Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

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…

Microsoft fully launched the quality updates in version 96 of Bing AI Chat on February 28th. It is a tad late, but it is live and reduces cases where Bing…

Google Ads now supports automatically created assets, and the new customer acquisition goal is fully live. But also, in March, the “Search Interest” targeting and “Presence or Interest” exclusion will…

Gary Illyes from Google said in his Q&A session yesterday at PubCon that while recovering from a Google helpful content update is possible, you can’t always get back to where…

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

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 went back and forth multiple times with some SEOs on the topic of using ChatGPT not to write content from scratch but to rewrite existing content. The…

In part one, we spoke about who Sam Michelson is and his business development techniques. In part two, we dive into CRM software and how they use it…

Microsoft Bing is testing a feature to set the tone you get from Bing AI Chat. You can select precise, balanced and creative tones.

Gary Illyes from Google noted that the list of Googlebot IP addresses that Google started to publish in 2021 and has updated last month is actually maintained in real-time by…

Microsoft Bing now shows if the content is medically reviewed by a medical professional for health-related search queries. So if you search for [heart burn] or other health-related queries, Bing…

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…

So much to discuss this week in the SEO video recap – just so much. Let’s start with a new confirmed Google update, and the February 2023 Google product reviews…

Google Ads announced four new features coming soon to Performance Max, including campaign-level brand exclusions, page feeds, video creation tools and more reporting. Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liason, said…

The Google Maps app for Android has seem to add a new tab to manage your business profile(s). The tab shows a store icon with the word “Business” below it….

Google’s John Mueller was asked if it would help with web rankings in Google to embed reviews from sites like Facebook, Bing, Google, etc on your web site. John said,…

Did you know that (1) over 50% of the Google search business goes through an Apple device and (2) Google also gives Apple a share of the Chrome iOS (and…

Google has updated the site move related search documentation this week. It seems like most of the changes were mostly about simplifying things around site moves, removing some content, clarification…

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 updated both the Google Discover help documentation and the Google helpful content system page documentation to clarify that Google Discover uses many of the same signals as Google…

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that the new Bing AI Chat features are available for some users on the Bing mobile app and Edge mobile app on iOS and Android. And with…

Google has updated its favicon search developer documentation to now say that you don’t need to host the favicon in the same domain in order to be eligible for a…

Google Search Console pushed out a security control update that reworked how the user and permissions management works. This is to bring over the old Webmaster Tools version to the…

Google Business Profiles lets you access and edit your business profile from web search (like it or not) and recently, Google has been testing showing a “see photos” button in…

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. Bear with me…

Joy Hawkins and friends re-did a study they did years ago to discover that now the services you add to your Google Business Profiles now have an impact on your…

Microsoft’s Jordi Ribas, Corporate Vice President of Search & AI at Microsoft put together a detailed blog post explaining the Prometheus technology and how Bing uses it to make Bing…

Google, at about 5pm ET last night on February 21, 2023, has unleashed the sixth product reviews update. This is named the February 2023 product reviews update and it expands…

Last October, Microsoft introduced its Image Creator tool to help you create images using AI. Well, now Bing seems to be testing this in the web and image search results…

Last week we had reported that Google Ads campaigns were seeing mass disapproval and suspensions but now I am seeing new reports of Google Ad account suspensions across multiple verticals….

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

Google’s John Mueller said on Mastodon that for small and local businesses, “in most cases,” core web vitals work should not be at the top of their list. He said…

Mikhail Parakhin, the CEO of Microsoft Bing, said on Twitter that they have fixed the systematic “Something went wrong” issue that some of you have seen over the past week…

Microsoft Bing is testing not showing the citations or links to publishers by default for some results in the Edge Sidebar. So instead of showing the links to the publishers,…

Google’s John Mueller said on Mastodon that an existing site isn’t not going to drop in ranking just because it uses an exact match domain. “Changes like that would be…

Google has just added a new feature to export your data in bulk, on an ongoing basis, from Google Search Console to Google’s BigQuery. Daniel Waisberg from Google said on…

Google AdSense is updating the Sites page, where you define which sites you want to monetize using AdSense. The updates are coming on March 20, 2023, and include a redesigned…

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

What happens when the noindex, nofollow directives are in the HTTP header and that URL is also being redirected somewhere, will Google respect or ignore the directive. Gary Illyes from…

Microsoft is increasing the price of using the Bing Search APIs by 10x the current cost, effective May 1, 2023, the company posted. That includes using the API for Bing…

A week ago, Thanos Bertes posted on LinkedIn, which I found via Mike Ryan on Twitter, that Google Ads disabled the ability in campaign settings to easily opt out of…

A major quality improvement should be coming to the new Bing AI Chat feature on Thursday, February 23rd said Mikhail Parakhin, the CEO of Advertising and Web Services at Microsoft.

Last June, Google began testing a “profile strength” widget or status icon that shows you if you need to do more with your Google Business Profile. Well, that just went…

Sam Michelson was in town, and he is the CEO of Five Blocks, a digital reputation management firm based in Jerusalem, Israel. We spoke about how Sam started…

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. FYI…

What a week, we had another big unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update. Google Ads had a pretty massive bug with campaign disapprovals and suspensions. Google published a new SEO…

Gary Illyes posted a new blog post on the Google Search Central site asking all of you to stop using 403 and 404 server status codes to reduce the crawl…

Several months ago, Google tested displaying a left-hand sidebar filter on the desktop search interface. Google is doing something similar on mobile search, but now they are tucking the search…

Did you see the scrollable and expandable features in some user experiences with the Google Search knowledge panel and answer boxes?Well, here are examples of both – I am not…

John Mueller of Google said not all Googlebots use the same rendering engine, in fact, not all Googlebots need to do rendering John added. So while the main desktop and…

Microsoft Bing has added a “more” button on some featured snippets in the mobile search interface. When you click on the more button, there is this brief and subtle animation…

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

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’s John Mueller posted at Reddit why he is not a fan of using keyword-rich hyphenated domains. He said, “I’m not a fan of keyword-keyword domains, but YMMV.”

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…

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…

Matt McGee posted a poll on Twitter asking how much of Google’s search engine usage market share do you expect the new Bing with ChatGPT to take in the next…

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

Last night, Google Ads started to suspend and mass disapprove Google Ads and Google Merchant Center campaigns. There are numerous reports of this issue starting around 4 pm ET on…

Here we go again; yet another Google search ranking algorithm update seems to have touched down on February 14th, maybe as early as February 13th, and seems to be continuing…

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…

The other week I spotted this Twitter thread where someone was able to ask Microsoft Bing AI chat what its codename is. In short, Bing AI responded that it was…

When the new Microsoft Bing AI copilot was announced, and I reported about the changes to the Bing webmaster guidelines, Glenn Gabe also picked up on some potentially problematic language…

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

Gary Illyes from Google said on Mastodon this morning that you should 301 redirect URLs when there is a “close-to 1:1 match” for that URL. We know that, but what…

Google Ads seems to be rolling out a small but yet powerful icon in the campaigns listing where you can quickly open up the settings for the campaign without clicking…

Similar to what we reported about with Google a few months ago, with Google testing a map within a search snippet for a specific company. It seems like Microsoft Bing…

A Reddit thread, spotted via Areej AbuAli on Twitter, says that there is an SEO guy who travels across multiple regions in Europe to upload photos to Facebook from that…

Google Search seems to be testing adding stock tickets with the stock price of public companies mentioned in the articles Google is showing in the top stories section.

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. Publishers, as expected,…

It is somewhat satisfying to see non-SEOs dig deeper into how search is changing at Google and Bing and to hear the concerns they have about these changes. We covered…

I believe Google changed the sitemaps-related search developer documentation last week. I am not sure if any of the content specifically changed, but Google did rename some of the pages…

Last November Google introduced a new catchall search spam policy named policy circumvention. That spam policy was listed to be able to take action on sites that bypass the other…

Google’s John Mueller said he thinks, and he said he might be wrong, that the final mobile-first indexing batch will be done in the next couple of months. Desktop indexing…

Gary Illyes from Google is back and this time he said that those “Checking if the site connection is secure” interstitials you see on some sites, some of the time,…

In part one, we go through Jeff Ferguson’s long history in search marketing. In part two, we pick up with him starting his own agency. Then in part three, we…

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

Famed YouTuber and excellent tech reviewer, Marques Brownlee, posted a poll on Twitter to his 6 million followers asking would you rather use Google as it exists now or Bing…

Google is testing a “trending” label in the people also ask box in the mobile search results. I guess it shows trending searches in the category of what other people…

With all this talk about how search is going to be more useful and helpful with the new AI features in Bing, very few are talking about ads in that…

I am seeing signs of another Google search ranking algorithm update just a few days after the February 4th Google search ranking update – both of these have not been…

What an insane week between the AI announcements, algorithm updates, content, and so much more. I start off talking about Google’s Bard announcement and a bit about the Paris announcement…

Microsoft Bing is now tucking away its logo, hiding it from searchers, after you conduct a search using your mobile device. Bing will anchor you down to the top of…

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

Google’s Danny Sullivan reiterated that when it comes to AI content, Google is fine with it, as long as the content is useful and written for people. If you are…

Google’s John Mueller confirmed that the GoogleProber and the GoogleProducer (which we covered here) are both legit Googlebot user agents and crawlers. “These are official Google requests with a user-agent…