Google has finished rolling out the December 2024 core update, it finished super fast and was incredibly volatile. The volatility started over the weekend but lasted throughout the whole update….
Google is testing a new style of sitelinks again (I cover these way too often). This one turns the sitelinks into shades / gray buttons.
Google Search will roll out an ‘AI Mode’ within Google Search that will look “nearly identical to its Gemini AI chatbot” according to some reports. We also saw sources post…
Google seems to be testing adding buttons/links to nearby hotels and restaurants directly at the top of a Google Business Profile listing. This may be related to the Digital Markets…
Microsoft has this “studies of” carousel in the Bing Search results. It can help you find content that helps you prepare for a specialized exam or course, of sorts.
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…
The Google December 2024 core update quickly and brutally finished rolling out yesterday at around 2:00 PM ET. It took just over 6 days to roll out, starting on December…
There are a number of reports of Google Business Profile listings in Google Maps coming up broken. Google seems to be showing half of the listing, with flickering maps portions,…
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. The Google search…
Mark Williams-Cook gave an unbelievable presentation at SearchNorwich named Improving your SEO with conceptual models. Lucky for you and me, this presentation was posted on YouTube for us all to…
Forbes has reportedly fired some of its freelancers for some stories over its ongoing issue with Google’s site reputation abuse policy, aka parasite SEO. The Verge wrote, “Forbes will stop…
Google is testing a much richer experience for things to do style queries. Instead of showing a calendar box, text format with image boxes, Google is testing showing this rich…
Google is testing another search result snippet interface change, this one is when you hover your mouse over the snippet, it adds a shadow effect to the snippet.
Google has confirmed it is testing allowing showing the same ad, from the same advertiser, on the same search results page. Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison said, “We’re conducting…
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…
Jonathan Jones attended the Google Search Central Live event in Zurich last week and posted excellent and detailed notes about the event, including a bit more on the more often…
Google’s John Mueller reiterated in a big way that SEOs and site owners should not spend time disavowing “toxic” links. He said it is a “billable waste of time” to…
Google has repurposed its 2014 blog post on faceted navigation best practices (which we covered a decade ago) and created a new help document page named Managing crawling of faceted…
Google Merchant Center added a new field in the “Promotion conditions” section for “first order” discount. This seems to be for shopping ads set up in Merchant Center.
When OpenAI launched ChatGPT Search several weeks ago, it was just available to paid users. Now, anyone who logs into ChatGPT should have access to the Search the Web button…
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. The Google December…
Google’s Daniel Waisberg confirmed that the new 24-hour date filter that is in the Google Search Console web interface is not yet supported by the Google Search Console API. Of…
Google is testing yet another design for favicons in the search result snippets. This one has these backgrounds, grayish backgrounds added behind the favicons in the search results.
Google is testing a “Research more” section in its search results that shows articles on the topic you queried. This looks like the list articles section we covered in October,…
Google is sending out emails asking business owners to add their social profiles to their Google Business Profiles. The email says, “Link your social profiles so customers can see your…
Google Search is testing adding a paper clip icon to the search bar, next to the voice search icon, next to the lens icon and the search button. This seems…
As you know, the December 2024 core update was announced on December 12, 2024 at around 10:46 am ET and Google said it would take about two weeks to complete….
Hanukkah (aka Chanukah) starts pretty late this year, compared to other years. The holiday starts Wednesday, December 25th. And Google has already added its Hanukkah decorations for his year, 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 surprised us…
For the original iTunes version, click here. Google began rolling out the December 2024 core update yesterday. Google said more core updates will come more often in the future. We…
Google surprised most of us with a new core update being announced yesterday, only a week after the November 2024 core update finished rolling out. This new December 2024 core…
Google held its Google Search Central Live event at its large Zurich office (where the Search Central team is based) and one of the things presented was that Google will…
Google Ads is beta testing its new AI tools to generate reports by asking Google for the report you want. You enter a prompt, or just a normal English request,…
Google Lens stopped working for all users for a short period of time yesterday morning (NY time). Google confirmed the issue at 9:46am ET on Thursday, December 12th and then…
Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads Liaison, confirmed that campaign-level negative keywords are now in beta for Performance Max campaigns in Google Ads. She added that this will expand in 2025 to…
Several weeks ago, Google announced it would test changes to the search results for hotels in order to see how the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in Europe would impact hotels….
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 testing…
Google announced its “new AI model” named Gemini 2.0 and with that confirmed Google has begun testing using Gemini 2.0 to power AI Overviews in Google Search. Sundar Pichai, Google’s…
Google Ads is testing a new asset type named video. It seems Google may be testing allowing advertisers to add video assets to their search ads and other Google Ads…
Apple released a ton of new Apple Intelligence features yesterday, including what I’ve been waiting to play with – Apple Visual Intelligence. It seems, at least for now, that Apple…
After months of testing, and after Google was the first to make this move, Bing has dropped support for its cache operator and the cache link in Bing Search. Bing…
We’ve seen our share of Sitelinks tests in Google Search. Including a number of variations around expandable sitelinks. But here is a version where you can click an arrow down…
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…
This morning we reported about weirdness with the Search Console performance report date picker. Well, maybe it is related to Google just rolling out a new date picker and 24-hour…
Google is testing adding the ability to track prices, share and save products you are looking at in Google Search and Google Shopping. Google added these buttons for track price,…
Google Search Console has a bug with its date picker, when you want to compare two date ranges. It seems to default to the last month of data in most…
Google’s video search results seem to be testing removing the YouTube channel name and video upload date from the search results snippet. I am not sure why Google would remove…
Google has posted a new help document in the Google Merchant Center help center documenting the annotations and badges available both in free and paid Google Shopping results. Google wrote,…
Google now supports even more categories for more types of hours for your business listing. Google added a number of new hour types for religious institutions and restaurants.
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…
Google has updated its crawler help documentation to add a new section for HTTP caching, which explains how Google’s crawlers handle cache control headers. Google also posted a blog post…
Google’s John Mueller was asked about over-optimization and if that can cause issues for ranking in Google Search. John replied saying, “Sometimes “over optimization” does drift towards “SEO-spam”.”
Google has dropped Google Analytics data from its Google Search Console Insights tool and reporting. Google posted this notice on social saying, “we’re focusing on data from Search Console, no…
In October, Microsoft announced it was testing adding Copilot features to Bing Webmaster Tools. This is not showing Copilot data in the performance reports, but rather using Copilot to ask…
Google continues its testing of labels and tags in the search results, including trending labels, by showing variations of “trending with” and “popular with” labels and tags added to search…
Google Search is testing a new design and user interface for the search tools menu. Instead of it showing below the search bar, it now shows right under the tools…
Google Search is once again having indexing issues where new content is not showing in the index for all sites. Google wrote this is about a “delayed indexing in Google…
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. Post November 2024…
The Google November 2024 core update finished on December 5th, but we have continued to see search ranking volatility after the update was finished. That ranking volatility seemed to spike…
Late Friday afternoon, Google quietly updated its expanded site reputation abuse policy notice with a section of 9 FAQs. This includes what happens if you try to move the content,…
Google Search Console may have made a big update to its link counts. I am not sure how widespread this is, and I really don’t not track the link count…
Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai was interviewed by New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. In this interview they spoke about Google’s approach to AI, Sundar’s outlook for the technology, and what…
Google Search Console has dropped a whole section on its side bar navigation. The Legacy tools and reports section has been removed from the side bar. It is unclear exactly…
Google may have dialed back how often they show AI Overviews in Google Search, especially in some verticals like health and finance (YMYL). Ziptie, a toolset that tracks Google 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. The Google November…
Google’s November 2024 core update was finally completed this week…
The Google November 2024 core update finally finished rolling out yesterday at around 1:30 PM ET. It took over 23.5 days to roll out, starting on November 11, 2024 at…
With all this talk about clustering and canonicalization today, what about if you get it wrong, or your CMS breaks and serves the wrong thing to Google? We know how…
As part of the topic of clustering and canonicalization with Google Search today, Allan Scott from Google explained how Google Search’s clustering technology works with its localization technology. The answer…
As part of the topic of clustering and canonicalization with Google Search today, Allan Scott from Google explained what he called “marauding black holes” in Google Search. Where Google’s clustering…
Did you know that Google uses around 40 different signals to perform canonicalization in Google Search? This not only includes numerous type of redirects, the rel canonical attribute but also…
Google’s John Mueller explained the difference between clustering and canonicalization within Google Search. He said, “Clustering is basically taking the pages that we think are the same. And then canonicalization…
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…
Google announced a new set of Google Ads policies for dating and companionship that will go into effect on March 4, 2025. Along with the new policy, advertisers will be…
Google Search has a new button at the bottom of the search results that shows you if the results are personalized or not and a way to turn off personalization….
Google Ads is testing new offers for agencies and advertisers, trying to find impactful incentives for agencies who sign up new advertisers in Google Ads. This information comes from Ginny…
As Google continues to test its shopping / e-commerce card format, Google is now testing replacing the “popular stores” section with a “Where to buy” section. I mean, it seems…
Google is testing “view all” buttons in the Google Search results, maybe shopping oriented results, next to search result listings that lead to shopping category landing pages. The view all…
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…
We are now over a week past the estimated time the Google November 2024 core update was expected to be done and it seems to still be causing a lot…
Google announced that it has modernized and refreshed the emails that are sent out from Google Search Console. Google wrote, “Starting today your Search Console emails are looking more modern…
Bing Search can now place a button under a search result snippet that triggers a site command to restrict the search results to only show results from that domain. The…
We knew Google’s web rendering service (WRS) does its own thing with caching but now a new post from Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt of Google said the “WRS caches…
Google has a newish way to search for events in specific regions. If you do a search for events in a region, like Las Vegas, Google will then try 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. Just because you…
Google’s John Mueller responded to a question on why a company is not ranking for its new brand name, saying, “Just because you call your company something doesn’t mean it’ll…
Google Analytics now supports Customer Match from Google Ads. Audiences exported to Google Ads will now also include your first-party consented, hashed customer data, and your tag-based user identifiers, Carly…
Google is testing a new video format for some YouTube videos that provide “easy to digest” summaries of YouTube videos based on the users queries. This is a pilot that…
Google seems to be testing underlining the title, link and domain in the search result snippet when you hover your mouse cursor over the snippet. Generally, Google will just highlight…
Google’s Gemini is testing a new format for showing sources and links, a format that gives publishers and content sources more visibility in its AI answer engine. Google Gemini’s AI…
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…
Today marks the 21st year anniversary of when I started this site, the Search Engine Roundtable…
Here is the big Google Webmaster report for the past month, including the launch of the Google November 2024 core update that has ventured into December, passing Thanksgiving and Black…
Google Chrome has a way to see site engagement metrics for your personal browser usage across the sites you visit. It shows the origin URL, base score, bonus score and…
Google is now showing animated tutorials for some math solver questions in Google Search. Math solver is not new but I think the animated tutorials are. And if they move…
We recently spotted Google testing a new e-commerce / shopping card format at the top of the results. Now it looks like Bing is testing its own version of this…
In April 2022, Google Business Profiles added performance metrics for direction requests, website clicks, bookings, products and food orders. Well, it seems like food orders are no longer being tracked…
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 November 2024…
Happy Thanksgiving and Black Friday! The Google November 2024 core update is not done rolling out yet – it should have been. And yes, we are still seeing heated volatility…
Google told us that the Sitelinks search box would stop working within Google Search on November 21st. Well, it finally stopped working a week later on November 27th, in the…