Industry News

The Google December 2024 core update quickly and brutally finished rolling out yesterday at around 2:00 PM ET. It took just over 6 days to roll out, starting on December 12, 2024 at 10:45 am and finishing on December 18, 2024 at 2:00 pm. This update finished fast, but it seems quick and mighty (or fast and furious).

There are a number of reports of Google Business Profile listings in Google Maps coming up broken. Google seems to be showing half of the listing, with flickering maps portions, missing business names, blue maps and more issues.

Google's John Mueller said, "It makes no sense to block" privacy, disclaimers, or other legal types of pages from your site. He added on Reddit, "They don't cause a 'duplicate content issue'."

The folks over at GMBapi have put together a large study on the topic of how and why Google removes reviews from Google Business Profiles. It looked at nearly 5 million reviews across 78 countries and over 19,000 locations.

Google Merchant Center now lets merchants specify which payment methods and options they offer customers. Google would normally handle this in an automated way but now Google is letting you override those payment options, in case Google is getting it wrong.

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.

The Google search API leak, now with an end point leak...

Mark Williams-Cook gave an unbelievable presentation at SearchNorwich named Improving your SEO with conceptual models. Lucky for you and me, this presentation was posted on YouTube for us all to enjoy. It covers how Mark found an exploit in Google's end points and was able to extrapolate from that interesting data that aligns with the search API leak from earlier this year.

Forbes has reportedly fired some of its freelancers for some stories over its ongoing issue with Google's site reputation abuse policy, aka parasite SEO. The Verge wrote, "Forbes will stop using freelancers for some types of stories indefinitely '" and has blamed the change on a recent update to Google Search policies."

Google is testing a much richer experience for things to do style queries. Instead of showing a calendar box, text format with image boxes, Google is testing showing this rich image carousel of events that slides by itself from right to left.

Google is testing another search result snippet interface change, this one is when you hover your mouse over the snippet, it adds a shadow effect to the snippet.