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 says site reputation abuse is not about links...

Google may have had two search ranking algorithm updates, one around May 9th and one around May 3rd. Google began its site reputation abuse policy enforcement this week with manual actions, and it is not about linking. Google said sites may recover from the helpful content update. Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, responded...

Mikhail Parakhin, the former head of Bing Search and Microsoft Advertising at Microsoft, confirmed he is no longer working on the Copilot project. He stepped down as the head of Bing Search and Microsoft Advertising weeks ago after Microsoft hired Mustafa Suleyman as the CEO of AI at Microsoft.

Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, made it crystal clear that the site reputation abuse policy has zero to do with linking. This means that who you link to and/or who links to you has no impact on this new policy that Google began enforcing with manual actions earlier this week.

Google can show the owner of the business in the local panels in the Google search results. I suspect this is not new but I don't believe I've seen this before, where Google will add an "owner" attribute to the local panel.

Google has updated its Local Services Ads help document on ad rankings to remove the line around "proximity to potential customers' locations" is a ranking factor for those ads. Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, said the document was updated but there was no recent or "sudden change to ranking considerations" to LSA rankings or positions.

Google has sent some Google Merchant Center e-commerce site managers notifications that a new annotation may begin to show up in the search results next to their site's listing that shows how many searchers purchased on your site. It may read, "1K shopped here recently."

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.