Industry News

This was one heck of a week with Google's search ranking data features being leaked...

Google's Head of Search, Liz Reid, wrote a blog post last night named "AI Overviews: About last week." She basically said that overall the vast majority of the AI Overviews are really good and they did find examples of where they can make improvements. But AI Overviews are here to stay and Google will continue to show them in Google Search.

This morning, I was doing some news queries and noticed that, sporadically, the Google News tab was not returning results for some queries. I thought it was just me and I moved on - but it was not just me - others are also seeing the Google News tab not working.

Google is now showing a newish "shopping ideas" carousel within its search results. It can show up for a variety of queries and gives you a less promotional version of the the shop all deals banners, but the links do lead to the Google Search shopping interface.

Google has added a "see also" section to some knowledge panels over the past few weeks. I think it is similar to the "people also search for" and related features we saw in knowledge panels. This one will show you other people some how related (in the news, etc) with the person or entity you searched for.

Even after the Google search API data leak, even after it was confirmed by Google, still 10% of SEOs will continue to trust Google statements going forward. The wild thing is, this level of trust has not changed in the past decade when I ran a similar poll in 2014.

Google is testing showing the first people also ask link, as opened by default. So you don't need to click on it to reveal the snippet within the first people also ask option. I guess this might increase "queries" for Google. :)

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

After over 32 hours of silence after the Google Search ranking data leak, Google has finally confirmed the leak, but urged caution around making assumptions on how Google Search ranking works based on the documents.

Google added a couple of new options to the spam reporting tool, including the new site reputation abuse and expired domain abuse, to the form. Again, Google announced these new spam policies last March, enforcing the site reputation abuse this earlier this month.