Industry News

Happy Thanksgiving and Black Friday! The Google November 2024 core update is not done rolling out yet - it should have been. And yes, we are still seeing heated volatility throughout this week, even today. Google warned....

Google told us that the Sitelinks search box would stop working within Google Search on November 21st. Well, it finally stopped working a week later on November 27th, in the afternoon.

Google has launched a new report form in Google Maps to "report business conduct." Specifically, this form is to report businesses that offer incentives in exchange for reviews, or pressuring people to leave reviews.

Google has updated its Google Business Profiles guidelines to say that businesses associated with products or services that require the customer to be a certain minimum age are not permitted as service-area businesses without a storefront.

Google's John Mueller said he was generally in favor to the idea of giving prior notice to receiving a manual action, but he said "it's challenging." John then explains that Google's search algorithm try to reward sites, while also negating any benefit any spam may have - but not demote. But that may have dodged the specific question provided.

Bing Webmaster Tools shows search data for Bing Search and Yahoo Search but not OpenAI's ChatGPT search feature. I actually forgot that Bing Webmaster Tools has Yahoo Search data but that was the deal when Yahoo closed Site Explorer in 2011 and I guess that deal still lives on.

Google is testing displaying a button in Google Search to load more ads. The button reads, "More sponsored results" and when clicked, it can load more ads, if Google has more to serve.

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.