Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

Last month we spotted Google testing an audio based listen and translate feature for the local panel. It seems Google is now trying this out for standard knowledge panels. These…

Earlier this week I reported that we were not seeing huge changes yet for the March 2022 Google Products Reviews update. Well, it seems like some of the tools and…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that the “nofollow is not a dampening factor.” Meaning, when you put a nofollow attribute on a link, it does not dampen the value…

Google promised to let us know when they expand when they use MUM in search and Google did just that yesterday with this new announcement. Google announced how they are…

Google is rolling out to features to give searchers more ammunition when looking at the search results on news related topics or evolving topics. One is a highly cited label…

Google announced that now the Search Console connector for Google Data Studio can now bring in traffic data for Google Discover and Google News. This means you can do more…

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. This newsletter showcases…

Microsoft Bing is testing (or maybe rolling out) new explore icons for images that show up in the web results. There are these round circle category icons that let you…

Microsoft Bing seems to be testing a new search feature that embeds snippets of content from Wikipedia in this large Wikipedia box in the search results. It basically brings in…

Google seems to be testing a specialized local pack that looks more like the local service ads. Maybe this is a bug because the ads are not labeled or maybe…

Google’s John Mueller said again on Twitter that you should only keep old URLs that have been redirected elsewhere in your XML sitemap file temporarily and not long term. John…

Back in August 2021, Google began testing this expandable tab search result snippet. Then the test seemed to have expanded in November 2021. Last week, I had countless folks ask…

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. Almost a week…

Google has launched a new Trusted Store badge for merchants who have an excellent Google Shopping experience scorecard score. Google also launched a new set of Google Merchant Center insights…

Google today has rolled out more specific, descriptive and contextually helpful names for the structured data error reporting it shows in Google Search Console rich result status reports, the Google…

So far, I will say that the Google Products Reviews update version 3, the March 2022 version, is not that huge. That is, not that huge compared to the previous…

Google’s John Mueller said there is nothing wrong with using the Google Search Console URL inspection tool to request indexing but the better route is to have Google discover those…

Google AdSense announced that those with AMP sites that have Auto ads with AdSense will now support anchor ads. From April 11, 2022, if you’re using Auto ads for AMP,…

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 had a…

On March 22nd and 23rd I noticed the BrightLocal tracking tool spike up a bit, so I kept tabs on that we may have had a Google local search update….

In part one of my interview with David Melamed, we spoke about his background and the beauty of the search marketing industry. David Melamed and I in part two then…

Brodie Clark reported that Google is now showing web stories / visual stories on the first page of the mobile results even for competitive keyword phrases. I can confirm that…

On Friday afternoon, Google confirmed with me that the search company has rolled out more visual results for some queries in the mobile search results. I’ve been experimenting with a…

Google is always testing, always, and here is another test where Google is testing snippets in the Google News search results without borders.

Google has announced this morning that on April 26, 2022 it will be killing off the URL parameter tool under the legacy Google Search Console. This is a bit of…

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 Maps released…

This week was pretty busy, we had the third Google product reviews update and I go deep into this algorithm update. We saw what I called a Spring 2022 Google…

Google announced that in addition to helping searchers find healthcare providers that take their insurance, they are now helping searchers book appointments at these healthcare providers. This is a limited…

Google announced its 2021 Google Maps and Google Business Profile spam fighting efforts, like it did for the 2020 year. Google said it blocked more than 100 million Business Profile…

Google is testing displaying a badge or icon or label that demonstrates if a product you are looking at is a low price or not. So if your product sells…

Google’s Martin Splitt, Gary Illyes, and Lizzi Sassman sat together on the latest Search Off the Record to talk about de-SEOing – what we would probably call over-optimization strategies. It…

Google may be testing new Google Ads extension icons in the search results. Khushal Bherwani spotted these and notified me of these on Twitter, and I think they are new….

Many searchers are seeing a bug or a test gone bad within the Google Search bar or box while in dark mode. The text displayed in the autocomplete search suggested…

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 released…

Google has rolled out its third version of the product reviews update, named the March 2022 Product Reviews Update. The previous two versions were the April 2021 Product Reviews Update…

Google seems to be testing another variation of the Google Search box. This one is a light gray background color for the search box. We recently saw Google testing the…

Google said in a spotlight piece of Danny Sullivan’s 25 year career in search (which is a nice thing) that Google reduced irrelevant search results by more than half in…

Google last night posted a new policy in the sensitive events category that will pause ads that exploits, dismisses or condones the Russia and Ukraine war. Google wrote “due to…

Google has launched the new Google Partners directory with new ways to search for partners and also the new and updated partner program. Google said “now it’s easier than ever…

If you do a search in Google Search for [inflation stocks], Google will show you a related searches feature with the title “stocks to buy now.” To savvy SEOs 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…

Microsoft Bing is testing a feature in its search results page to anchor you to different sections of the search results. Microsoft calls this “On This Page” and when you…

We know that links pointing to pages that do not exist, that 404 or some soft 404, are links that are not counted by Google – that is not new….

If you go to Google and search for [National Cherry Blossom Festival] or [cherry blossom] or [hanami season] and so on, Google will give you a Cherry Blossom flower to…

Microsoft Advertising announced its “biggest reporting update in our history” by making the search ads reports “faster, easier, and more intuitive,” the company said. The company said reporting is now…

Google is showing coupon codes that you can click on to “view code” and then that will show the code that you can copy and paste into the checkout page…

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

Google has released version 2.0 of Google Ads Editor and as promised, this version comes with support for Performance Max campaigns. Google also jumped from version 1.8 directly to version…

John Mueller of Google wrote a very detailed and honest explanation on why Google (and third party SEO tools) do not crawl and index every URL or link on the…

Malte Ubl just left google a couple of weeks ago after being with the search company for 11 years. He came back onto Twitter to ask some very specific SEO…

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’s John Mueller said that the search company did look into what it could do to incentivize sites to be more eco-friendly. He said they looked into a ranking boost…

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 yet…

In part one of my interview with David Melamed…

For the past several years, Google has been saying that when machine generated or AI generated content becomes high quality, it might be something that Google allows within its search…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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)….

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…