Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

Last week we reported on the early signs of big Google Search ranking volatility, fluctuations, chatter within the search results. We just don’t know if that was related to the…

Over the past few months Google has been auto-selecting background colors not just for image search results and not just for shading Google Shopping Ads but also for images added…

Google seems to be testing (or maybe it is a bug) the local panel sub-menu under the main search bar, under the search box. Normally, these sub-menu items would be…

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

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.

Google’s John Mueller responded to questions around image SEO, specifically explaining that while the image itself and the alt text is useful, so is the page that image is embedded…

I am seeing a significant spike in chatter from within the SEO community about a possible Google Search ranking update and/or heavy volatility happening starting October 31st. Let’s call it…

For the past few days, Google Business Profiles has a bug when you try to edit existing Google Posts or Google Updates. I confirmed this myself when writing this story…

Google Maps announced a bunch of updates for the iOS and Android app including the prices of tolls, displaying traffic lights and stop signs on the map and additional iOS…

The new Google Search, the Google Search Generative Experience, now shows AI-generated answers for recipe queries. I am told it did not show in early releases of SGE but sometime…

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…

Google’s John Mueller said in a video he posted yesterday that the feedback submitted and Google collected around the March 2024 core update has “been really helpful in evaluations and…

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

In February, we covered how Google’s AI Overviews really hurt the click-through rate of the search results and paid ads. Well, several more recent studies have come out that back…

An SEO asked Google’s John Mueller if it is okay or even a good idea to publish blank or empty pages so Google can find those URLs? John Mueller said…

There is no doubt that Google is going through a rough patch right now on many fronts. Between all the complaints about search quality, all the search bugs, the revelations…

Google’s John Mueller said that if you make your content creation decisions based off of keyword search volume lists, then those pieces of content will be mediocre, at best. John…

A new data report from Rand Fishkin at Sparktoro says that Google Search has seen 21.64% growth in searches year over year. This comes after his study that showed 1/3rd…

On Friday, Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, shared some internal documents showing how he complies some of the feedback from SEOs online and then prepares that feedback to share with…

Google announced a new robots.txt report within Google Search Console and at the same time said it will sunset the old robots.txt tester tool. The new tool shows which robots.txt…

If you are on an HTTP site and you decide to migrate the site to HTTPS, it is common practice to update all of your internal links from the HTTP…

A week ago, we saw Google renamed the AI overview experimental results to simple “AI Answers.” Well, that didn’t seem to last long. Google renamed it back to “AI Overview”…

When you create a Google Business Profile and now go into creating service areas, Google may now offer you a list of suggested service areas in your region. Just be…

This week, we covered that Google told creators that a new search ranking update is coming fairly soon, but you shouldn’t expect to recover with this update. Google is now…

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

The SEO community is buzzing about some recent U.S. Department of Justice documents released that hint at some ranking concepts at Google. One slide is named “The 3 Pillars of…

Google has rolled out a new interface to view your historical Google Posts within Google Business Profiles. Now the interface is a scrollable list view.

Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, was asked about if a business should always have a website and if so, should they also have a blog. Sullivan replied that he believes…

As expected, although it took a lot longer than we thought, Google announced it will be replacing the FID metric with the INP metric for its Core Web Vitals. This…

Google has confirmed that AI Mode reporting will be coming to Google Search Console. It is currently not yet in Search Console, but it will be coming as part of…

Google’s John Mueller said in the last Google SEO office-hours from December 2023 that there is no such thing as perfect SEO. He said, “in fact no SEO is perfect.”

Google announced it has renamed the Google Ads extensions to “assets” plus it has released new workflows, tools and reports to “make it easy for you to deliver more engaging…

Google’s John Mueller the other day said on Twitter the example given to him was “less about duplicate content, and more about fluff.” He said when it comes to fluff…

Google seems to be testing a new local search feature that is categorized as “Places people are talking about.” It shows you local restaurants with social media information, like posts…

So it’s been well over a week of incredible volatility within the Google search results. Pages have been bouncing all over the place, rankings are jumping and then last night…

About a year ago, Google first introduced guidelines around manual actions for Google Discover and Google News. In the past week, I have seen numerous news publishers, both large and…

Google has posted some fresh data, saying they answer over 5 trillion searches per year. The last time we saw this data was in 2016, when Google was at 2…

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…

Here is our monthly Google Webmaster Report – the May 2025 edition – where I summarize the past 30 days or so of the big organic Google related news in…

Google seems to be testing a “posts from” section in the search results. Very much like the popular on Twitter (now X) section but this includes not just posts from…

Similarweb released a report shows that since the launch of Google AI Overviews in May 2024, zero-click search (as coined by Rand Fishkin) grew 13 percentage points, from 56% 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. Google is going…

Yesterday afternoon Google temporarily disabled the ability to validate fixes for issues in the coverage report. This is related to some “minor updates” the Google Search Console is adding to…

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, said we should expect to see more clarification from Google on its creating helpful content page, specific to the section “Get to know E-E-A-T and…

Google is testing a new feature for featured snippets that will animate the highlighting of the text of part of the featured snippet. It looks like Google is manually highlighting…

I am wondering if the screenshots below are the new featured snippet callouts Google spoke about almost a month ago. You can see bolded callouts, multiple answers for a featured…

Google Search is testing a new carousel named “Most-read articles.” I guess Google is using click data to see which articles are being read the most. Or maybe Chrome or…

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. There may have…

Ever since the Ray Google AI Overviews update, Google scaled back showing AI Overviews in Google Search for some YMYL categories, especially in the health space. But now we are…

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

Google may be testing a new search label named “preferred source” on the search results snippets. This is shown on organic search results, not search ads, and honestly, this seems…

Google is testing bringing back the search options that is currently positioned at the top of the search results to the left hand side bar. Google had the side bar…

X, well, Twitter.com, is now blocking Bing Search, specifically Bingbot, from crawling and accessing content posted on Twitter.com, on the X platform. Twitter specifically added to its robots.txt file a…

Google Search ranking volatility is heating up today, June 4th. Many of the tools and some of the chatter within the SEO community are showing signs of a Google ranking…

Gary Illyes from Google reiterated that it is still best for SEO purposes to use hyphens as separators in your URLs over using underscores are separators in your URLs. Why?…

Google added links to its overview of guidelines page with five-more links, keep in mind, that this content is not new, they were published back in April in the Google…

Not only is Google having indexing issues this morning, but Google has been having issues with showing recipes in the carousel and images of recipes in search over the past…

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. Are we seeing…

Google has added a new spam policy for policy circumvention. The new section was added to the Google spam policies document and basically says if you try to go around…

In addition to the shop deals top bar we spotted earlier, now we are seeing reports of Google Search testing a shopping search filter bar at the top. This makes…

Surprise, surpise… Wikipedia is the number one source of information that comes up when you click on the people also ask feature within the Google Search results. People also ask…

CNBC reported the other day that Google is working on its own AI chatbot named Apprentice Bard. Apprentice Bard is reportedly built on Google’s AI LaMDA language model stack and…

Google Merchant Center may have recently added to the product feed report the number of products found by Google, not by way of a feed you provided or manually submitted…

This week we saw a lot more volatility from the Google Product reviews update, one last weekend and the other around March 1st. I also posted the big Google webmaster…

Google is expanding AdSense’s Auto ads to support French, Spanish, and Japanese languages. Previously, Auto ads were worked for English and German languages only.

Google’s John Mueller said putting the category name or topic name in your URL slug has zero impact on your rankings. I am not 100% sure if he really meant…

Google said on Tuesday, December 21, 2021 that the December 2021 Google product reviews update is now fully rolled out. Alan Kent from Google shared this news on Twitter after…

A couple of months ago, Aleyda Solis posted a thread on Twitter (I was waiting for a slow week to post it here) asking “what’s the most counterintuitive SEO recommendation/implementation…

John Mueller of Google responded to a complaint on Reddit where the SEO or site owner was upset his one month old site was not performing on Google Search. The…

Google announced a new reviews update is going to roll out sometime next week and this new update will make the reviews update more real time. Thus Google will stop…

Google is testing a new label on its search ads within the Google Search results that says “Learn more about Sponsored results.” This label is on the bottom right of…

Today is both Father’s Day and Juneteenth and Google had both logos on its home page for the day. Google first placed the Father’s Day logo up on Google.com early…

Google has these e-commerce or product cards that show up at the top of the search results. Now, Google is testing labeling them with not just the product category name…

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

How do you use the link data within Google Search Console? That is what John Mueller of Google asked earlier this month, and he got a nice list of uses…

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. Some SEO tips…

Just last week we reported that chat is going away from Google Business Profiles. Well, Google may be adding native SMS and WhatsApp messaging support for your Google Maps business…

Google has always said that having pages that serve a 404 status code is normal; most sites have them, and when a page does not exist on your site, and…

Gary Illyes from the Google Search Relations team posted another PSA on LinkedIn. This time he said, “when you redesign a site, its rankings in search engines may go nuts.”

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. Yelp sued 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. The Google Search…

Google has confirmed a bug with some users not seeing the users and permissions in Google Search Console. There are also complaints about the performance reports being a bit delayed,…

Google is testing a new image pack design that shows four images instead of three images with a more images button. This may not be a new change, it might…

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…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if the Google Search Console screenshot feature in the URL Inspection Tool is what Google Search sees. John responded saying, “For the most part, yes”…

In early December, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, said Google is starting to test powering AI Overviews with Gemini 2.0. Well, we may be starting to see some of…

Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, said it is important that there is human oversight when it comes to using AI-generated content. He said this on Twitter after speaking at the…

Google warned us that the Google My Business app will go away at some point when it relaunched as Google Business Profiles. Now Google is emailing users of the app…