Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

There is an interesting response from John Mueller of Google on what to do with URLs that may appear duplicated because of URL parameters, like UTMs, at the end of…

Google announced it has renamed the Google Ads extensions to “assets” plus it has released new workflows, tools and reports to “make it easy for you to deliver more engaging…

What a week, we had the launch of the September 2022 core update that started off strong and fast. Google confirmed the helpful content update is done rolling out but…

Google is now testing or rolling out the Health & Safety and Sustainability information for hotels right in the knowledge panel. Previously, in 2020 it was added to the hotel…

Google Search Console may have improved the URL inspection tools view inspected page screenshot feature to show more of the page. Now it seems with the mobile view, Google is…

Google can show your favicon in the search results next to your search result snippet. Google’s John Mueller said Google finds your favicon based on the favicon presented on your…

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

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter this morning that word count is not a sign or factor for what Google considers to be thin content or unhelpful content. John wrote,…

Google is promoting the Google Lens feature in the mobile search results based on the type of query you enter. Google has a promotion box smack in the middle of…

Google has made changes to how your feeds work for countries, removing the need to list a primary country and additional countries, and replacing them with target countries.

Earlier this month, Google said it might remove the word count reference from the best practices for your article pages help document in the Search Console news errors page. Well,…

Google announced that Google Ads scripts now support Performance Max campaigns. Google said, “this treated as a brand new campaign type in scripts, similar to how video or shopping campaigns…

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

Google has added a new HTTPS report within Google Search Console. This new report now shows you not just which pages are not served over HTTPS but also why they…

This may be obvious to most of you, but Google’s John Mueller was asked if profile links, links in forums or social profiles if those links are enough to get…

Google announced a lot of new features and availability around shopping and product experiences in Google Search yesterday. Google expanded eligibility for merchant listing experiences, added more structured data properties,…

Google Ads has added a new consolidated or bundled page that puts all your automatically applied recommendations on one page. Google said there is “a new version of the “Manage”…

Google may have also pushed out a local search ranking update around September 7th. This is in addition to the helpful content update between August 26th and September 9th 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 announced a…

According to both RankRanger and Semrush, Google is showing fewer featured snippets in the search results since Thursday, September 8th. Personally, I am not seeing this when I search but…

Google Search has started to roll out the second broad core update of the year, the September 2022 broad core update. It started on September 12, 2022 at about 11:25…

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…

Google’s John Mueller said something he normally does not say, the word “never.” He said Google will never penalize a site for not having an H1. John said this on…

Just like with Google’s consolidation of preventing spam on your site, Google did the same with its blog post on how to minimize A/B testing impact in Google Search. Google…

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. There was a…

Christine Zirnheld, aka Shep, is a Digital Marketing Manager at Cypress North, is a co-host on Marketing O’Clock, and has been with the company for over four years. Shep came…

The Google helpful content update finished rolling out around 2 pm ET on September 9th. That morning we reported we started to notice more widespread volatility and fluctuations, possibly related…

Someone is looking to move to a new CMS where the site has 20,000 products on the front-end of the website. When the site switches to a new CMS, it…

Google is now testing highlighting portions of the featured snippets they show in the Google search results page. I am seeing the highlights both in yellow and blue format, as…

Google has removed the datePublished “recommended” property from the fact check structured data documentation. Google said, “Currently, date information isn’t used in the Fact Check rich result.”

There is an interesting conversation on Twitter about Google crawling spikes and (1) if these spikes are global or on a per-site basis and (2) if the URL parameter tool…

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. We are finally…

This week, I posted the large Google webmaster report a bit late but then dug into the Google helpful content in a lot more detail…

Google’s Aurora Morales posted on Twitter that her team has updated the Google Ads Traffic Quality site to provide more examples of what is invalid traffic. The previous site had…

Have you ever noticed that some Google one boxes, like the Twitter carousel, in Google Search, have special tracking parameters added to the URLs when you click on them. Carolyn…

Today marks the two-week and one-day mark since the Google helpful content update started to roll out and by the time I am writing this (at 5:30 am ET on…

Google has added a new section to its quality guidelines category named “Prevent abuse on your site and platform” yesterday. The content is mostly not new, it is mostly from…

Google seems to be testing showing when a photo was taken or uploaded to a Google Business Profile listing. Google has done this for image search and other areas but…

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. Are we seeing…

I am a week late with the monthly Google webmaster report because I was on vacation and these are a pain to put together. But it is important and I…

Google has posted that it began upgrading some review-type results to product-type results in Search, and has been able to generate some new product type results. This started on August…

Google is testing, again, placing the site name above the URL and description in the mobile search result snippets. Also, we are seeing more rounded favicons in those snippets as…

There seems to be a lot of confusion around the Google helpful content update and if it is “big” or not big. That all depends on if you were hit…

Google is adding a new set of data metrics to the Google Ads ad groups column reports. The new options are under a section called “Setup” and include eight new…

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

I am wondering if the screenshots below are the new featured snippet callouts Google spoke about almost a month ago. You can see bolded callouts, multiple answers for a featured…

Historically, I mean for over a decade, John Mueller was the single person answering questions from SEOs on the Google SEO office hours segment. Recently John announced changes to the…

Google’s John Mueller was asked if a spike in crawler activity would be a sign that the helpful content update is rolling out. John said no, as expected because he…

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%.

So many of you, including myself, are wondering why Google would make such a big deal of an upcoming update when the update itself is not that huge of a…

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

Microsoft Advertising announced a lot of new features today including the ability to import from Pinterest, Google Import to for Performance Max campaigns, Microsoft Advertising Editor support for multimedia ads,…

I am not 100% if this “learn something new” feature in Google Search is actually new but I have never reported on it before. Google Search shows a box named…

The Google Home Hub display can show users an “about reviews” disclaimer or notice that talks about how the review may not be verified by a confirmed visit or experience.

Google’s Gary Illyes was on Reddit offering advice to one SEO who simply does not want traffic from Google from users in specific regions. The reason is, that they don’t…

Google has quietly announced that on September 30th, Book on Google for flights will be discontinued in most countries or regions outside the United States.

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. For Labor Day…

Google Ads sent out emails on Friday to advertisers of a change coming to its policies starting in October 2022. The change says that if your destinations contain ad experiences…

As we have reported, so far, the Google helpful content update seems pretty minor in terms of what SEOs and tools are picking up, despite what we all thought would…

Today is Labor day in the United States and in Canada and to celebrate the laborers’ work and contributions to their states, Google has a Doodle. The Doodle showcases plumbers,…

Google announced that it is making changes, for privacy reasons, to the Google Ads Search Queries report in Universal Analytics and the Google Ads query, First user Google Ads query,…

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

This week, again from Jerusalem, I spoke about this weird rollout for the Google helpful content update…

As many of you know Bill Slawski passed away in May. But earlier this week, Bill’s treasure trove of content covering search patents and more at SEOByTheSea.com went offline. The…

Google seems to be testing or launching, showing dual people also ask boxes in the Google Search results. One people also ask box is in English and, in this case,…

Google’s Gary Illyes said on the last Search Off the Record podcast that Google can crawl certain sections of your site more frequently and also infer the quality of certain…

Google is testing a search feature for more product and e-commerce features, this one is titled “explore products.” The explore products feature comes with product images and without product images.

Google has updated its meta descriptions help documentation to provide five examples of how to improve your meta descriptions. This was added yesterday, plus Google did some formatting updates to…

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

Google announced new functionality within Google Ads to apply rules to specific store visits or store sales conversion categories. It is called conversion value rules, and it lets you adjust…

Ryan Levering who has been with Google for over 11 years working on structured data said on Twitter that the “growth of microdata is fairly stagnant.”

Google’s AdsLiaison, Ginny Marvin, has confirmed a bug with Share and Auction Insights reporting for Google Ads Search campaigns starting on August 29th. Ginny said this is just a reporting…

We keep watching to see if this Google helpful content update is making some sort of dent in the rankings but so far, we are not seeing massive, Panda-like, ranking…

Google Search Console has a Google News specific article content error named “Article too short.” In that section it offers a recommendation to “make sure your articles have more than…

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

Google has added a new section for products to the Google Business Profile guidelines. The section says “If you run a retail business, you can show nearby shoppers what you…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that he is not aware of any recent search algorithm update that focused on links, outside of webspam algorithms. He said this when someone…

Google has updated the Learning video structured data documentation to add the full list of supported academic values for educationalLevel. It now lists out the values per country, since each…

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 is testing a “browse places” search feature where it shows you place cards that you can swipe through and then click on. It is kind of like a new…

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

Chris Silver Smith noticed how Google has updated its Google Maps contributed content policy and removed a line that prohibited review-gating. The line that was removed was “don’t discourage or…

Google is asking some Google Local Guides to leave sub-reviews about a single business listing. So Google might ask the local guide about the restrooms in the restaurant or the…

Microsoft Advertising has extended the deadline to move from Expanded Text Ads to Responsive Search Ads once again. Instead of it being August 29, 2022, Microsoft is now pushing the…

Molly Youngblood posted some screenshots on Twitter showing how Google is pushing her to check out Google Search Console Insights with a little banner that reads “New: Get insights about…

Google has clarified on its Local Business structured data help documentation that when you want to specify multiple types in Local Business structured data, specify them in an array and…