Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

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…

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…

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,…

Now, Google is showing double justifications for some local results. Google’s local search results has a feature to highlight and/or summarize some of the local reviews in the map pack…

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

Google has also updated the image SEO best practices document to clarify that Google will parses img elements even when they’re enclosed in other elements such as picture elements when…

Google will be sunsetting, killing off, the Google Optimize product on September 30, 2023. “Google Optimize and Optimize 360 will no longer be available after September 30, 2023. Your experiments…

Google has updated its Get On Discover page in the RSS feed for the Follow feature in Google Discover section to specify the most important content for that section. Google…

Google’s Gary Illyes said on LinkedIn this morning that you should “include the URLs that you would want to see as canonical in your sitemaps.” This is not necessarily new…

Digiday reported that with the mass Google layoffs, Google advertisers are being encouraged to work with third-party resellers, like agencies, directly as it seeks to reduce its overheads related 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. There may have…

Google has confirmed outages across the Google Ads network, including Google Ads for Search, Google Ads for other surfaces and many of the Google Ads management projects, like Search Ads…

Jeff Ferguson is the CEO of Amplitude Digital, and he has been in the search space for a really long time. He is also an Adjunct Professor at UCLA. In…

There was a possible Bing algorithm update that rolled out on January 18, 2023 that’s impacting some sites heavily.

Yahoo posted on Twitter under its Yahoo Search account, “Just popping in to remind everyone that we did search before it was cool. BRB making it cool again.” Is that…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if there is a Google SEO preference to having your structured data connected in some graph or node array versus having them as individual elements…

Google Search Console Insights seems to have added a new section named “Achievements.” I believe Google would email these achievements but now there is a section at the top of…

As many of you know by now, Google announced mass layoffs due to “difficult economic cycles.” Those Googlers in the US were already informed by Friday morning if they had…

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

Google is testing the “order online” button from the bottom of the search result snippet to the top of that snippet. I see it on the bottom, but some can…

Google has posted a new help document for posting restrictions around user-generated content in Google Maps. This is specific to reviews, photos, and videos users may update to Google Maps….

Last October, Google revamped its Google Webmaster Guidelines into Google Search Essentials and one part of that was to consolidate the previous pages on thin content and affiliate programs into…

This week we had two unconfirmed updates from Google rollout after the helpful content…

The other day we reported on the newish check wait time button and now we are seeing a “join waitlist” button as well. I guess this gets you on the…

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

Google is rolling out Performance Max experiments in Google Ads today. We knew this would come and now, I think for the first time but I might be wrong, we…

It looks like we may have had another tremor or Google search ranking algorithm update kickoff yesterday, Wednesday, January 18th. We just had one this weekend after the December 2022…

Google has posted that you may see an increase in clicks and impressions in your search performance report when filtering by the product results search appearance in Search Console. Google…

Google has dropped the playable podcast search result rich snippets. 9to5Google reported this first, and there is a bit of confusion around what exactly Google removed. Google seems to have…

Microsoft Bing is testing topics refinements options in the search bar, this is similar to what Google Search launched a few months back on mobile search and has been testing…

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

Google’s John Mueller said again that its quality updates, like core updates and the others in the family, can not just impact the ranking of a page in Google Search…

Google’s John Mueller was asked about if it is okay with Google Search to have a website with the same name as another site on the internet. John said he…

Google has a “related products” section in its search results. This seems similar to the similar products concept, but it looks like the other query expansion options for Google Search…

Google Posts insights is no longer working, it has been discontinued according to the Google Business Profiles API documentation for the deprecation schedule.

Google is testing displaying a round map pin that has a business photo in the pin itself. This is supposedly working on some Google Maps devices when you request directions.

Post Content

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

John Mueller of Google said on Twitter that “publishing frequency alone does not make something spam.” Google’s algorithms don’t look at the content volume as a spam signal alone.

Google seems to be testing a new box in the search results named perspectives and opinions. The naming convention reminds me of Google perspectives, but this acts differently, as the…

Google is testing a “check wait time” button for some local results in the Google search results. I guess this tells you how long you have to wait to receive…

For a long, long time, Google has given searchers a way to override the location Google Search thinks you are searching for. Often, that location was in the footer, but…