Industry News

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 started to enforce the site reputation abuse policy with manual actions...

Google said it began to enforce its new site reputation abuse policy last night. The policy went into effect on Sunday, May 5th, but Google did not announce it would take action until last night. As a reminder, this should target sites doing what some call "Parasite SEO."

I am slow to report on this but figured I'd document it just in case some of you noticed ranking volatility and fluctuations on or around May 3rd and May 4th. This is not a confirmed Google Search ranking update but there are signs of an update that touched down this past Friday.

Google Ads has launched Performance Max for Marketplaces. This is designed to help you sell your goods or services on specific marketplaces using Performance Max.

It seems Google has fully removed the number of results found, the results count, from the Google Search results page. It was removed from the Google Search Generative Experience last June and Google has been testing removing it for ages but not it seems fully gone.

The Google Ads Liaison, Ginny Marvin, said the rumors of Google auditing 25% of Google Ads accounts are false. She wrote, "The rumor about Google auditing 25% of Google Ads accounts on 1 May is inaccurate."

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 says sites hit by the old helpful content update can recover and even grow...

Google's John Mueller said again this morning that sites hit by the old September helpful content update or even new core updates can recovery. He said on X and on LinkedIn that it is possible to recover but it is not a simple change you can tweak on your website, but rather it takes a lot of effort, over time, to recover.

Over the past week, many have been windblown by Statcounter reporting that Google lost significant market share in the US and worldwide from March to April 2024. It turns out it was some sort of reporting bug and Statcounter has updated the data over the weekend.

Google's John Mueller said on X that he believes Google will remove the disavow link tool "at some point" in the future. Bing dropped the disavow links tool from Bing Webmaster Tools in September 2023 and I suspect Google will also drop it from Google Search Console.