Industry News

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

I probably should have covered this yesterday but I have been seeing more ranking volatility starting late on Monday, July 22nd, through yesterday, July 23rd and into today July 24th. This may be a continuation from what we saw last week or maybe something new - it is hard to tell.

Aleyda Solis posted the results of a poll she ran, which showed 54% say their sites have seen mostly a positive effect from Google Updates in the last couple of years. John Mueller from Google replied to that poll saying, "While there are exceptions, life as an SEO or when working on the web is not about doom & gloom."

Google has added new ad budget options and features to Local Service Ads. You can now set a maximum monthly ad spend limit for the month for some accounts.

Google / Alphabet reported its Q2 2024 earnings last night, where its ad revenue hit $64.62 billion, up 11% from last year's quarter of $58.14 billion. Clearly, Google's advertising business continues to grow despite any economic downturn we may have seen.

Google seems to have changed how it shows large videos in the search results. I am now seeing them show these gray lines, outlining the video box, in the Google Search results.

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 will not deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome...

Google Search is testing using AI Overviews to provide video descriptions in the Google Search results. When you click to expand some videos, Google may overlay the video and its description directly in the search results. And that description may read, "AI overviews are experimental," which means the description was adapted by Google Gemini.

Google has decided not to deprecate, do away with, third-party cookies in Chrome. This is something Google has been planning and testing for a while, delaying the efforts numerous times, and now ultimately deciding to scrap those efforts.

Google is testing larger sitenames and favicons again. You can see a considerably larger font used for the sitename (the link in the Google search result snippets) and a larger favicon being tested in the search results.