Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

Google has updated its favicon search developer documentation to now say that you don’t need to host the favicon in the same domain in order to be eligible for a…

Google Business Profiles lets you access and edit your business profile from web search (like it or not) and recently, Google has been testing showing a “see photos” button in…

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. Bear with me…

Joy Hawkins and friends re-did a study they did years ago to discover that now the services you add to your Google Business Profiles now have an impact on your…

Last week we had reported that Google Ads campaigns were seeing mass disapproval and suspensions but now I am seeing new reports of Google Ad account suspensions across multiple verticals….

Google, at about 5pm ET last night on February 21, 2023, has unleashed the sixth product reviews update. This is named the February 2023 product reviews update and it expands…

Microsoft’s Jordi Ribas, Corporate Vice President of Search & AI at Microsoft put together a detailed blog post explaining the Prometheus technology and how Bing uses it to make Bing…

Last October, Microsoft introduced its Image Creator tool to help you create images using AI. Well, now Bing seems to be testing this in the web and image search results…

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

Mikhail Parakhin, the CEO of Microsoft Bing, said on Twitter that they have fixed the systematic “Something went wrong” issue that some of you have seen over the past week…

Google’s John Mueller said on Mastodon that for small and local businesses, “in most cases,” core web vitals work should not be at the top of their list. He said…

Microsoft Bing is testing not showing the citations or links to publishers by default for some results in the Edge Sidebar. So instead of showing the links to the publishers,…

Google’s John Mueller said on Mastodon that an existing site isn’t not going to drop in ranking just because it uses an exact match domain. “Changes like that would be…

Google has just added a new feature to export your data in bulk, on an ongoing basis, from Google Search Console to Google’s BigQuery. Daniel Waisberg from Google said on…

Google AdSense is updating the Sites page, where you define which sites you want to monetize using AdSense. The updates are coming on March 20, 2023, and include a redesigned…

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

What happens when the noindex, nofollow directives are in the HTTP header and that URL is also being redirected somewhere, will Google respect or ignore the directive. Gary Illyes from…

Microsoft is increasing the price of using the Bing Search APIs by 10x the current cost, effective May 1, 2023, the company posted. That includes using the API for Bing…

Last June, Google began testing a “profile strength” widget or status icon that shows you if you need to do more with your Google Business Profile. Well, that just went…

A week ago, Thanos Bertes posted on LinkedIn, which I found via Mike Ryan on Twitter, that Google Ads disabled the ability in campaign settings to easily opt out of…

Sam Michelson was in town, and he is the CEO of Five Blocks, a digital reputation management firm based in Jerusalem, Israel. We spoke about how Sam started…

A major quality improvement should be coming to the new Bing AI Chat feature on Thursday, February 23rd said Mikhail Parakhin, the CEO of Advertising and Web Services at Microsoft.

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. FYI…

Gary Illyes posted a new blog post on the Google Search Central site asking all of you to stop using 403 and 404 server status codes to reduce the crawl…

What a week, we had another big unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update. Google Ads had a pretty massive bug with campaign disapprovals and suspensions. Google published a new SEO…

Several months ago, Google tested displaying a left-hand sidebar filter on the desktop search interface. Google is doing something similar on mobile search, but now they are tucking the search…

Did you see the scrollable and expandable features in some user experiences with the Google Search knowledge panel and answer boxes?Well, here are examples of both – I am not…

John Mueller of Google said not all Googlebots use the same rendering engine, in fact, not all Googlebots need to do rendering John added. So while the main desktop and…

Microsoft Bing has added a “more” button on some featured snippets in the mobile search interface. When you click on the more button, there is this brief and subtle animation…

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

Google has released Google Ads API version 13.0 and below is a list of what changed. Version 12.0 was released in October 2022, Version 11.0 of the Google Ads API…

Google’s John Mueller posted at Reddit why he is not a fan of using keyword-rich hyphenated domains. He said, “I’m not a fan of keyword-keyword domains, but YMMV.”

Matt McGee posted a poll on Twitter asking how much of Google’s search engine usage market share do you expect the new Bing with ChatGPT to take in the next…

Google has published a new, or vastly revamped, document on SEO link best practices. The previous document was just on how to make your links crawlable but the new one…

Microsoft published a new blog post on the Bing blog about its learnings from its first week with the new Bing AI search and chat feature being live. Microsoft said…

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

Last night, Google Ads started to suspend and mass disapprove Google Ads and Google Merchant Center campaigns. There are numerous reports of this issue starting around 4 pm ET on…

Here we go again; yet another Google search ranking algorithm update seems to have touched down on February 14th, maybe as early as February 13th, and seems to be continuing…

When the new Microsoft Bing AI copilot was announced, and I reported about the changes to the Bing webmaster guidelines, Glenn Gabe also picked up on some potentially problematic language…

The other week I spotted this Twitter thread where someone was able to ask Microsoft Bing AI chat what its codename is. In short, Bing AI responded that it was…

Just a PSA, Google is fully deprecating the legacy Google My Business API on February 20, 2023 – this coming Monday. This is not new, most of those using the…

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

Similar to what we reported about with Google a few months ago, with Google testing a map within a search snippet for a specific company. It seems like Microsoft Bing…

Gary Illyes from Google said on Mastodon this morning that you should 301 redirect URLs when there is a “close-to 1:1 match” for that URL. We know that, but what…

A Reddit thread, spotted via Areej AbuAli on Twitter, says that there is an SEO guy who travels across multiple regions in Europe to upload photos to Facebook from that…

Google Search seems to be testing adding stock tickets with the stock price of public companies mentioned in the articles Google is showing in the top stories section.

Google Ads seems to be rolling out a small but yet powerful icon in the campaigns listing where you can quickly open up the settings for the campaign without clicking…

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. Publishers, as expected,…

It is somewhat satisfying to see non-SEOs dig deeper into how search is changing at Google and Bing and to hear the concerns they have about these changes. We covered…

Last November Google introduced a new catchall search spam policy named policy circumvention. That spam policy was listed to be able to take action on sites that bypass the other…

I believe Google changed the sitemaps-related search developer documentation last week. I am not sure if any of the content specifically changed, but Google did rename some of the pages…

Google’s John Mueller said he thinks, and he said he might be wrong, that the final mobile-first indexing batch will be done in the next couple of months. Desktop indexing…

Gary Illyes from Google is back and this time he said that those “Checking if the site connection is secure” interstitials you see on some sites, some of the time,…

In part one, we go through Jeff Ferguson’s long history in search marketing. In part two, we pick up with him starting his own agency. Then in part three, we…

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

I am seeing signs of another Google search ranking algorithm update just a few days after the February 4th Google search ranking update – both of these have not been…

What an insane week between the AI announcements, algorithm updates, content, and so much more. I start off talking about Google’s Bard announcement and a bit about the Paris announcement…

Famed YouTuber and excellent tech reviewer, Marques Brownlee, posted a poll on Twitter to his 6 million followers asking would you rather use Google as it exists now or Bing…

With all this talk about how search is going to be more useful and helpful with the new AI features in Bing, very few are talking about ads in that…

Google is testing a “trending” label in the people also ask box in the mobile search results. I guess it shows trending searches in the category of what other people…

Microsoft Bing is now tucking away its logo, hiding it from searchers, after you conduct a search using your mobile device. Bing will anchor you down to the top of…

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

Google’s Danny Sullivan reiterated that when it comes to AI content, Google is fine with it, as long as the content is useful and written for people. If you are…

Chris Long asked a poll on LinkedIn, asking “How important is the Yandex leak for SEO?” He had 517 responses and by the responses, it seems like most SEOs don’t…

Google’s John Mueller confirmed that the GoogleProber and the GoogleProducer (which we covered here) are both legit Googlebot user agents and crawlers. “These are official Google requests with a user-agent…

Google now can show you a Merchant Center with Google Business Profile status dashboard in the search results. This is similar to how Google shows your local business profile in…

Google Search now shows a carousel at the top of the search results for hotel results. Previously, Google showed a list view and only showed the carousel inside the hotel…

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 demoed its…

Yesterday I was at the Microsoft office with dozens of other media folks (lots of famous YouTubers also) for Microsoft to showcase its next evolution of Bing, the co-pilot for…

Microsoft has updated the Bing webmaster guidelines to support the updates with the new co-pilot, AI, ChatGPT-powered version of Bing. Bing updated the answers section and added a new section…

Almost a year ago, Google began to integrate clipable coupons into Google Shopping. Well, now it seems that Google is testing showing those clipable coupons directly in Google Search, and…

A few weeks ago, we reported that Google dropped the podcasts carousel from the search results. Well, now Google confirmed the podcast carousel is 100% going away within the Google…

For the past few weeks, there have been reports via the Local Search Forum that Google has been removing emojis and special characters from business names within Google Business Profiles….

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 Search launched…

Google may be testing a new layout for videos it displays in the Google Search results. Google is testing a new format for how the videos show in the Google…

As you know, Yahoo is planning a come back to search with a new way of thinking about Yahoo Search. What that means, we don’t know yet, but we do…

I am currently in Seattle, and headed to the Microsoft Campus in Redmond, for an in-person press event. I decided to go, assuming it would be related to ChatGPT and…

Back in 2020, Google Search introduced a feature named people cards. It was only available in India but now it seems like it might be expanding, as I can now…

Well, we knew it was coming and here it is, Bard – Google’s answer to ChatGPT. Google is now having its trusted testers test out Bard and will soon roll…

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 may have…

Google’s John Mueller was asked again about if you should translate the content of the URL itself to the language of the content used on that page. John this time…

Google has confirmed that its latest efforts to filter out local reviews against its policies and guidelines went too far. Google, over the next few weeks, is working to restore…

Google is testing a new design for the mobile search result snippets. Google is boxing in the snippet, the description text, of a specific listing in a gray-shaded curved box.

There may have been another unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update – this one also on the weekend, around February 4th, maybe kicking off on February 3rd. I am seeing…

In part one, we go through Jeff Ferguson’s long history in search marketing. In part two, we pick up with him starting his own agency. Then in part three we…

Google has clarified in its search developer documents that JSON-LD, Microdata and RDFa are all fully supported forms for structured data and Google Search. Google wrote, “all three supported formats…

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