couple of days ago, we reported that the FAQ rich results dropped out of the search results again, and now we are seeing the how-to rich results drop out…

Bing Search has placed the “Chat” button in its top search menu since Bing Chat launched. But now Bing is testing expanding it to read “Chat w/GPT-4” and “Copilot.” We…

Google has officially deprecated the Sitemaps ping endpoints. Now, when you try to access it, Google responds, “Sitemaps ping is deprecated,” with a link to the post about it going…

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

Google’s John Mueller posted a comment on Reddit describing what is often referred to as the “Japanese keyword hack,” he said. It is an automated process that looks for vulnerabilities…

John Shehata posted some data he gathered through his NewzDash service regarding the Google Perspectives search feature. He shared some interesting data, probably nothing that will shock you, but Twitter,…

Google has finally done away with the crawl rate setting within the legacy Google Search Console. It now redirects to the blog post about the feature going away.

Google announced it is shutting down Websites made with Google Business Profiles. They will stop working on March 1, 2024 and will only redirect to your Google Business Profile listing…

Google officially supports the suggestedAge property as an alternative to suggestedMaxAge and suggestedMinAge within its product structured data. Google says they added this support to make it more flexible for…

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, in response to another SEO hit piece by The Verge said that author bylines and bios do not help a site or piece of…

If you search Google for some zip codes, Google may return some products from its shopping graph. One example, spotted by Adam Di Frisco, is to search for [orange county…

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

As I hinted in my last video recap, I was seeing some early signs of an update on Friday, January 5th and 6th. Well, now there are more signals in…

There may have been a local ranking algorithm update that Google quietly pushed out on Thursday, January 4th. The BrightLocal Local RankFlux tool showed a significant spike in volatility on…

Google has made a number of updates to its how-to control your snippets in search results to clarify that the snippets are primarily generated using the page content. Google removed…

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, said that Google Search does not use Google Analytics data for ranking purposes, even when that GA data is connected to Google Search Console.

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, posted this morning that the search company has changes coming to better deal with the recent flux of search spam we’ve all been seeing in…

It looks like Google has stopped showing FAQ-rich results again. Yes, again. Google told us that FAQ-rich results in the Google search results will be shown for only authoritative sites….

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

Right before the New Year, the Google search results volatility spiked big time. I posted the Google webmaster report for January 2024 this week. I published a big list of…

OpenAI is opening its GPT Store next week where you can publish apps and software that you built on top of OpenAI’s GPT to the public.

As many of you know, OpenAI’s ChatGPT service has a plugin for Browse With Bing, which basically opens up Bing Search to the popular AI chat feature. But Browse with…

It seems that YouTube is not showing up in Google News as often as it use to. Will Flannigan, the SEO Editor at the Wall Street Journal posted a chart…