Industry News

Today is Thanksgiving in the United States, so I was planning on not posting anything - since most of you just want to enjoy your time with your family. But I felt I needed to (1) showcase the Thanksgiving Doodle that (2) resembles the volatility of the Google Search results with the Google November 2024 core update still not being complete before Thanksgiving and likely Black Friday.

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

There is some speculation within the SEO and search community that Google's search results have recently become more personalized and tailored. This is based on people comparing the search results to being logged into Google and signed out of Google.

Google Ads has a new column named "conversation started" for message assets, like WhatsApp messaging, through Google Ads. Clicking on a WhatApp button in Google Ads will trigger the "conversation started" metric in Google Ads.

A couple of weeks ago, we spotted Google testing large thin fonts for the search results. Now I am seeing Google testing large thick and chunk fonts for its search results.

Two years ago, we saw Google playing videos, mostly YouTube videos, in an overlay that really gave almost zero incentive for the searcher to click over to the YouTube page. The issue is that you don't get the subscribe or like buttons, or even the ability to comment, on the Google Search video overlays - you do get views and ads in the videos but not the other engagement signals.

Google has slightly updated its Google crawlers and fetchers documentation to say that it will pick the protocol, HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2, that "provides the best crawling performance" for Googlebot. In fact, it may even switch protocols between sessions, if it needs to.

Google is testing swapping out the blue buttons within the local pack with gold buttons. In this example, the blue call phone icon is now in a gold color, on dark mode.

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

The Google November 2024 Core Update launched two weeks and a day ago, and it should be confirmed as done rolling out any minute now but starting yesterday, we are seeing a spike in Google search ranking volatility. It was unusually calm for the past several days but now Google Search is heating up, in a big way.