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.

Saturday night...

As many of you know, Google is now in court over its monopoly ruling by the Department of Justice before the court rules on the remedy for such a ruling. The ruling may not come for a year or so, and Google will be in court for some time.

Google has completely reorganized its crawlers and user-triggered fetchers documentation. It used to be all on one page and now it is in several pages. Most of the changes were just moving content around but Google did add sections for what product each crawler affects, and added a robots.txt snippet for each crawler to demonstrate how to use the user agent tokens.

Google has posted a new document about the way Google may apply restrictions to your Google Business Profiles over review or other policy violations. In the document, Google wrote that it takes "take fake and/or incentivized reviews and ratings on businesses very seriously."

In one of the more disassociated social posts Google has made in a while, Google's Small Business account posted a poll asking if you will use Gemini, Google's AI models, to help with your SEO, to help boost your search rankings.

Google Search is testing a new recent posts carousel in the desktop and mobile search results. This carousel can show YouTube videos, TikTok videos, Reddit or other "hidden gems" of sorts.

The Google Search App stopped working last night for a few hours. Google was quick to fix it in the middle of the night but by then, hundreds, if not, thousands of complaints flooded the support forums and social media.

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 Ads is launching confidential matching...

For the original iTunes version, click here.

Well over a week after the Google August 2024 core update finished, we still have a ton of volatility. Apple Visual Intelligence was demoed at the Apple event this week...

Google Ads announced what it calls "confidential matching." Confidential matching is a "way to securely connect your first-party data for our measurement and audience solutions," Google said. And it will be used on Google Ads in numerous areas.