Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, confirmed on X that follower count is not used as a search ranking factor by Google Search.

Google appears to be reintroducing the “product status change” report within Google Merchant Center. This displays the historical changes of your product statuses and is a feature that was greatly…

A few weeks or so ago, Twitter removed nofollow attributes from its links. Well, it seems like now those nofollow link attributes were added back. Glenn Gabe spotted this on…

Google is testing adding the site name next to the link icons in the AI Overviews within Google Search. This makes it much more likely for searchers to click on…

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

We had more volatility from Google Search on July 10th. Google shows half the number of people also ask boxes in the search results. Google Search Console anonymizes many queries…

Ten days ago, we reported that the people also ask feature dropped down 30 percentage points in terms of how often the feature is shown in Google Search. Well, now…

Here is the large Google webmaster report for April 2022 – catching you all up on what you may have missed in the past month related to 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 is now…

Google Ads has stopped supporting the top content bid adjustments and in October 2022 will migrate campaigns using content bid adjustments to automatically default to 0%.

Google announced this morning support for Product variant structured data. This new structured data supports three new properties; hasVariant, variesBy and productGroupID in order to handle most of the way…

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…

There is a thread on Reddit asking site owners how they are dealing with the new various Google updates and the associated traffic drops. One Redditor responded that he would…

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

Google has added three examples of the type of product review pages and who can write them to the “how to write product reviews” help document.

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….

Google’s John Mueller confirmed that Google Search is working on an issue with some favicons not showing up properly in Google Search. The issue has been ongoing for weeks, well…

Today is the total solar eclipse and while we know about the neat Google Search solar eclipse easter egg, today, Google has a special Doodle for the total eclipse of…

Google has released version 12.0 of the Google Ads API. Version 11 of the Google Ads API was released in June, and version 11.1 was in August. Version 12.0 is…

Google is showing a green leaf label that says “pre-owned” on Google Shopping results, which I guess are pre-owned. This shows both in the desktop and mobile Google Search shopping…

Google Ads is sending emails out to some advertisers offering to pay them $100 in Google Ads credits for enrolling in automatically applied recommendations. The response from the PPC community…

Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, said there is no such thing as an SEO compliance score from Google. He said instead think about avoiding technical errors, don’t spam, and use…

Mikhail Parakhin, the former head of Bing Search and Microsoft Advertising at Microsoft, has announced he is now on the advisory board for Perplexity. Perplexity is a new AI search…

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…

Google is testing or has launched a new search refinement or expansion feature named “popular next steps.” If Google thinks<< your original query will lead to a new query in your…

Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads Liasion, said on Twitter that performance max is not preferred over search ad campaigns. Ginny wrote on Twitter, “PMax isn’t ‘favored’ over Search.”

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…

Just a PSA, Google is fully deprecating the legacy Google My Business API on February 20, 2023 – this coming Monday. This is not new, most of those using the…

Well, this last February 2023 product reviews update has been pretty volatile and we have seen some significant ranking changes and the chatter within the SEO community has been pretty…

Google’s John Mueller was asked about a domain name purchased several months ago but still does not rank well in Google Search. John explained that the domain has a “long…

Not too long ago, John Mueller from Google blasted an agency for using a disavow file and now he is doubling down on that, adding on Twitter in response to…

Google Search Console’s URL Inspection tool can now report if the embedURL page for a video uses the newish indexifembedded robots tag. This was spotted by Jon Henshaw and posted…

The Google March 2023 Broad Core update finished rolling out yesterday morning at about 10:30 am ET. It took 13 days to roll out, kicking off on March 15th at…

Google announced three new features for Google travel including a new story format for hotel bookings, price guarantees for some flights and new discover tools for locations.

We know that OpenAI’s ChatGPT supports third-party plugins and soon, Bing Chat may also support third-party plugins. Mikhail Parakhin, the CEO of Bing, was asked about the topic and he…

There are reportedly at least five bugs within the Bing Webmaster Tools API and the corresponding documentation. The bugs range from setting country and regions to site move requests, plus…

Remember a few weeks ago; I showed a test where Google Ads allowed some advertisers to use AI to generate ad copy for their search ads? Well, the Financial Times…

If you visit the Google Support pages, any of them, at support.google.com, you will see a banner at the top come up again. The banner says “as a precautionary health…

Google is now saying it has ranking systems that “aim to understand if a section of a site is independent or starkly different from the main content of the site….

Google has released Google Ads API version 13.1, and below is a list of what changed. The big changes include bid simulations retrievals, added several recommendation types related to Shopping…

Google Discover generally should not show content or images that Google’s SafeSearch filter would block. Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, said this on Twitter a few weeks ago but this…

Google may have also pushed out a local search and map algorithm and ranking update over the past week or so. There has been some recent chatter and the Bright…

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

With all the changes and updates Google made recently, I wondered if some SEOs felt they couldn’t take off over the Christmas weekend holiday. Google gave us permission to take…

Google told us that the Sitelinks search box would stop working within Google Search on November 21st. Well, it finally stopped working a week later on November 27th, in the…

The other day, I reported that Google was testing replacing the 3D label with a 360 label. Well, I may have been wrong because 360 and 3D may be different…

With all this talk about clustering and canonicalization today, what about if you get it wrong, or your CMS breaks and serves the wrong thing to Google? We know how…

Google released an update to Google Bard last night that allows you to share your precise location with Bard for it to give you more accurate and relevant local results.

Google is testing a new trending videos section in the mobile search results. This one was spotted by Khushal Bherwani and he posted a video cast of a list of…

Google seems to be testing adding buttons/links to nearby hotels and restaurants directly at the top of a Google Business Profile listing. This may be related to the Digital Markets…

Google updated the Search Console rich results report for breadcrumbs starting on June 8, 2023. The report now shows warning when sites use the HTML id attribute to specify an…

The Federal Vampire & Zombie Agency is no longer showing up in Google Search, is it some sort of conspiracy or technical bug? Well, it is a technical issue with…

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 goes…

In November 2020, Google said we may see a label for the Google page experience update show up in the search result snippets. Then in December 2020 we saw actual…

Google announced it would end support for Sitemaps ping endpoints in six months. Google said this is because they are “not very useful” and the “vast majority of the submissions…

Google Ads will consolidate the current advertiser Identity verification and Business operations verification programs under a unified Advertiser verification program to provide a simplified and improved advertiser experience in March…

Microsoft is testing an updated Bing Search AI answer box powered by Copilot is testing an updated interface, that seems to promote links to publishers more. The links are more…

On Saturday morning many of us were surprised to see that Universal Analytics 3, Google Analytics (not GA4) still showed to be collecting data, after the deadline. Well, Google said…

Google is having a hard time holding on to its data in Google Search Console. Google posted yet another data logging issue on its site, this time it impacted the…

Google announced that it has is releasing more features to potentially show more ad extensions including sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippets. This includes a way to review and manage automatically…

Google is testing a new job carousel in the search results titled “jobs at similar employers.” This likely pulls from the Google Jobs postings schema and more but it can…

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

On June 28th, three weeks ago, I removed the AMP pages from this site. Overall, I didn’t see overall traffic changes from the change. I did notice issues with this…

Is there a speed difference between using absolute versus relative links and if so, does it matter to Google. I am pretty sure there is no speed difference and I…

Google has updated its Local Service Ads reviews dispute form. The update clarifies that the form should be used for reviews on Local Service Ads and not to handle reviews…

Google has updated its Merchant Listing structured data documentation to now support, in beta, membership loyalty pricing property types. Google also updated the docs to provide more examples and instructions…

Google has removed the @id mentions in the site name documentation calling the use of @id “unneeded.” If you compare the old version of the page to the new version,…

Microsoft has this new style for some of the Bing Search Copilot answers. They can show a card or box that has a tabbed carousel where you can swipe through…

Google has added a new attribute for some hotel listings to specify if they offer free or discounted accommodations for people displaced from Ukraine. This is a special attribute titles…

Microsoft is testing outlining the individual search result snippets within Bing Search. So when you look at a snippet, it has this outline around it, and then when you hover…

I should start by saying, this is super dangerous and you probably should not do this unless you really know what you are doing and why you are doing it….

Bing is testing a green official site label or icon on some of its search result snippets. We’ve seen the “official site” title added to some search results in the…

Google announced that starting next month, in September, existing vehicle ads campaigns created through Smart Shopping campaigns will be automatically migrated to Performance Max.

Google AdSense made a small change to the user-based ads controls within Google AdSense. Now instead of it just being applied to Google Ads and Display & Video 360 ads,…

Google’s John Mueller responded to a concern on Reddit about a site that scored a D with its Pingdom score. Pingdom measures sites uptime and overall page speed metrics. John…

Google announced a new label for top stories named “highly cited” about two weeks ago. The highly cited label is now showing up for select news stories in the mobile…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if adding a language indicator to the meta title tag would have any impact on SEO and Google Search in any way. John Mueller replied…

Google may have a bug with the Google Ads automated rules where the conditions you set up are not sticking. Automated rules let you make changes in your account automatically,…

Bing Chat’s precise mode has received a big upgrade that makes those answers a lot better. “Finished rolling out a pretty big update in our Precise mode of Bing Chat…

Google has a carousel in both desktop and mobile search that leads with “more about.” For example, for a query on [apply business loan] you will find a carousel that…

Microsoft is testing removing its name, i.e. Microsoft Bing, next to the logo in the Bing Search bar. Normally the search bar has the Microsoft Bing name next to the…

Google for years has been doing super fancy search features based on reviews left in Google Maps. Here are some more features that may or may not be new, but…

Google has a new beta feature to encourage searchers to add comments and have discussions around a specific topic. It is called “Discussions” and has a beta label on it….

Google has a new ad format called AR beauty ads. In Google Shopping ads you can now add the “try-on experience” in place of the search ad’s product image. “With…