Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

Google’s John Mueller said on the last Google office hours that using HTTP/3 for your server will likely not have any impact on your SEO or rankings in Google Search….

The other day we reported how Google will be releasing an update to the helpful content system that can identify “hidden gems” deep within the web and promote that in…

Google’s new Business Profile interface, aka NMX (I hate the name), in the web search results, for some business profile listings, is showing an option to “add a map to…

As you know, Google has dropped its deadline to switch all sites to mobile-first indexing after missing its self-directed deadlines multiple times in the past. But John Mueller of Google…

Google has released Google Ads API version 13.0 and below is a list of what changed. Version 12.0 was released in October 2022, Version 11.0 of the Google Ads API…

Google Search Console has dropped a whole section on its side bar navigation. The Legacy tools and reports section has been removed from the side bar. It is unclear exactly…

Google seems to be testing another refinement feature named “explore more.” This is in addition to the product grids, and popular products and refine by search features. This looks similar…

Most search marketers are saying that the cost per clicks are up from last year on Google Ads. In short, most advertisers are saying the overall cost of each click…

Next month, Google Ads will remove the examples it provides in its Google Ads Legal Requirements policy. Google posted that on August 7, 2023, it will no longer list examples…

Google Ads added a new brand control override for Performance Max campaigns that lets you override the exclusion for Shopping Ads. The check box is under the brand exclusions section…

Danny Sullivan of Google said on Twitter that he believes that sites that require age verification would not surface in Google Discover. He added he has to confirm this but…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if there can be some sort of negative impact when it comes to cross linking your language or country versions of your pages. In which…

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…

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 is trying…

Alcides Aguasvivas is a co-founder of Pix-l Graphx, he has been running the company for 18 years now and they are based around the corner from my office in Rutherford,…

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…

Google has posted a new video on how BERT helps Google Search understand language. Google has been using BERT in search since 2018, we only knew about it in 2019….

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…

Google Business Profiles will stop supporting price ranges for products and custom call to actions, starting February 15, 2023. Google will also remove any existing price ranges and all landing…

Google has added a method to bulk manage the special hours for all the businesses you manage in Google Business Profiles. You can easily copy special hours from one business…

What a busy week, we had Google confirm it is working on an all-new search engine that uses AI and Bard. There is no ETA for when that will go…

With Google’s new effort to get business owners to manage their business listing in web search and not in the Google Business Profile manager, formerly Google My Business, Google is…

Google’s John Mueller said it might be bad if your site depends on Google Discover for traffic. He said on Mastodon, “If your site depends on Discover traffic, that sounds…

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

Lizzi Sassman from Google said in this morning’s Google SEO office hours that using the anchor text “here,” the text for your hyperlink, is simply “bad link text.” Instead, you…

Apple seems like it may be preparing integration Google Gemini in Apple Intelligence as an option for its users to select. Aaron Perris from MacRumors spotted hints in the iOS…

Google Ads will prohibit some skin lightening products starting in June 2020. Any skin lightening product that imply the superiority of one skin tone over another will not be allowed…

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

Fabrice Canel from the Microsoft Bing team told SEOs that instead of focusing on traffic and rankings, they should focus on conversions and click value. He said on X, “SEOs…

Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, said that in the “very near future” the Google Ads team will be adding support to have Performance Max data to Google Data Studio….

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 sending some of its advertisers personalized emails about how they can boost their ads performance by following a few steps. The email is titled, “Your step-by-step guide to…

I am seeing a number of complaints that Google Analytics real-time reporting is not working properly. Many are complaining that the data looks off and is underreporting, at best.

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

We know Google will be bringing Google Discover to the desktop interface, heck, we’ve seen Google testing it for a while now. But did you know that Google will also…

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. Almost a week…

Ryan Moulton, a Google Search engineer who worked on Google’s search rankings algorithms for over 18 years now, went to X to call out some of what the courts are…

Google has a bug with Google Ads where for campaigns running on New Customer Acquisition they are not able to spend the set budget. This bug was confirmed with Google…

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

Microsoft Bing is pushing more into Bing Chat through Bing Search. Bing is adding Bing Chat icons in the autocomplete bar, the pagination bar and other areas of Bing Search…

Google has updated the event structured data and recipe structured data help documentation. The changes include removing the online event properties, adding more examples and also saying that recipe markup…

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

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 am celebrating…

Google has changed how much it charges for message leads within Google Local Service Ads. Previously, it was 50% of the corresponding phone lead but now, Google said it is…

Google is testing vertical images within the Top Stories section of the Google search results on desktop. We’ve seen vertical or portrait layouts for top stories on mobile, but I…

I’ve covered the almost invisible and incredibly hard to see experiments with Microsoft Advertising placing hard to see search/sponsored ads in the Bing search results many times. Well, now that…

Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads Liaison, responded to some data that suggests that AI Max is expansionary on SPN, the Search Partner Network. That using AI Max will more heavily target…

Last week, I included in my recap a link to a Reddit thread that seems to have got some attention. It has John Mueller of Google saying a site with…

Microsoft Bing is testing the “see results for” feature on the left hand side. The same place we saw the “on this page” feature that would jump you to the…

Microsoft posted the monthly Microsoft Advertising news and new features and announced a bunch of new stuff. The new features include new flyer extensions, update (restate) the revenue value associated…

We covered the topic of taking over an old domain name from someone else and how that can sometimes be problematic in the Google SEO world. But here is a…

The March 2022 Google Product Reviews update is now fully rolled out, Alan Kent from Google told me. The updated started on March 23, 2022 and ended 19 days later…

Welcome to 2023, and with that, here is our Google webmaster report for 2023 – where we summarize the bigger Google SEO-related changes in the past month. The big items…

A couple of weeks ago, Gary Illyes and Lizzi Sassman of Google had Dave Smart as a guest on the Search Off The Record podcast and they spoke about crawling….

Ten months ago, Google said on stage at Google Search Central Live event in the Google Zurich office that we should expect more core update, more update. We now have…

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 Web Stories…

Steve Plimmer posted a screenshot from the Google Ads console’s change history log showing how Google has named the RSAs, response search ads, versatile text ads. It makes you wonder…

Google is now sharing the Googlebot IP ranges for the User-triggered fetchers. User-triggered fetchers are from Google tools and product functions where the end user triggers a fetch.

Google had filed a lawsuit against a company that allegedly created fake Google Business Profiles and tons of fake reviews. Google said it filed the suit “to help put an…

Google has once again updated the relatively new documentation around Site Names in Google Search, this time to clarify that www and m-dot prefixes for domain names are generally considered…

Google is testing a dynamic keyword insertion feature for Google Shopping Ads where it may insert the material in the product if used in the searcher’s query. I do not…

Google has published a new, or vastly revamped, document on SEO link best practices. The previous document was just on how to make your links crawlable but the new one…

In Google Search you can trigger the Google Translation widget. But now, Google is testing a G icon to let you “search for this on Google” from that translate widget…

Some SEOs are seeing Google rewrite more of their titles to something shorter and maybe less descriptive than they would prefer to display in the Google search results.

Google seems to be testing showing a super short product review in the image thumbnail in the search results. So Google will overlay at the top of the product image…

The new Google Search Generative Experience started to roll out to some users in late May but we are already seeing a decline in usage for these generative AI search…

Sam Gooch noticed that if you filter the Google Search Console performance report to show video search appearance and desktop-only results, Google will start to flat line on June 13,…

Google has just launched the new INP report within the Core Web Vitals reporting in Google Search Console. As a reminder, INP, Interaction to Next, is replacing FID, First Input…

Google Search is testing adding a color swatch to the product grid layout in its search results. Google is showing colors in small boxes and a “+ more” label if…

Google has updated its product structured data help documents to say that you need both product and car structured in order for Google to display ratings and review snippets in…

A Google document that came out of the DOJ trails said that back in 2017, Bing Search was faster than Google was specifically looking at mobile queries. The document was…

Google is shutting down the Google Question Hub feature on January 15, 2023 – a month from today. Google officially launched Question Hub in the US two years prior, but…

Google Search has been super busy with tons of unique and different interfaces for shopping and product-related search results. Here is one, that I am honestly not sure is new…

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…

There have been a lot of complaints about the quality of Google search results – the truth is, there are always complaints. Assuming you believe the results are indeed getting…

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…

Google News has a new (I think new) section for some news queries that says “see similar headlines from.” This section is often at the bottom of the news results…

Google’s John Mueller said it is a big deal if your most important page or pages are terrible but not such a big deal if your less important pages are…

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…

As a reminder, back in 2016, Google updated its guidelines for using schema markup on your site with third-party reviews. Google reminded us in 2018 that this is not in…

There is this interesting conversation on LinkedIn around a robots.txt serves a 503 for two months and the rest of the site is available. Gary Illyes from Google said that…

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…

Microsoft Bing is testing a new annotation in the autocomplete search results to communicate to searchers that they can tap the tab key to finish the autocomplete without clicking on…

Google has added a “by owner” button to the local panel, the local business profile listing, within Google Search. When you click on it, it shows you the business description…

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 local listings have been pushing products for the past several years, in fact, it just recently added in-store products in the help document around improving visibility in Google local…

Bing Image Creator will get some big improvements in about a month. Microsoft Bing CEO, Mikhail Parakhin said this on Twitter the other day, saying the language model for Bing…

Google is rolling out new sales and leads conversion reports in the Google Ads advertiser console. These reports are under the Goals section, then Conversions and then Summary tab and…

Microsoft is testing showing larger favicons that also animate in the Bing Search results. The favicons look a lot larger in this test, here are side by side comparisons so…

Google has mixed its search ads between and throughout the organic (free) search results starting sometime mid-last year. Google calls it dynamic ad placement, and it is an ongoing tests….