Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

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…

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…

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…

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…

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….

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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…

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

Google reported earnings last night and their ad revenue not only slowed but was technically lower year over year. Google’s ad revenue was down about 3.6%, while total revenue was…

As a reminder, since April, Bing has been slowly testing a new BingBot user agent, slowly rolling it out to more percentages of crawls over the year. It should have…

Owen Yin shared some screenshots of what he said he saw on the Microsoft Bing website. It looks like the beta version of the upcoming ChatGPT features that we are…

Last night I reported on Search Engine Land, based on the earnings report and earnings call, that Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai has confirmed the search company will release a chat…

Google has updated its search help documentation around canonicalization this morning. The Google Search Relations team split in three distinct sections and updated a lot of the content to provide…

In this week’s recap, I covered the unconfirmed Google update that seemed to impact product review sites but maybe more on January 26th. Yandex had a huge leak…

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

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…

Microsoft Bing posted a new blog post saying “for XML sitemaps, one of the most critical tags you can include in your sitemap is the “lastmod” tag.” And it will…

Google may be crawling the web with a new crawler, a new Googlebot, named GoogleProducer. This useragent is not listed on the official Google crawlers page but maybe it is…

It is time for the Google webmaster report, where I summarize the most important SEO and webmaster-related Google topics for the past month. Google completing the long rollout of the…

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

Gary Illyes said in the Google SEO office-hours from yesterday that verifying your website in Google Search Console won’t impact your Google Search indexing or ranking whatsoever.

Gary Illyes from Google posted a new PSA on LinkedIn saying that the most common reason a site unexpectedly blocks Googlebot from crawling is due to a misconfiguration of a…

John Mueller of Google blasted SEO or marketing agencies that sell both link-building services and disavow link services. He said on Twitter, “These agencies (both those creating, and those disavowing)…

After months of silence and no policy updates from Google Ads, Google has posted that it will be updating its Google Ads Government documents and official services policy in a…

Google is still recommending that you nofollow your credit links in your footer, if you have control over those links. So the site designed by or powered by or made…

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

Here is another batch of Microsoft Bing Search tests and features that were caught out in the wild that I wanted to share with you. They include

Google has posted one of its Google SEO office-hours, this one was posted today, recorded in January, after the Google layoffs news, and one question asked was about keyword density…

Google is testing more card and box-like elements in the search results. We covered this with the product results interface a few weeks back but now we are seeing them…

Last week I reported that Yahoo Search posted on Twitter that it will be making search cool again. As I posted on Search Engine Land yesterday, we got more evidence…

Google has posted one of its Google SEO office-hours, this one was posted today, recorded in January, after the Google layoffs news, and one question asked was about if you…

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

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

The Google Ads team has not posted a new feature announcement or any new announcements on its new features and announcements page for about two and a half months, since…

Yandex had a boatload of its source code across all its technology allegedly leaked by a disgruntled employee and part of that was the source code for Russia’s largest search…

On Thursday, January 26th, there were some signs of a possible Google search ranking algorithm update. The signals and chatter I was tracking, honestly, were not at super high levels….

Gary Illyes from from the Google Search Relations team posted another PSA on LinkedIn, this one says “don’t use relative paths in your rel-canonical.” Gary wants you to use the…

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. Google Ads now…

As I mentioned briefly last week, Google announced mass layoffs last week, and I discuss what I know so far about it. There are also reports that Google is pushing…

A new Twitter poll shows that most SEOs do not yet feel comfortable recommending using AI to write client content. The poll asked, “Would you recommend using an AI writer…

Did you know that in some browsers, specifically on Android on Chrome and maybe others, that you can scroll to see more of a longer and truncated snippet in the…

Gary Illyes, from the Google Search Relations team, said on LinkedIn that Google Search handles the marquee HTML tag “appropriately.” What does it mean by appropriately? That is Gary for…

We knew it was coming, Google Ads now supports negative keywords for brand safety at the account level. Google has just added account-level negative keywords to Google Ads and the…

Lily Ray ran a Twitter poll asking SEOs if they trust content in the YMYL, your money or your life, category more, less or the same if it was written…

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

A couple of weeks after I said I thought Google would stop publishing SEO case studies, Google just published a new one. This one is on How Vimeo improved video…

Google is now opening up its car or auto inventory feature within Google Business Profiles to all motor vehicle dealerships. Google began testing car listings in 2021 and then expanded…

Microsoft Bing is testing a new search bar interface on image search (I believe) where the search vertical options, such as web, videos, news, etc, are now presented in a…

Google is testing a new design for the trusted store badge in the paid shopping results. The Google Trusted Stores program to all U.S. merchants back in 2012, along with…

Last December, we caught Google testing an experimental feature named content ideas in Google Search Console. Well, yesterday, Google sent more invites to this feature but noted the feature is…

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 being…

The big news out of yesterday was that the US Department of Justice and several states has once again sued Google calling for the breakup of its ad tech business…

John Mueller from Google said that bulk-generating fake URLs of your competitor’s site should not lead to negative SEO and ranking issues for that site. “This is not something I’d…

Microsoft Bing is testing infinite scroll just a month after Google fully launched continuous scroll on desktop search. I guess this should come as no surprise that Bing would test…

Microsoft reported earnings last night, and in after-hours trading, it seems, for the most part, that Wall Street is happy. But if you look at the search ad revenue numbers,…