Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

With Google Analytics rushing folks on Universal Analytics to set up Google Analytics 4, many are asking if they should run both UA3 and GA4 code at the same time….

Some are saying they now see under the Google Analytics 4 property settings where it lets you link Google Analytics with other Google products – an option to link with…

Last week sometime, probably around the same time Google added the hotel attributes for Ukraine refugees, Google added new “emergency help” attributes to Google Business Profiles. The attributes include accepts…

We know that Google for several years has been telling us we need to have redirects in place for a year or so for Google to have the site moves…

Google may have started to release another Google search ranking algorithm update starting Friday, March 18th through today, March 20th. This is an unconfirmed update but unlike the last one…

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 won’t be…

Sometimes when Google wants to encourage site owners to take action, they might give us a ranking boost for implementing it. They did it for HTTPS, mobile friendly design, page…

This week, I covered a possible Google update that ticked off a week ago, but it was weird, the tools didn’t pick up on it. Google announced it is sunsetting…

On last Friday’s hangout with Google’s John Mueller, Ankit Dalal, an SEO, asked about a site he is working on and what the issue it has with rankings. In short,…

When Google first launched messaging within Google Business Profiles (formerly Google My Business), it was done through SMS, text messaging. Then Google removed the SMS portion and just added it…

Rajan Patel, the VP of Engineering at Google, confirmed with me that Google has rolled out full width movie reviews. So when you search for a movie name and add…

Google seems to be testing a feature in a local listing for a venue that says which lists, if any, these venues are on. Often you see websites that have…

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 Google is doing away with Google Analytics 3, aka Universal Analytics and you will all have to switch to Google Analytics 4, aka GA 4. Universal Analytics properties will…

A Twitter poll by Natalie Mott showed that almost 80% of SEOs do expect to see some traffic lost when managing a site migration. There were over 1,300 votes on…

Google Search has a carousel, which may or may not be new, that shows categories of offers from a merchant as part of the overall snippet. The carousel is beneath…

Google seems to be testing a new button in the local business listings, the local panel, that has a “more about” button. The button drives someone from the web search…

I was a bit too eager in reporting the dates for the Google Search Central Virtual Unconference the other week. Google changed the tentative dates on the registration page to…

Google announced that the free Google hotel listing is released a year ago is now expanding. Google will now show these free hotel listings in Google Search and Google Maps….

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

Google continues to move more and more business editing features and controls to the web search results and outside of the Google Business Profile Manager (formerly Google My Business manager)….

For the past few days I have been debating if I should cover what may have been a Google search ranking update that ticked off on Friday March 11th. There…

In 2018, Google added a lens button to the mobile search image results. That eventually came to desktop as Google more tightly integrated Lens into Image Search. Now we are…

After the announcement in September at Search On and months and months of testing, the Refine This Search and Broaden This Search features are fully live in US English Google…

There are numerous complaints in the Google Search Community Forums that the Google Search settings are not sticking. The most obvious example is when you have the dark theme set…

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. Reviews are dropping…

Google’s John Mueller said again that Google Search does not use “engagement” as a factor for ranking or other purposes in Google Search. Google Search does not know if your…

When it comes to the Google page experience update and its metrics, Google may in some cases split up the scores/metrics it has into different sections of your site. It…

There are tons and tons of complaints over the past week or so of reviews not posting or going missing in the local maps business listings. In short, people are…

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…

Two weeks after Google first confirmed an issue with the Google Search Console URL Inspection Tool, it is still not fully fixed. I will say that while I do see…

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. Happy Pi Day…

Google’s John Mueller said (again) that the Google URL Parameters tool is scary. He said this on Reddit, and then suggested the person try to use noindex or robots.txt methods…

A few years ago, Google began to roll out a local search feature to search photos of nearby places. Now Google seems to be calling this “find places through photos.”…

Google has updated its Google crawler help documentation to specific that the Google Favicon crawler now respects the Googlebot and Googlebot-Image robots rules. Previously, it seemed to just respect its…

David Melamed, who I’ve known for about 15 years or so, has been in the space for about that long or even longer. David Melamed is now a search marketing…

Joe Hall posted a poll on Twitter asking what do SEOs use most to manage faceted navigation. The vast majority of SEOs responded that they use “proper canonicals tags.” Others…

Google’s John Mueller said again that using hreflang will not help you rank better and does not change rankings for your site. All it technically does it replace the URL…

If you search for Pi Day in Google Search you will see a calculator come up that has the pie logo sparkling. When you click on that, it will search…

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

On March 4th we had more Google search turbulence, a possible Google search ranking update around then. Google’s John Mueller said they sped up the SafeSearch filter classification process. The…

Google announced that the vehicle ads are now available to all US advertisers. Vehicle ads are a performance-focused, lower funnel ad format which allows auto advertisers to promote their entire…

In the latests Search Off the Record, Gary Illyes and Lizzi Sassman from the Google Search Central team had Danielle Marshak, a Google Search Product Manager for Videos, as a…

Google seems to be testing displaying the Things To Know section in the Google search results more often. We first heard about Things To Know back in September at the…

Here is a weird Google issue where Google is showing a Google Ad slot in the search results that ends up leading to an error that reads “no products found.”…

Here is a screenshot of Google News on mobile showing a date that is not the Gregorian date but rather the Buddhist calendar date and year. I assume this is…

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. Stop taking short…

Did you ever get an email from Google Search Console that asks you to take an action to fix an issue and then click the “verify fix” button? Well, did…

John Mueller of Google responded to a complaint on Reddit where the SEO or site owner was upset his one month old site was not performing on Google Search. The…

As you know, Google has a webmaster guideline against widget links, despite what some SEOs want to tell themselves. But the good news, and we knew this, that Google will…

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….

Google seems to be testing displaying the domain the web story is from, while on the web story, in the footer of the story. Also, Google also shows tips on…

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. Does dropping content…

A few years ago, we reported that Google said despite some of the SEO case studies, content collapsed and hidden within expandable tabs (accordions) will be indexed and ranked fully….

Google seems like it will open the registration for the Google Search Central Virtual Unconference on March 17th. The Google Search Central Virtual Unconference will then take place the following…

Over the past couple of weeks, I had a number of people show me examples of the people also ask box coming up two times on a single page. At…

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, responded to Andrew Yang, the businessman, attorney, lobbyist and political candidate and Ramesh Srinivasan, UCLA professor, that they are wrong on how Google Search…

Microsoft announced that the Microsoft Advertising Editor now works with the Microsoft Audience Network. Previously, you were only able to manage your audience network campaigns within the web console or…

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

When it comes to “dominating” the search results, most SEOs define that as taking up as much of the search results on page one as possible. Sometimes that means on…

This is a weird one, Google is testing using a lighter font color for parts of the URLs displayed in the search ads in the search results. So the main…

Back in 2011 Google first launched prayer time rich results but then a year later Google sunset those results. Then in 2018, Google relaunched native prayer times for Islamic prayer…

Google is sending out a notice via Google Business Profiles that you can connect your business profile on Google Maps to Woo. Ben Fisher spotted this the other day and…

Microsoft Advertising announced yet another set of vertical ad formats for Bing Search – professional service ads for insurance services, real estate services and tax services. “Professional Service Ads aim…

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 have…

Google Cloud’s web site is having issues being indexed in Google Search, specifically the translated pages. Last week, I reported about a webmaster asking about issues with translated content not…

Taylor Kurtz (@realtaylorkurtz) is the Founder of Crush the Rankings and he stopped by my office to talk SEO. In part one, we spoke about his background in search, the…

Google Shopping has a filter to show you products sold in “smaller stores.” I believe Google announced this back during the Google Marketing Live event last year but now it…

If you do a search for variations of Russia and Ukraine keywords together, Google will show you a search result page that seems to be tailored specific to the Russian…

Historically, the Google SafeSearch filter, i.e. the filter that weeds out adult content from the search results, was very slow in removing the SafeSearch label for a site or specific…

This past Friday, March 4, 2022, I noticed that the chatter within the SEO community started to heat up and then the day later, the automated search engine tracking tools…

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 page…

Some folks are asking why there isn’t a demo account for Google Search Console like there is for Google Analytics. John Mueller said Daniel Waisberg and the Google Search Console…

Last night Google announced it is temporarily pausing Google ads from serving to users located in Russia. This is due to the “ongoing war in Ukraine” according to the Google…

That is a wrap – the Google page experience update for desktop is now fully rolled out – as of yesterday, March 3rd. If you are counting, that is a…

The other day I reported again how blocking US based users would require you to also block Googlebot, Google’s crawler. And that would be devastating to a site’s search rankings…

This week in search, I reported how the Google page experience update for desktop has been fully rolled out. I also posted my monthly Google webmaster recap…

A couple of weeks ago we reported that Google has a new set of ranking factors specific to the Google Shopping tab named the Shopping experience scorecard program. The concern…

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

Martin Splitt from Google announced on Twitter that the Google Search Central Virtual Unconference is returning at the end of this month for the 2022 event. Google held an Unconference…

Google’s John Mueller said again that websites do not have some form of quota where they can only rank for a limited number of keywords. He said on Twitter “there’s…

Google is now showing how long ago it confirmed a phone number and hours were accurate for a local business. Google can now write in a business local panel “confirmed…

Google Search is testing removing the estimated number of search results figure you typically see under the search bar after you conduct a search query. Google tested this back in…

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

It is time for the March 2022 Google webmaster report, where I look back at the past 30-days of SEO news related to Google and highlight the most important changes…