Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

Google released spam and fraud prevention stats for Google Maps and local search. In short, Google blocked 21% more reviews, 5% more photos, 40% more videos, and 5% more fake…

Microsoft has been busy making improvements to Bing Chat. It not only increased chat limits, is exploring ad revenue sharing, and nicer math formats, but also added image and video…

In part one, we spoke about who Sam Michelson is and his business development techniques. In part two, we dove into CRM software and how they use it, including looking…

The other day I reported on how some are upset that Bing Chat is surfacing content that is behind paywalls, raising suspicions that Bing Chat is not respecting the robots.txt…

I am starting to see early signs of a possible Google search ranking algorithm update touching down this morning, April 3rd. The automated tracking tools are not picking it up…

Jack Krawczyk from Google, who is the lead on Bard, said on Friday that Bard just rolled out improvements around math and logic. It did this by incorporating PaLM, Google’s…

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 Business Profiles seems to allow some restaurants to copy a menu that it thinks it pulled for that restaurant from another source and use that copied menu to start…

Google has extended the Google Ads Government documents and official services policy for several weeks, from March 31, 2023, to May 24, 2023. This was previously announced in late January,…

Google finished rolling out the March 2023 broad core update on Tuesday, and it took about 13 days to roll out. Microsoft said they are exploring sharing ad revenue from…

Microsoft Bing is testing adding an “official site” label in the search results. If you search for a specific site, you may find that Bing adds to the title of…

Google’s John Mueller is no longer recommending you verify all the variations of your domain with Google Search Console. Instead, he said, keep it simple and verify using domain verification.

Google Search seems to be testing a new product carousel titles “products gaining attention.” I assume this carousel shows products that are being viewed or clicked on more often than…

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

Google has released its annual ads safety report and the report showed that Google removed 67% more ads this year and in the previous year. Google removed over 5.2 billion…

Right now you cannot sit all day and ask Bing Chat questions, no matter how lonely you are, at some point, Bing will say to give it a break. But…

It looks like review spammers are using ChatGPT and other AI tools to generate fake reviews. These reviews are being posted in Google Business Profile local listings and causing a…

Microsoft may share the ad revenue it generates through the Bing Chat responses with some publishers it obtains that content from. Yusuf Mehdi from Microsoft wrote, “exploring placing ads in…

Microsoft announced it would be testing the ability of third parties who are delegated or authorized providers to advertise for certain government services with review and pre-approval.

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 finished…

Google has launched the new perspectives feature, added an “about this author” section, globally rolled out “about this result” and made it easier to access “about this page” in the…

Microsoft Bing will soon be rolling out cleaner and nicer math result formatting. Mikhail Parakhin from Microsoft Bing said this is already out to 10% of users for all chat…

With all the talk about ChatGPT and other AI bots, did you know that there is an OpenAI ChatGPT bot and it respects the robots.txt protocol? So if you want,…

Several weeks ago, Google enabled the ability to export your Google Search Console data in bulk, automatically, to Google’s BigQuery. Now, Google announced that you can do this across multiple…

The Google March 2023 Broad Core update finished rolling out yesterday morning at about 10:30 am ET. It took 13 days to roll out, kicking off on March 15th at…

Google may be showing less site names and brand names in the title of the search results snippet. Yes, Google has a sitename and favicon change for the search results,…

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

Google has released version 2.3 of the Google Ads Editor, this comes four and a half months since version 2.2 was released in November 2022. The new version gains image…

Google has updated some of the reporting within Google Search Console to break out the Merchant listings and Product snippets differences. You can see the difference in performance between how…

By now, many of you, not all of you, have played with both Bing Chat and Google Bard. So far, about 70% of SEOs find Bing Chat to be better…

Microsoft has fixed the missing data in the Bing Webmaster Tools API. As a reminder, there was a bug that caused the Bing Webmaster Tools API to stop working, then…

Google updated the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console on March 27, 2023. The update may have resulted in a change in the number of URLs in your…

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

The folks over at Whitespark has published there 2023 local ranking factors study, where they asked dozens of local SEO experts to rank what they think are the most important…

As a reminder, when Google launched Bard, I, along with some others, were taken back by the lack of citations and links to sources provided in its answers. A Microsoft…

Gary Illyes from Google said that in some cases, Google may not fully render a page before showing it in Google Search or Google News. It depends on how timely…

As you know, Google Analytics 4 does not support tracking AMP pages. Well, Google’s Ads Liaison, Ginny Marvin, said on Friday that Google is “currently looking into it and will…

Google is testing showing blue badge icons and labels on some search ads for advertisers who are verified by Google Ads. The blue label is a blue circle with ridges…

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

A few days ago, I reported that Bing Chat has now integrated the Bing Image Creator tool. But the truth is, it was not integrated, not until at least after…

As we approach the Google Analytics 4 migration deadline, Google Ads Liaison, Ginny Marvin reminds advertisers that some “advertisers could see a significant performance impact” in their ad campaigns if…

The other day, John Mueller of Google tweeted something true but sarcastic and it seems some took it the wrong way. He said In case you’re curious, the rel=dofollow works…

Google Business Profiles seems to have launched a new manage menu feature for restaurants in the web version of the business profile tool. It opens a “your menu on Google”…

The Google broad core update for March is not done yet, and we see tremors. Google started to roll out Bard, and while it is fast and has a sleek…

As you know, Google has started to roll out the Google March 2023 Broad Core update on March 15th, it should probably continue to roll out through the first half…

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. Microsoft’s CEO of…

As you know, we’ve been playing with Google Bard, it just started to roll out a couple of days ago. Early on, we were disappointed thus far with how limited…

The Bing Webmaster Tools API might have a week of data loss, a data gap, if you will. There was some sort of issue where the API was not returning…

The Microsoft Advertising team announced its PromoteIQ launched a new way to target your ads, by targeting shoppers based on the categories they browse with the ability to also use…

Mikhail Parakhin, the current CEO of Bing at Microsoft and former CTO at Yandex said that Google Bard is “pretty far behind” compared to Bing Chat. “We learned to never…

Google Search Console’s URL Inspection tool can now report if the embedURL page for a video uses the newish indexifembedded robots tag. This was spotted by Jon Henshaw and posted…

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 started…

Microsoft is planning first to work on relaxing the Bing Chat limits and chat caps for the balanced mode before working on relaxing those limits on other modes, said Mikhail…

Google has added a new section to the Google Search Status Dashboard – Ranking. The Ranking section will show the confirmed Google ranking updates that Google already posts on its…

Google’s John Mueller posted a clarification on how and when Google processes the removal requests, or exclusion requests, you make in your robots.txt. The action is not taken when Google…

Yesterday, Google began to slowly roll out Google Bard to some initial reporters and also Google opened up a waitlist to users in the US and UK. I personally do…

Microsoft has announced that Bing Chat in “creative” mode can now create images based on you inputting a description of what you want it to create or referencing another image….

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. Bing Chat is…

If you do some queries in Bing Search, you may get the Bing Chat box and a brief answer from Bing Chat at the top. We knew this was coming,…

Google has updated the industry and services selector or picker tool within the Google Local Service Ads interface. This makes it a bit faster to find and activate your business’s…

There is some concern and speculation on the internet that Microsoft Bing is feeding in content behind paywall and using such content to provide answers in Bing Chat. I asked…

Google is testing showing only one star in the local pack in the search results. This is instead of showing five stars with some of those stars filled in with…

Google’s John Mueller said that keyword stuffing alone would not make a page be deemed unhelpful. John added that Google is good at ignoring tactics like keyword stuffing, so that…

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

The topic of blacklists and whitelists for Bing and Google are not new. But now we have chat bots and AI features and Mikhail Parakhin was asked if there is…

Google has updated the Googlebot help document on crawling to clarify that the 15MB fetch size limit applies to each fetch of the individual subresources referenced in the HTML as…

In part one, we spoke about who Sam Michelson is and his business development techniques. In part two, we dove into CRM software and how they use it, including looking…

Google is now testing highlighting snippet text in the Google Explore feature in light blue, darker blue, and a brownish color. After months of testing, Google launched the featured snippet…

On March 14th, Google published its Generative AI prohibited use policy that states where you are not allowed to use its AI features to create content and information. This is…

Google Business Profiles lets you see what business listings offer service-wise, they’ve been doing this for a while now, and now they seem to impact your local rankings. But what…

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. Bing laid out…

A few weeks ago, Microsoft added three tones or modes of responses to the Bing Chat feature; balanced, creative and precise. Yesterday, Mikhail Parakhin, the CEO of Bing, explained the…

Google released the March 2023 broad core update, so far this has been a very fast and big update. Bing said they’ve been using the new GPT-4 technology for the…

Google may be testing a new search result snippet that blends a typical search result snippet with a local snippet result. This one has the favicon, sitename, URL, title and…

Google will be updating its Merchant Center policy to allow ads for electric bikes that go up to 28 mph. This is an increase from the max speed of 15.5…

Google Search is testing replacing the 3D label with a 360 label for products and images that you can rotate within the search results. I guess either 3D or 360…

Last September at the Search On event, Google announced a new personalized shopping results based on your previous shopping habits with the ability to specify which brands you want. That…

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 March 2023…

Google Search has started to roll out the first broad core update of the 2023 year, and this one is named the March 2023 broad core update. It started on…

Microsoft Advertising’s broad match modifier keywords are now being served as broad match keywords instead of phrase match on Bing Search. This is effective as of yesterday, March 15, 2023.

Google may have a bug, it is a confirmed bug according to some local SEOs, where a bunch of businesses are seeing a notice in Google Search that “your business…

Google’s John Mueller said when it comes to spammy referral traffic, you can ignore it and not worry about it regarding SEO. John said on Twitter, “I’d ignore it,” when…

Google has updated the interface and user experience for Auto ads within the AdSense console. Google said, “To make it easier to navigate and understand the differences between Auto ads…

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. Microsoft Bing has…

Google may show similar businesses or restaurants in the local business listing of a competing business or restaurant. This “similar to” section may show up based on your previous search…

I was doing some searches yesterday to test new Google Search featured and I stumbled upon Google showing a promotion in the mobile search results to use camera search. It…