Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

Google announced a couple new Google Lens features; (1) they are expanding how AI Overviews show on Google Lens results and (2) Chrome and Google’s iOS app now let you…

Microsoft Bing’s CEO, Mikhail Parakhin said on Twitter that Bing Chat outperforms raw GPT-4 but it comes at an expense. He said, “It is outperforming according to our measurements,” when…

It looks like Microsoft is testing search ads that auto expand to reveal sitelinks under those ads within the Bing Search results. You don’t need to click or do anything…

Google is testing wider and larger image thumbnails on snippets in the desktop search results interface. The images look about twice as wide, maybe even more, the the normal image…

This week was pretty busy, we had the third Google product reviews update and I go deep into this algorithm update. We saw what I called a Spring 2022 Google…

This week I broadcast from Chicago where I cover the latest confirmed Google update…

Google is sending out notices about intrusive interstitials to sites that are placing these interstitials in a possibly annoying manner on their sites. The email subject lines read “Improve your…

At the Microsoft AI event last Thursday, Microsoft also announced new AI-based ad features in the upcoming months. This includes Copilot, which will help you create ads in Microsoft Advertising,…

In part one, Larry Brauner and I spoke about growth versus brand marketing, reputation management, reviews…

This week in search, a reporter uncovered that sketchy SEOs are making up fake lawyers using AI to send out fake DMCA requests demanding links to their sites…

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 shocked us…

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

Google has stopped the indented results, something Google has been doing for well over a decade. Instead, Google will just list out the result it would have indented in the…

Google has added one line to its video best practices document explaining that you should have at least 80% of your thumbnail pixels have little or no transparency to enable…

Microsoft is testing shading the site names, the brand names, of retailers in the Bing Shopping search results. So the name Amazon is in a blue shaded background color as…

Google has posted new guidelines to the Google Merchant Center for electric or motorized bikes. You must now list the max speed of the electric bike, if you do not,…

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’s IndexNow, after…

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’s CEO, Sundar…

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

Google is investigating reports of a number of searchers seeing that all the links shown in the Google search results are marked as previously visited. When you click on a…

Google seems to be showing the people also ask feature a lot less often now on desktop. According to Semrush and RankRanger, it was at about 60% of queries showing…

So while Google Search is currently having massive indexing issues, the Google Ads advertiser console is having issues loading ad spend and other data. Google confirmed the issue saying “affected…

Google Ads has this advertiser verification program and now advertisers can use their DBAs (“doing business as”) or trade names for that verification. Google said these names are accepted if…

The fourth version of the Google Product Reviews Update is now rolling out – this update is called – you guessed it – the July 2022 Google Product Reviews Update….

As you know, Microsoft released the Copilot App for iOS and Android but it does not support plugins like the Bing App. But don’t worry, Copilot will soon support plugins.

Google is testing displaying all of the menu bar options under the Google Search bar. This is instead of showing the “more” button, to see more search options.

Google Local Service Ads is testing and may eventually launch a new user interface to allow businesses and advertisers to exclude their ads from showing in certain areas.

This week, again from Jerusalem, I spoke about this weird rollout for the Google helpful content update…

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, wrote on X, “Another thing to keep in mind is that some of the sites I’ve looked into, where someone thinks they have a…

Google is testing, again, placing the site name above the URL and description in the mobile search result snippets. Also, we are seeing more rounded favicons in those snippets as…

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…

There seems to be a much higher level of Google Business Profiles suspended in the past couple of weeks than one would typically see. So a higher number of businesses…

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

In less than about 42 hours, Google has fully rolled out the last spam update – the Google October 2022 spam update. The update began on October 19, 2022, at…

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

Google has posted a short note in the Search Consoles data anomalies that says there was a bug in Google Search that affected some search features, including but not limited…

In June of 2022, Mordy Oberstein first spotted a new SERP feature being tested called Google Explore. That’s where a feed of content shows up after a user scrolls through…

The new AI advanced version of Google Search, aka Google SGE or Search Generative Experience, provides wicked smart AI answers to your queries. And if you ask it how to…

Google has updated its Google Crawler / User Agent help document with a new section for “Retired Google crawlers.” With that, Google announced the retirement of the short-lived DuplexWeb-Google User…

Google has once again said that its enforcement of the site reputation abuse policy is still only being done through manual actions and not algorithmically. Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liasion,…

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

Google’s John Mueller said that just because an algorithm update takes longer to roll out, it doesn’t make that update more or less intense. The update’s length is generally related…

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…

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…

Google seems to be rolling out a new Google Lens feature that lets you record with your camera and also speak with your voice on top of that video. Then…

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…

Gary Illyes from Google gave a keynote and a Q&A session yesterday at PubCon and while the keynote was pretty vanilla stuff, the Q&A did reconfirm a lot of what…

In the latest Google SEO office hours session, Gary Illyes answered how Google decides when to show links in Google Search to a company’s mobile app. The short answer is…

Google AI Overviews generally do not show up for branded or navigational queries. So if you are searching for a brand or company, generally, Google has not shown an AI…

It looks like review spammers are using ChatGPT and other AI tools to generate fake reviews. These reviews are being posted in Google Business Profile local listings and causing a…

So far, Google’s official stance on using AI to write content is just fine, assuming that content was not written to manipulate the search results. If the content is useful,…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if it makes sense to publish 8,000 new pages at once or slowly publish them over time. Like, would publishing them all at once cause…

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 now…

Gary Illyes from Google spoke about the topic of a website dropping in rankings for a single keyword or single keyword phrase while ranking fine for others. Can it happen?…

Google Ads posted an update that you a no longer to promote sports betting services or ads in Florida using the Google Ads platform. Google said this is effective as…

Google has updated its documented ranking systems page over here to remove four ranking systems from the list, including removing three ranking systems. Google has removed the page experience system…

Google Merchant Center can now show you which products are automatically eligible for badges. Krik Williams shared a screenshoot showing off this new feature and Search Engine Land received confirmation…

Google’s John Mueller said it again, he said on LinkedIn, “We’ve been pretty clear that Core Web Vitals are not giant factors in ranking, and I doubt you’d see a…

Google posted a number of new Google Ads policy changes that take place in January and February 2022 around political and election based content in ads. Google is ending the…

Google has posted that the Google Merchant Center feeds have issues. The notice is posted here and reads, “We’re investigating reports of an issue with Feeds. We will provide more…

Google has told us that you want to avoid buying a domain name that was filtered by the Google SafeSearch adult filter. Well, servers.com had this issue and after asking…

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. Bing Chat AI…

A couple of months ago we reported that Microsoft may share revenues with publishers that help it create content for Bing Chat. It was under he Microsoft Start Partner program….

Google is testing yet another format for its AI Overviews. This one looks like Google is grouping answers for a more generic query into multiple categories of responses. Google is…

Google seems to be testing displaying the “services” button as the first action button in the local and maps search result listings. Usually, the first action buttons would be the…

Instead of just showing citations in the footer of the response and answers in Bing Chat, Bing is now showing anchor text hyperlinks as responses. In fact, if you watch…

Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai was interviewed by New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. In this interview they spoke about Google’s approach to AI, Sundar’s outlook for the technology, and what…

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 be…

This week we had yet another unconfirmed Google search ranking update in the middle of the week. The Google Search Generative Experience AI snapshot answers are now twice as fast….

Google’s Ginny Marvin via the AdsLiaison account on Twitter confirmed that target CPA, tCPA, is not being cancelled in 2022. She wrote “we have no plans to sunset tCPA in…

Google has confirmed an issue with the Google Search Console Performance reports specific to image search. The issue is a logging issue that may result in your clicks and impressions…

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

Statcounter’s search market share data for the 2024 year is up and there are a lot of ways to look at this data. At Search Engine Land, Danny Goodwin wrote…

The other day Open AI announced that it disabled the browse with Bing add-on to ChatGPT “out of an abundance of caution.” The issue was that some content that was…

Google’s John Mueller replied to a bunch of screenshots of SEO tools showing word counts for the same page that tailed the word counts differently. John said, “This is also…

After hearing reports that the Google News team is working on fixing an issue, Google has confirmed it last night. Many publishers were either not showing up in Google News…

Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, confirmed some time ago that for the Google Ads machine learning models to work faster (and probably better) Google would need a minimum of…

Google has posted a new document in the Google Merchant Center area on how to build trust with your customers. The document goes through your business identity, your transparency, your…

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 Editor…

This week, we noticed that many, but not all, of the Google rank tracking tools were cooling, but then later this week, the SEO chatter heated up. Google Merchant Center…

Buckle up – it was one insane month of changes that all SEOs who care about Google need to catch up on. We had very unstable and heated Google search…

In the Google Shopping search results, if you can check out with Google, Google will add a Google-colored shopping cart icon to the search results that support checkout with Google….

For the past few years or so, Google has had a more detailed, almost survey-style review questionnaire for some local results, especially restaurants. Now, according to Claudia Tomina, Google has…

Google said you will soon see fewer FAQ and HowTo rich results showing up in the Google Search results. Why? I assume because there is just too many of these…