Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

Google announced last week that Google Search “now makes it easier to search for datasets” by showing “more datasets” and explore more features for datasets within Google Search.

Google’s John Mueller was asked if having hyphens in your domain name, like www.my-site-goes-here.com, can cause ranking issues in Google Search. John Mueller said no, domains with hyphens are not…

Google is now showing products that businesses add through the Google Business Profile manager directly in Google Shopping search results. I was not sure if this is new, but it…

Google may be testing replacing the “people also ask” with a “more to ask” box. I am unsure if this is just a headline change or if there is any…

Google Explore is that weird feature you get when you keep scrolling and scrolling through the search results. Then Google hits you with this explore feature to expand your query…

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

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

Google has made a couple of updates to the Google Maps User Contributed Content Policy around prohibited and restricted content. Specifically, Google updated the definition of personal information under the…

After many months of testing, Google has launched the highlights in the featured snippets within the Google search results. Google seems to have gone with the blue highlights, not the…

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…

Jack Krawczyk, the product lead for Bard at Google, told Googlers at an all-hands meeting, saying, “I just want to be very clear: Bard is not search.”

Since the Google February 2023 product reviews update on February 21st, we’ve been seeing some pretty big swings in the search results – a lot of volatility, more than the…

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

This week we saw a lot more volatility from the Google Product reviews update, one last weekend and the other around March 1st. I also posted the big Google webmaster…

Google is testing a few interfaces for the Google Posts and updates in the local interfaces. One is to overlay the Google updates in the images for the business listing…

Microsoft Bing is testing placing a site’s favicon on the right side of the search result title’s snippet. We are accustomed to seeing it on the left for Google search…

An SEO is in a situation where a site needs to move from www.domain.com to new.domain.com and then a few months later back to www.domain.com. John Mueller of Google was…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that it is an SEO myth to say you can use the nofollow attribute on links to hoard your links. He said, “You don’t…

Google announced it is testing a new design to help improve the workflow of advertisers in the Google Ads console. Google said it is “testing new designs to improve how…

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 posted the…

Here is the big Google webmaster report for March 2023, where I cover all the most important things that happened with Google search over the past month. The highlights include…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter, “when it comes to web pages in Google Search, hashtags are just words, they have no special meaning or effect.” So if you are…

Google’s John Mueller spoke a bit more about when you should update the date in the lastmod tag in the XML sitemap file. He said on Twitter if you are…

Google Ads is updating its Malicious or unwanted software policy on May 9, 2023. The policy will be split into three policies, Malicious software, Compromised sites, and Unwanted software.

Google’s John Mueller was asked if Google Search would be impacted if you block other crawlers, like Bing or the ChatGPT crawler. John said no, “Google doesn’t care if you…

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 Bing seems to be incorporating more of its Chat AI features into answer boxes in the main search results. Bing is testing a “summarized” box that gives you summary…

Google has been testing blocking news in Google Search on about 4% of Canadian users. Google said, “We’re briefly testing potential product responses to Bill C-18 that impact a very…

Both Semrush and RankRanger are reporting several point drops in the percentage of time a people also ask box shows up in the Google search results. The drop started on…

I am seeing a much bigger spike in chatter within the SEO community this morning around another Google search ranking algorithm update. It might be related to the ongoing Google…

Yesterday, Fabrice Canel from Microsoft Bing announced at PubCon that Bing Webmaster Tools would get two new features. First is the Bing Chat integration, and the second is the index…

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 said it…

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…

Google Bard and its chat-based search features that have yet to be seen in the wild may have their unique way of sending publishers traffic, unique from Bing’s AI Chat…

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…

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…

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 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…

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 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…

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’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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…