Latest SEO News & Tips From SE Roundtable Blog

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

Microsoft Bing Search’s Copilot Answers now can show maps and local results, including local ads. The AI answer has a map on the left side and then on the right…

A couple of days ago, Google sent out an email to owners of Google Business Profile listings. The email was a reminder about the Google Business Profile policies, and it…

A year or more ago, Google added a toggle switch to use Gemini directly in the iOS Google Search app. Well, that was removed this week and you now need…

Microsoft is testing outlining the individual search result snippets within Bing Search. So when you look at a snippet, it has this outline around it, and then when you hover…

If you go to Google Shopping and enter a query that is not shopping related, Google will add a button above the shopping results asking you to search Google for…

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 seeing…

I am seeing the SEO community starting to chatter around a lot of Google Search ranking volatility. Keep in mind, the third-party tracking tools currently seem relatively calm. Often, I…

Microsoft is now showing the sources it used to generate its AI-based “from sources across the web” section in Bing Search. If you click on the little i icon, Bing…

Google is now showing a “top search” definition box below the auto suggestions within Google Search for some searches. I guess it is a quick way for Google to give…

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 Local Service…

Google has sent out an email to its Google Local Service Ads advertisers, notifying them that they are now letting searchers use a booking link to schedule an appointment or…

A few weeks ago, we saw Microsoft testing green colored sponsored URLs for the Bing search results. Now I am seeing reports of both underlined and bolded URLs and titles…

Last April 2024, Gary Illyes from Google said he was on a mission to make web crawling more efficient, he wanted to “figure out how to crawl even less, and…

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

Microsoft seems to be testing a more fully AI-powered search engine, which may be named Copilot Search. Copilot is the name of Microsoft’s AI features, formerly known as Bing Chat.

Some sites, hosted on some CDNs (content delivery networks), are experiencing a big spike in server response times for crawling, while seeing a drop in total crawl requests. So technically,…

18 year old, publicly traded education technology company, Chegg, has sued Google over its AI Overviews and how it has hurt their traffic and revenue. Chegg has “filed a complaint…

Google is testing opening the normally closed/collapsed AI Answer box. Meaning, normally you need to manually tap to expand the answer, here Google is testing opening these boxes by default,…

The Google Search Console API has been delayed for the past several days. Data is days behind the web interface and causing issued for those who use Looker Studio, Big…

Google seems to have added, for some merchants, a new section named Physical Stores to the Google Merchant Center Next console. In this section is random data from within the…

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

A few weeks ago, I reported on how Google was testing showing deeper Google AI Overviews, maybe powered by Gemini 2.0, with over 60 links and citations in them. Well,…

Microsoft is at it again with its search engine – Bing. Previously, when you searched for Google, they tricked you to think you were searching Bing and then hide 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…

Apple seems like it may be preparing integration Google Gemini in Apple Intelligence as an option for its users to select. Aaron Perris from MacRumors spotted hints in the iOS…

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

We had more ranking volatility with the Google Search results, this time we reported on it on Thursday. There are some rumors of a local update where Google would remove…

Google posted a new Google Ads update for Response search ads (RSAs) where up to two RSA headlines can serve in the space that previously only sitelinks were eligible for…

Google is testing a new box that highlights that you can book the hotel at the official site, the hotel’s direct website. This does not look like a sponsored result,…

Microsoft has this new style for some of the Bing Search Copilot answers. They can show a card or box that has a tabbed carousel where you can swipe through…

Last week, Shameem Adhikarath spotted a sponsored label on top of the “People also consider” box within the Google Search results. I figured it was a bug with ads not…

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

It’s been almost two weeks since I last reported on a Google Search ranking update (unconfirmed) and that may be a recent record. But that being said, I am now…

Google announced a couple new Google Lens features; (1) they are expanding how AI Overviews show on Google Lens results and (2) Chrome and Google’s iOS app now let you…

Google Business Profiles now can add backgrounds to the images you upload to your Google Posts, using AI. Victoria Kroll from Google wrote that you can now “can create an…

Google is showing AI-generated review summaries on some top quality store pages. So when you click on a specific retailer or merchant’s top quality store link, at the top of…

Martin Split from Google said that having an audio version of a page or a blog post, does not impact your Google rankings. He said it is good for your…

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

The first week of January, we reported on an interesting local update we named the January 2025 local search update. Well, this might be more of a diversity update, where…

If you try to access your Google Business Profile page right now, you likely won’t be able to. It seems Google Business Profile edit section within Google Search is broken…

Google Business Profiles support team is currently a bit delayed, with a backlog of support requests, video verification delays, and reinstatement request backlogs.

We know Google can show reviews from third-party sources in Google Business Profile listings. We’ve seen Google take reviews from Yelp, travel sites and other third-party websites. But these days,…

Google is testing a new design for its search results that are more of a grid format, more of a boxed in design. They are not on all the search…

Google has this feature in its search results that lets you find results based on the images you’ve view within Google Image Search. It places this button in the search…

Google is testing spelling out the search menu and instead of saying “All,” Google is testing writing out “All results.” I am not sure why Google is testing this, but…

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

Google’s John Mueller said that there is no persistent shortcut to faster crawling. Yes, you can expedite crawling for specific situations and times, but there is no way to just…

Google Search is testing a new section in the search results titled or named “Background.” This includes articles from news publishers, with I guess, more background information than you would…

Microsoft is testing adding a new box to the knowledge panels within Bing that show related searches. This is obviously to encourage searches to do more queries, to generate more…

Google is testing removing the numbers from the pagination menu at the footer of the Google Search results page. The normal pagination bar shows the page number you are on,…

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

Dwarkesh Patel interviewed Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer of Google and one topic he asked about what would it be like to merge or combine Google Search with in-context learning….

Google has upgraded the emails Google Business Profiles sends when your verification has failed. It now shows the reason(s) a verification has failed and what you need to do to…

Google Merchant Center recently began showing AI-generated summaries for how well your performance is doing with Merchant Center in Google Search. These are labeled as “experimental” and “AI-generated.”

In 2019, Google stopped using rel prev and next as a signal for its search engines to combine or understand paginated results on your site. Then Google offered up some…

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

Google had some more ranking volatility around the Super Bowl weekend. Reddit blamed Google for not meeting its expected user growth. Google Search is now faster for some users. Google…

Google has updated its Merchant Listing structured data documentation to now support, in beta, membership loyalty pricing property types. Google also updated the docs to provide more examples and instructions…

Google seems to be adding links to review publishers when you hover over some of the product results, popular products, snippets. The links show only after the box expands, and…

Google seems to have removed the minimum required budget for Local Service Ads. It is not clear if this is intentional or a bug but the box to stop you…

Remember the Bing shopping / e-commerce cards? Well, now it looks like Bing is putting an ad slot in them and labeled them as ads.

Google has posted an update on the reviews bug we first reported on a week ago, that it later confirmed this past Monday and we saw a fix rolling out…

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. Reddit blamed Google’s…

Google announced it is testing new pre-fetching methods that increase the speed (Largest Contentful Paint – LCP) of the first two results by 67 milliseconds and for the results after…

So after Google literally paid Reddit for its content and then ranked them incredibly well in Google Search and its search features, Reddit during its earnings call blamed Google’s search…

Initially, when Yahoo Search launched AI-generated answers, they did not contain sources or links. Now it seems Yahoo is adding “Learn more” links to these AI answer boxes in Yahoo…

Google Search is showing a snippet that has a date in the future. Normally the snippets have dates from the past; such as this content was found by Google X…

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 reviews…

There is some chatter in the SEO community that Google Image Search may be down ranking, lowering the rankings, of AI-generated images, in favor of non-AI-generated images within the Google…

Google is making more changes to the Google Publisher Center, in March Google News will fully transition to automatically generated publication pages in March.

Microsoft has updated Bing Webmaster Tools to make selecting the date ranges a lot easier in the performance reports. Now the date selectors are very quick to select, and not…

Google is testing adding filters to the latest post carousel. These filters can show recent posts, video posts, posts from Instagram, or Facebook.

The big Google review count bug, that we first reported on Friday and that later Google confirmed on Monday afternoon, is now being fixed. We can now see review counts…

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

Did you ever want to validate to see if Google or other search engines can see your tabbed (hidden in a tab) navigation or content? Well, John Mueller from Google…

There are a number of advertisers in the local space who are complaining that the lead quality has been worse than ever in the past few months. They blame the…

Microsoft seems to be testing dropping the AI labels and other interaction features from the Bing Search AI Answers. Or maybe, Bing dropped its AI Answers for normal featured snippets…

On Friday, we reported that the Google local reviews seem to be disappearing or being counted wrong. Well, Google finally confirmed the issue, just minutes ago, in the Google Business…

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 seeing…

Over the weekend, the Super Bowl LIX weekend, there has been a lot of chatter about ranking volatility and traffic losses. Truth is, I feel there is often chatter about…

Earlier we reported that Google was testing AI-organized restaurant results in the Google Search results. Now, Google is doing the same for local events; and organizing them with AI.