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.

There is another Google search ranking update going on today, May 9th - Google did not confirm it...

I am seeing signs of a possible Google search ranking update today, May 9th, between a spike in early chatter this morning within the SEO industry and many of the tools showing a significant lift in ranking volatility in the Google Search results.

A week ago, we saw Google renamed the AI overview experimental results to simple "AI Answers." Well, that didn't seem to last long. Google renamed it back to "AI Overview" but left off the "experimental" text on that label - at least in the forefront.

Google is testing a new button to add a note to the search results. As a reminder, Google launched Notes in Google Search and Discover last November as a labs feature. The new note button is much smaller and just has an icon of a notebook with a plus sign within it.

Google Analytics has a new beta Google Ads report named "conversion performance." This is a beta feature right now, so you might not be able to see it. But you must link your Google Ads account to your GA4 account. Then you will see the conversion performance over time, analyze conversions and segment by channel groups.

Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, was interviewed by Emily Chang at Bloomberg before the big Google I/O event. They talked a lot about a lot of things, but there was 25-second clip where they spoke about core search quality. As you can imagine, he didn't say much but he did respond.

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

Microsoft's disclosure of search ads on Bing has not been the greatest, honestly, in many cases, worse than Google's disclosures. Recently, however, Bing has been testing a clearer distinction between its ads and organic free listings.

Here is a new SEO myth I have not heard before... Someone said that using the word "news" in your site's name is bad for SEO and Google ranking. John Mueller from Google said it is not, it is fine to use "news" in your site name.

Microsoft Advertising, the ads you see in Bing, have these "Marketing with Purpose Attributes" ad labels with carbon-neutral labels. Those labels used to be gray, but now Bing has them in a dark green, which makes them way more visible.