Industry News

While I highly doubt Google pushed an algorithmic change over Memorial Day, there was a significant spike in chatter in the SEO community and the third-party Google Search tracking tools are showing volatility. Yes, traffic can be weird and lower on Memorial Day - I get that - but there seems to be more movement than normal.

John Mueller, a Google Search Analyst at Google, wrote a response to a site owner who saw their site tank in September 2023 and hired SEO, and there has been no improvement. John's response was that it was likely not one thing but many things and that even possibly the site had a good run and it is time to move on to something new.

Google has sent some Google Ads advertisers email notices that any of their Google Ads experiments without an end date will now be assigned a default end date of August 23, 2024.

Last November or so, Google started to roll out the "shop deals" search bar on both desktop and mobile, this was from the shop deals banner in the middle of the search results page. Now, Google is testing a thinner version of the shop deals search bar.

Rand Fishkin along with Mike King may have published one of the biggest data leaks outside of the Department of Justice data reveal around Google Search and its internal ranking features and signals. The document was from an anonymous source but verified by Rand Fishkin and contains a ton of details on how Google Search reportedly works.

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

Google has updated its help documentation page on AI Overviews to tell searchers how to show only web results in its search results (not show AI Overviews, videos, image, etc), plus how to give feedback on the AI Overviews Google provides. This obviously comes based on the backlash Google has received on some of these AI Overviews.

Google's John Mueller once again blasted the "concept of toxic links," he wrote on Reddit, "The concept of toxic links is made up by SEO tools so that you pay them regularly." As you know, John is not a fan of link selling, buying and removal services - including tools that tell you what to remove.

I am hearing numerous reports from SEOs that the link report within Google Search Console is showing drastically fewer links than it did a month prior. I am not sure if this is impacting all SEO, but there are a number of SEOs complaining about this.

Google Images lets you upload an image, and then it may show you an option to "see exact matches." This essentially will show you all the locations where the image is found by Google across the web. Obviously, this can help you find out who stole your image, and then you can have fun trying to get them to take it down.