Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

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…

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

Back in 2016, we covered how Google’s John Mueller said product pricing is not a web search ranking factor. Well, the same is true in 2022, six-years later. But this…

Google seems to be testing clickable links within a search result description area. I am not sure if this is a bug or a feature but I was able to…

This week, I posted the monthly Google webmaster report – got to say, it was a super busy month – so catch up there. Google’s product reviews update, the tail-end,…

Everyone now is seeing the people also ask and people also search for in the search bar menu area. Now, Google is testing related to recent searches and trending searches…

A recent poll on Twitter by Brodie Clark shows that SEOs really do want both a featured snippets filter in the performance reports in Google Search Console and also an…

As you know, last week, on April 26th, Google disabled the URL parameter tool within Google Search Console and stopped respecting any of the rules added to that tool. Some…

Google AdSense has been testing serving and displaying ads within AI Chatbots. Bloomberg reported Google has already begun testing this within AI search apps iAsk and Liner and plans to…

Did you know that sometimes Google will ask you to provide more search terms in your query when the search conducted was super short and generic? Here is a screenshot…

Google is testing adding the ability for you to add your own annotations to the Google Search Console performance reports. This is one of the requests SEOs have been asking…

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…

Yesterday an SEO named Nilesh Dhobi submitted an XML sitemap through Google Search Console. It was on June 1, 2022 but Google showed the date submitted as June 2, 2022….

Google’s John Mueller said it is acceptable to restrict access of your XML Sitemaps to just search engines. So you can technically block humans from seeing your XML sitemaps but…

Microsoft is now labeling some of the Bing vehicle ads with the condition of those automobiles. They include ‘New,’ ‘Used,’ and ‘CPO’ (Certified Pre-Owned). Also highlights features like ‘Single Owner,’…

OpenAI announced it has released several improvements to the ChatGPT search response quality. These improvements include “more comprehensive, up-to-date responses,” according to the AI company.

Microsoft Bing is testing what might be a featured snippet on steroids with a section named “from this page” in the search results page. This box shows you detailed automated…

Two years ago, Google made a new Google Merchant Center policy named Website needs improvement. Well, now free listings accounts with this issue status are still active, but their products…

Christmas is in five days and today Google has launched its Christmas decorations for Google Search. As an FYI, Google launched the Chanukah decorations on December 3, 2023 but now…

Google has officially deprecated the Sitemaps ping endpoints. Now, when you try to access it, Google responds, “Sitemaps ping is deprecated,” with a link to the post about it going…

Google has updated its Business Profile posts content policy to specify that Google now considers duplicate photos, posts, videos, and logos as spam. If you have duplicate photos, posts, videos,…

The last Google product reviews update, the July 2022 Google Product Reviews Update, was an interesting one. It felt, based on SEO and webmaster feedback, that it just didn’t hit…

I am weird, I love user-generated comments and while tons of blogs removed them ages and ages ago, I kept them here. I do my best to remove the spam…

On August 17th, Google seems to have removed the “see results about” disambiguation search feature from the Google mobile search results. They still show on desktop but on mobile, it…

Google has updated its Google Maps contributor guidelines, specifically disallowing a business to incentivize those who leave negative reviews to remove those reviews. Previously, the guidelines only prohibited incentivizing leaving…

Marguarite (Maggie) Humphrey worked at Cypress North as an intern back in 2019, then went to DAC for a few years…

Marcus Tober at Semrush, a respected search marketing platform, published a new zero-click study that puts zero clicks across Google on average at 25% of all searches or 26% on…

This should come as no surprise – but more people and companies spend more on PPC than on SEO. A Twitter poll from Lily Ray shows that but so does…

It seems as if I see more volatility signals on the weekends with Google Search than I do during the weekdays. We may have had another Google search ranking algorithm…

Google announced a bunch of features around Google Search, Google Maps, Google Lens and more that are now rolling out in the US and some other regions. This goes across…

Since Friday of Thanksgiving last week, we have been seeing a lot of chatter and volatility with Google Search. Google said they improved the accuracy of the Discover performance report…

Google added a new annotation to the Google Search Console performance reports on December 5th, saying that sites that use Subscribe with Google may see an increase in clicks and…

Google has added a wheelchair-accessible icon to the Business Profile listings in Google Maps of businesses that self-claim they are wheelchair-accessible. There is a little wheelchair-accessible icon next to the…

Google announced in India yesterday that they are testing a search feature to allow you to search text within video. This isn’t a huge stretch from key moments but it…

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

There is a lot of talk in the wider SEO community around pound signs, #, in the Google Search Console reports, meaning something about canonicalization. John Mueller from Google, along…

John Mueller of Google was on the web, responding to SEO-related questions both on New Year’s Eve and New Year. This has become expected from John, which might be unfair…

There are reports in the Local Search Forum that in the past few weeks or so, Google has been offering fewer verification methods via postcards than other verification methods, compared…

It looks like we may have had another tremor or Google search ranking algorithm update kickoff yesterday, Wednesday, January 18th. We just had one this weekend after the December 2022…

Microsoft reported earnings last night, and in after-hours trading, it seems, for the most part, that Wall Street is happy. But if you look at the search ad revenue numbers,…