Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

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 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…

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…

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 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…

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’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…

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…

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.”…

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 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…

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….

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Having issues with Google indexing your web pages? Google’s John Mueller said while Google may not index pages that are spammy, it will index pages that are adult oriented. John…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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

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…

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 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…

Some of you may be wondering why Yoast or WordPress have not integrated the Microsoft backed IndexNow protocol. Well, Joost de Valk, the founded of Yoast said he has seen…

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

Yesterday, Google confirmed that some folks trying to use the URL Inspection tool via the console or even the API may be seeing errors. Google said it is working on…

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…

You may end up confusing Google when you have “garbage” parameters trailing in your URLs, espesially when it comes to translated content parameters. There is this interesting conversation when a…

Google has updated the help document on how to verify your business to say “we may require you to verify by more than one method.” So if you verify using…

Google sends its crew of crawlers, Googlebot, from the United States. That is where 99% of the crawling originates from. If you are not allowed to show your website to…

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. IndexNow has grown…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter “we generally don’t use color as a factor.” He then added “but CSS tweaks can include a lot more than just color changes.” We…

Greg Sterling, a search industry analyst (amongst other things), posted a poll on Twitter asking where will Google be in ten years from now. The vast majority of responses said…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter “it’s never that site A always ranks above site B.” He was asked if Medium articles always rank better than articles found on LinkedIn…

Last week, Microsoft Bing announced over the course of three days that IndexNow gained support from Duda (a sponsor here), the All In One WordPress plugin and Rank Math SEO…

Google’s John Mueller said again that Google does not use the link disavow files for discovery of spammy link networks. He said on Twitter “usually problematic link networks are easier…

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

This is just a reminder, since I covered this back last April but I forgot myself, there is really no top stories eligibility requirements in Google Search anymore. It use…

I am seeing multiple reports of Google placing the search bar filters, you know, the bar that says “all, videos, news, images, more, etc” which is normally placed under the…

Allie Margeson from Whitespark noticed that the Google local pack in the search results is no longer a static map. The map is now interactive and lets searchers zoom in…

Taylor Kurtz (@realtaylorkurtz) is the Founder of Crush the Rankings and he stopped by my office to talk SEO. Crush the Rankings is now about four years old and he…

Google has posted a new legal requirement policy that blocks search ads related to what is going on with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The policy says that entities and individuals…

David Mihm pointed out on Twitter that Google is hosting a partner workshop event named “Drive Traffic to Your Website with SEO.” The interesting bit is that the workshop says…

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 am seeing…

Google’s John Mueller if a claim found on an SEO website that says “recognized by Google as an agencies as SEO specialists in SEO for Real Estates” is legit. The…

This week was packed with algorithm and ranking topics but not the typical unconfirmed Google updates. We had Google officially begin rolling out the desktop version of the page experience…

Google is testing an ad format, that I think is new, where it has three images in the ad, all that link to different landing pages. So if you click…

Google seems to be testing a form of messaging between businesses and merchants that use Google Merchant Center. Google said in an email to some Google Merchants that it is…

I am seeing new signs of a possible, but yet, unconfirmed Google Search ranking algorithm update that seemed to touch down on Thursday, February 24th. To be honest, this is…

Is there a speed difference between using absolute versus relative links and if so, does it matter to Google. I am pretty sure there is no speed difference and I…

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