Industry News

Google once again said you can recover from the damage inflicted on your site by the September 2023 helpful content update with the next core update. Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison said on X, "yes, people who have had impacts with core ranking updates may see changes (if our systems believe they've improved) after the next broad one we have."

Google added deeper insights for those who use merchant listings to see how well their merchant listings are performing within the Google Image Search tab. A new search appearance filter works for the image filter in the performance report in Google Search Console.

Now that Google is encouraging publishers to use proper lastmod dates in their sitemap files, what happens if your lastmod date is incorrect and shows the wrong date. Gary Illyes from Google said either Google trusts your lastmod date or doesn't, there is no in between.

Google seems to be testing categorizing or organizing the search results on the search results page. This is something Google announced it would do at Google I/O and also something Google has tested numerous times over the years.

Apple held its WWDC event yesterday and while I found Craig Federighi's helmet used for jumping out of the airplane in the Apple skydiving suit to be super entertaining, Apple ended with big news - a new Siri powered by Apple Intelligence (AI) and OpenAI's ChatGPT.

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's Search Liaison commented on the Google search leaks, navboost, clicks...

The Google Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, gave a more specific comment to specific signals and elements mentioned in the search leak, well above and beyond what is mentioned in the original and very vague comment gave us a couple days after the search leak. Sullivan responded to questions on Navboost, clicks and user interactions as it related to the Helpful content update.

Last week we reported that Googlebot will pretty much halt crawling and indexing websites using its desktop crawler and just crawl using its smartphone crawler (which caused a lot of confusion). But John Mueller of Google said on Reddit that he doesn't think it means you can "completely disregard what's served on desktop in terms of SEO."

Google paused Google Business Profiles restatements for the locksmith industry but has now resumed those requests and is working through the backlog now. Google paused them early last week and began processing them once again on Friday afternoon, June 7th.

Google is currently working on fixing a bug that prevents the product variant structured data from showing rating stars in the search. This bug was spotted by Jarno van Driel and Ryan Levering from Google confirmed it and said they will work on a fix soon.