Industry News

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

I am deeply sad to report that Mark Irvine passed away unexpectedly last night. Mark was deeply involved in the search marketing community, known as being a brilliant paid search specialist who always spent his time helping others over his long career in the space.

This week, we covered how the Google March 2024 core update finished back on April 19th, and Google forgot to tell us. I also posted the May 2024 Google webmaster report. Google said it's still possible for sites to recover...

One of the big worries for Google investors was the cost of running AI to show within its search results. The AI overviews, now AI answers are costly to run. But as expected, Google was able to reduce the cost to generate these AI Answers.

Gary Illyes from Google said he has heard from the SEO industry that hreflang can be "annoying" and complex and confusing. So he is open to ideas on how to replace it and make it work for both small and really large websites.

Google has to crawl the web to build its index for it to provide search results. And since webpages and documents get updated, Google needs to recrawl those URLs from time to time. Google will recrawl URLs at different rates, said John Mueller of Google.

Google Search is testing custom filters and pre-define search filter templates. It appears you can save your custom filters and reuse those filters for future searches. This is showing up for a limited number of searchers.

Google AdSense has removed reference to your privacy policy as a place to withdraw consent. AdSense now has clarified that the revocation link at the bottom of the page should say "Privacy and cookie settings".

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

In the past month, in Google-land, we have spoken a lot about the March 2024 core update, which ended on April 19th, a week before Google notified us it was done. This core update was painful for many, especially those who were hit by the September helpful content update. But more is to come, we have the site reputation abuse penalty coming in the next few days - are you ready?