Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

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 shocked us…

This week, we had Google officially release another core update, the October 2023 core update. Also, a day before Google started to roll out the October 2023 spam update. We…

Google is now also rolling out the October 2023 core update. This is happening while Google is rolling out the October 2023 spam update and only weeks after Google finished…

Google’s Ad Liaison, Ginny Marvin, confirmed on X that Google Ads has stopped maintaining the Keyword Planner individual & ad group keyword forecasting data. She said that “few advertising were…

Bing Search is testing showing video chapters for video search results. This is similar to the Google Search key moments feature that has been out for a while.

Several weeks ago some businesses were seeing that they could edit their social profiles within Google Business Profiles. But most businesses did not have access to this feature. Now it…

Bing Search may sometimes show a “Trending in Bing” carousel at the top of the search results. That carousel shows alternative search refinements based on your previous query but it…

Google may be having issues with indexing and serving new content within Google Search. The issues started around 2pm ET and have been sporadically happening since then. I personally have…

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 released a new spam update, the October 2023 spam update. This update goes after cloaking, hacked, auto-generated, and scraped spam. But those sites written in Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian,…

Google Assistant will live on with a little help from its friend – Bard. Assistant With Bard is coming in the next few months after Google tests it with a…

Wired had a piece named How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet. That piece wrote, “Google just flat out deletes queries and replaces them with ones that…

For years and years now, spammers have been creating fake obituaries using automated methods. In fact, Danny Goodwin covered the issue Google Search has with obituary spam a couple of…

Google seems to be testing a new hotel search result snippet. The search result snippet shows a carousel of hotel cards under the main snippet. These cards can be swiped…

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. Apple Business Connect,…

Google’s Local Service Ads (LSA), Google Screened, previously would load the same advertisers as you scrolled down the search results page. Now, Google is loading unique, different advertisers when it…

Apple has announced new insights and analytics to Apple Business Connect, its local business dashboard. The new insights are called “Peer Group Benchmarks” and tell you how well your business…

Google is testing a section titled “popular stores” in the Google search results. It shows you stores like Walmart, Target, Amazon, Best Buy, Home Depot and more.

When Microsoft Bing announced its new features a couple of weeks ago, including the updated performance reports, it also went ahead and updated the colors of the top bar from…

Bing seems to be testing added “learn more” cards under the knowledge panel within the search results. The learn more cards are in a carousel format that you can slide…

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…

Here is the big Google webmaster report for October, where I sum up all the most important topics SEOs need to know with Google organic search over the past thirty…

Bing seems to be testing showing the number of people who visited a website listed in a search ad. The ad in the Bing Search results says X “visitors in…

Microsoft launched DALL-E 3 in Bing Chat late on Friday night and went it went live, it just stalled. It took a really long time for Bing Chat to create…

A few months ago, Microsoft increased the Bing Chat conversation limit to 30 turns in a chat conversation. But according to Mikhail Parakhin of Microsoft, no one hits that number…

Google may be testing a bright red “back to top” button in the desktop search results. As you scroll down, this button overlays at the top portion of the screen.

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…

Chris Long, the VP of Marketing at Go Fish Digital, stopped by my office to chat SEO and that is what we did. Chris does a lot of internal marketing…

I am seeing some early signs of an unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update, maybe some small shifts, starting yesterday, Sunday, October 1st. Only a couple of the tools showed…

Google Search has started to test a box labeled “ask your own” under the People also ask and more questions section. This seems to take you into a chat-like experience,…

Google has added a new section to the Google Discover documentation to explain three reasons why Google Discover traffic may drop. Those three reasons include changes in interests, content type…

Google Business Profile is updating the data within the bulk Insight data to match the data you see for a single business profile listing. Google emailed those who have downloaded…

Generally, Google has said that when pages are not indexed and there are no technical issues, the reason it might not be indexed is that the page does not meet…

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 launched a…

This week in search, Google finished rolling out the September 2023 helpful content update, which seemed to target SEO-first, search engine-first content in a big way. Google won’t be rolling…

Google has announced a new Googlebot, a new Google crawler, named Google-Extended that you can use to control if your content can help improve Bard and Vertex AI generative APIs…

In May we reported Google was testing a “chat with a live agent” button for some local panels within Google Search. Well, that feature might be rolling out more fully…

Google has rolled out some updates to the Search Generative Experience (SGE) the company announced on its blog. One update is that SGE should now respond with higher-quality, more accurate…

Last week, we reported about the new Bing Chat personalized answers feature that uses your chat history to give you a more tailored answer to your queries. But that might…

Wix now supports IndexNow, the Microsoft initiative to make indexing more efficient and faster. With that, Microsoft said, “more than 60 million websites are publishing over 1.4 billion URLs per…

A new email was leaked as part of the DOJ investigation, this was was from Jerry Dischler, the Vice President of Google Ads. The email was to Prabhakar Raghavan, who…

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

Google, at around 3 am ET this morning, announced that the September 2023 Google helpful content update has finished rolling out. It took about 14 days, starting on September 14,…

A few months ago we reported how it was nearly impossible for a trained SEM to spot the ad label on these Microsoft Advertising search ads on Bing Search. Well,…

Google Ads seems to have added a new feature to the account alerts section that lets you set up alerts to go to email addresses but now lets you define…

Google’s John Mueller defends Google’s position of helping SEOs by providing documentation, video content, and responses to questions on multiple channels. This comes after some are upset that Google is…

Google will update the Google Ads Healthcare and Medicines policy from Prescription drug sale policy to Prescription drug services. “The Healthcare and medicines policy page will be updated to reflect…

OpenAI has relaunched the browse with Bing feature in ChatGPT which lets users use ChatGPT leveraging the index of Bing Search. This was after Open AI turned off the feature…

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

Google launched shared conversations in Google Bard about a week ago and forgot to ensure search engines can’t index the results. The robots.txt had(s) nothing in it to block bard.google.com/share…

A few years ago, Google’s Daniel Waisberg wrote two blog posts, one on analyzing Google Search traffic drops and the other on improving SEO with a Search Console bubble chart….

Today is Google’s official 25th birthday and to celebrate Google has a special Doodle that showcases some of Google’s early Google logos. Google wrote, “Let’s take a walk down memory…

Bing Chat’s precise mode has received a big upgrade that makes those answers a lot better. “Finished rolling out a pretty big update in our Precise mode of Bing Chat…

Google has added new content to its spam policies and ranking systems guide specific to child sexual abuse material (CSAM) content. Google now clearly says that they “always remove such…

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

Over the past couple of days, I’ve seen more chatter of ranking movement for those SEOs initially impacted by the September 2023 helpful content update. I wonder if this is…

At the Microsoft AI event last Thursday, Microsoft also announced new AI-based ad features in the upcoming months. This includes Copilot, which will help you create ads in Microsoft Advertising,…

Bing decided not to wait for the alternative approach to a robots.txt method for blocking AI tools from using your content and decided to go with what is out there…

Google Ads will update ads policies to suspend advertisers over non-fulfillment and non-delivery of products or services due to a lack of qualifications.

Google has confirmed it is working on fixing the delayed Google Search Console reports. Many are delayed a couple of weeks when normally those reports are updated daily or within…

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

This is just a programming note that I will be 100% offline starting Sunday night (September 24th) through Monday night (September 25th) for Yom Kippur. I am not scheduling any…

Google’s John Mueller said it is very unlikely that the search company will roll back the last Google update, the September 2023 Google helpful content update. The update is currently…

Google has been downplaying the importance of links in its ranking algorithm for the past couple of years now. But last Thursday, at PubCon, Gary Illyes from the Google Search…

At the Microsoft AI event on last Thursday, I had a sit down with Kya Sainsbury-Carter, the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Advertising, who told me that clicks on ads…

Gary Illyes from the Google Search team said at PubCon that comments sections on websites can be a good thing. This messaging is on target with what Google has said…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that removing content doesn’t make the rest of your content rank higher. He said, “keep in mind that removing content doesn’t make the rest…

Google posted on Twitter “we recommend not adding meaningful content or symbols using ::before or ::after CSS pseudo-elements.” Google said such content “might not be used for indexing your pages.”

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

Google’s helpful content update is still rolling out, and the SEO chatter is super heated this week, with tons of sites reporting huge drops. But the Google tracking tools are…

I am excited but also feel let down that the new Bing Webmaster Tools Performance report gained all these new sources of data, including Bing Chat, but the only one…

Fabrice Canel from Bing also announced that the disavow link tool will soon be removed from Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing said their algorithms and artificial intelligence capabilities are now so…

Bing Chat announced yesterday at the AI event a new Bing Chat feature that uses “memory” – something we covered a couple of times here before. This is called personalized…

Bing Webmaster Tools began testing its new Sitemap Index Coverage report in June after it was announced a few months prior. As of a few weeks ago, it went fully…

When the September 2023 Google helpful content update came out, Google added new information to its documentation around this update. One thing was specific to this documentation change was around…

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

If you’ve been following my Google helpful content update volatility story, you will notice that the Google tracking tools are showing very little volatility when the SEO chatter is super…

Google has made two updates to its prohibited and restricted content policy for Google Maps user-contributed content. The impacted sections are the fake engagement and personal information sections. Here is…

Google announced that it is expanding its AI-powered tools for Google Ads, its search ads platform. The AI powered conversational tools to create ads is going into a true expanded…

Bing Search now displays a section named “recent chat topics” for some searchers who have recently used Bing Chat. The area is added at the top of the search results…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if adding a language indicator to the meta title tag would have any impact on SEO and Google Search in any way. John Mueller replied…

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. It’s been about…

Google started to roll out the Google September 2023 Helpful Content Update last Thursday afternoon and I’ve been seeing mixed signals about how strong and widespread this update is. There…

There is a fun new Google Search Off the Record podcast to listen to with John Mueller and Gary Illyes from the Google Search team. The short is that quality…

Jerry Dischler, Vice President and General Manager at Google, said under oath in 2020 that Google tuned its ad prices to meet its revenue targets. Ad prices went up 5%…

Last week we reported that the Google site names issues, according to Google, has massively dropped off, after the last big upgrade to site names in Google Search. Well, that…

Google’s John Mueller said on X that a compilation of ChatGPT output does not make your content unique or worthy of outranking other content on the internet. He posted on…