Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

This morning, John Mueller from Google offered to do a gut check review of part of your presentations to help ensure what you are presenting is accurate. He posted this…

Google’s John Mueller had another good one-liner the other day. He said, “if you don’t know whether your content is expertly written or not, then it’s definitely not expertly written.”

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

Microsoft Bing is testing placing a label in the search result snippets that tell you if the search result snippet you are looking at is a web page or something…

Before there was Google Search Console there was Google Webmaster Tools, before there was Google Webmaster Tools there was Google Sitemaps. To tell you that story, John Mueller and Lizzi…

Google may have removed the license number from business details in the Local Service Ads. I checked a number of LSAs and noticed that Google will say if a business…

Google’s John Mueller said that Google Search “won’t get penalized for keyword-stuffed URLs.” He said stuffing the keywords in your URLs “basically has no effect, positive or negative for search…

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

Marguarite (Maggie) Humphrey worked at Cypress North as an intern back in 2019, then went to DAC for a few years…

Back in 2016, Google Search came out with a way to hear animal sounds in the knowledge panel. Google recently updated the play sound icon or button in Google Search…

A year ago, last November, Google started to show this GIF of a fishing bot of some sort when Google returned no results. Well, sometime in the past weeks or…

Just a reminder, since I am seeing this question come up often. The Google product reviews update is updated periodically, just like with core updates. Google will run them every…

A couple of weeks ago we reported on a possible Google local search ranking update that turned out to not be an update but rather a bug. Well, that bug…

This is a programming note that Monday and Tuesday are Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year and I will be offline the next two days. I will be offline Monday…

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 a…

In this week’s video, we cover how Google said they try not to overlap search algorithm updates but then announced the rollout of the fifth product reviews update before the…

Microsoft Bing is testing background colors for the sitelinks section of the search result snippet. I am not sure I like this look but it does indeed make the sitelinks…

Google’s John Mueller and Ginny Marvin said that both on the organic search side and paid search ad side, Google does not guarantee clicks will lead to conversions.

Google’s John Mueller said Google Search will de-duplicate its search results based on almost duplicates. John said this on Twitter the other day when asked about canonicalizing international URLs.

Did you know that in some countries, like Germany, if you report a review as being fake or spam, Google will email the reviewer about the objection and see if…

Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, posted last night that Google Ads has an issue where some ads may not be served. “Google is aware of an internal issue impacting…

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

As you know, Google began to roll out the fifth Google product reviews update on September 20th during the roll-out of the September 2022 core update. I promised to return…

Google’s John Mueller often posts detailed and thoughtful responses on Reddit related to SEO and also general gadget tinkering. In one of his latest SEO posts, he posted a very…

About a year ago, Brodie Clark posted a poll asking SEOs which area of SEO do you find the most challenging. The response a year ago was by far link…

As we reported last month, Google has now officially deprecated the International Targeting report in Google Search Console. If you try to access the report, Google will show you a…

Google is testing a new my account section named “results about you.” This is part of the feature where Google Search allows you to remove information about yourself from Search…

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

A lot of SEOs focus on the pages Google has indexed versus the pages Google has not indexed on your website. So if there is a larger percentage of not…

Google’s John Mueller explained what he would consider being a search quality issue, causing ranking issues specific to Google considering the site not “quality.” John said “to me, quality issues…

Google is testing placing the thumbnail image on the top stories carousel in Google Search at the top and also at the bottom. I believe normally you would see the…

Last week we saw Google testing highlighting text in the featured snippets. Now I am seeing reports of Google testing highlighting text in the people also ask.

Google said when it comes to your cookie consent banners, make sure not to make those banners annoying. John Mueller of Google was asked, “does cookie consent banner disturb user…

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

Google, at about 4 am ET today, September 20, 2022, has unleashed the fifth product reviews update. This was released prior to the September 2022 core update being completed, which…

Microsoft Bing has been doing a lot of user experience features around search refinements and filters dynamically within various search feature boxes. Here is one more showing a filter option…

Next week the High Holy Days begin for the Jewish people and some of us will be offline (I will be offline) and some more righteous folks actually disable functionally,…

Google has added a new Google crawler, a new user agent, to the Google spider list. Its name is Google Site Verifier User Agent. This user agent ignores robots.txt rules,…

What if your site gets hacked and there is a ton of spammy content placed on it? Do you have to worry about negative consequences on your Google rankings and…

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

In part one, we learned more about Christine Zirnheld, aka Shep, the Digital Marketing Manager at Cypress North and a co-host on Marketing O’Clock. We also spoke about her being…

Last week, Google rolled out a new Search Console report for HTTPS, and with that came a lot of confusion around a specific error. The error was “HTTPS is invalid…

Some folks in the SEO community have been asking if the last core update, the September 2022 core update, has been slower to roll out in some specific countries than…

A lot of folks were thinking that Google in order to bolster the helpful content update rolled out a core update right after the helpful content update was done. As…

Google is testing showing two people also ask featured snippets in a single question expansion. This acts similar to the multifaceted featured snippets and the new featured snippet design we…

Google announced on Friday that it has begun rolling out the self-upgrade tool for Local campaigns to Performance Max. We knew this was coming, as we reported last August and…

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

What a week, we had the launch of the September 2022 core update that started off strong and fast. Google confirmed the helpful content update is done rolling out but…

Google is now testing or rolling out the Health & Safety and Sustainability information for hotels right in the knowledge panel. Previously, in 2020 it was added to the hotel…

There is an interesting response from John Mueller of Google on what to do with URLs that may appear duplicated because of URL parameters, like UTMs, at the end of…

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 Search Console may have improved the URL inspection tools view inspected page screenshot feature to show more of the page. Now it seems with the mobile view, Google is…

Google can show your favicon in the search results next to your search result snippet. Google’s John Mueller said Google finds your favicon based on the favicon presented on your…

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

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter this morning that word count is not a sign or factor for what Google considers to be thin content or unhelpful content. John wrote,…

Google is promoting the Google Lens feature in the mobile search results based on the type of query you enter. Google has a promotion box smack in the middle of…

Google has made changes to how your feeds work for countries, removing the need to list a primary country and additional countries, and replacing them with target countries.

Earlier this month, Google said it might remove the word count reference from the best practices for your article pages help document in the Search Console news errors page. Well,…

Google announced that Google Ads scripts now support Performance Max campaigns. Google said, “this treated as a brand new campaign type in scripts, similar to how video or shopping campaigns…

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

This may be obvious to most of you, but Google’s John Mueller was asked if profile links, links in forums or social profiles if those links are enough to get…

Google announced a lot of new features and availability around shopping and product experiences in Google Search yesterday. Google expanded eligibility for merchant listing experiences, added more structured data properties,…

Google Ads has added a new consolidated or bundled page that puts all your automatically applied recommendations on one page. Google said there is “a new version of the “Manage”…

Google has added a new HTTPS report within Google Search Console. This new report now shows you not just which pages are not served over HTTPS but also why they…

Google may have also pushed out a local search ranking update around September 7th. This is in addition to the helpful content update between August 26th and September 9th 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 announced a…

According to both RankRanger and Semrush, Google is showing fewer featured snippets in the search results since Thursday, September 8th. Personally, I am not seeing this when I search but…

Google Search has started to roll out the second broad core update of the year, the September 2022 broad core update. It started on September 12, 2022 at about 11:25…

Google has updated its Google Maps contributor guidelines, specifically disallowing a business to incentivize those who leave negative reviews to remove those reviews. Previously, the guidelines only prohibited incentivizing leaving…

Google’s John Mueller said something he normally does not say, the word “never.” He said Google will never penalize a site for not having an H1. John said this on…

Just like with Google’s consolidation of preventing spam on your site, Google did the same with its blog post on how to minimize A/B testing impact in Google Search. 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. There was a…

Christine Zirnheld, aka Shep, is a Digital Marketing Manager at Cypress North, is a co-host on Marketing O’Clock, and has been with the company for over four years. Shep came…

The Google helpful content update finished rolling out around 2 pm ET on September 9th. That morning we reported we started to notice more widespread volatility and fluctuations, possibly related…

Someone is looking to move to a new CMS where the site has 20,000 products on the front-end of the website. When the site switches to a new CMS, it…

Google has removed the datePublished “recommended” property from the fact check structured data documentation. Google said, “Currently, date information isn’t used in the Fact Check rich result.”

There is an interesting conversation on Twitter about Google crawling spikes and (1) if these spikes are global or on a per-site basis and (2) if the URL parameter tool…

Google is now testing highlighting portions of the featured snippets they show in the Google search results page. I am seeing the highlights both in yellow and blue format, as…

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. We are finally…

This week, I posted the large Google webmaster report a bit late but then dug into the Google helpful content in a lot more detail…

Google’s Aurora Morales posted on Twitter that her team has updated the Google Ads Traffic Quality site to provide more examples of what is invalid traffic. The previous site had…

Have you ever noticed that some Google one boxes, like the Twitter carousel, in Google Search, have special tracking parameters added to the URLs when you click on them. Carolyn…

Today marks the two-week and one-day mark since the Google helpful content update started to roll out and by the time I am writing this (at 5:30 am ET on…

Google has added a new section to its quality guidelines category named “Prevent abuse on your site and platform” yesterday. The content is mostly not new, it is mostly from…

Google seems to be testing showing when a photo was taken or uploaded to a Google Business Profile listing. Google has done this for image search and other areas but…

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…

I am a week late with the monthly Google webmaster report because I was on vacation and these are a pain to put together. But it is important and I…