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.

I posted the big Google webmaster report for January 2025, the past month was so insane...

Talk about a busy month - the last 30 days has been pretty wild. We had the November 2024 core update finish in December, then we had a new December 2024 core update start and finish, while also having the December 2024 spam update start and finish in December as well.

Google's John Mueller was asked if the Google Search Console screenshot feature in the URL Inspection Tool is what Google Search sees. John responded saying, "For the most part, yes" and then added some caveats.

Google seems to be testing a new local search feature that is categorized as "Places people are talking about." It shows you local restaurants with social media information, like posts from Instagram and Facebook, in a carousel format.

Google Ads launched a new beta to let you edit existing images in your Google Ads asset library. This was previously in Product Studio but according to Menachem Ani, a Google Ads professional, this is new to the Google Ads asset library.

Google Ads has a new conversion goal that is in beta named "leads from messages." Conversion goals labeled as account default will use data from all of your campaigns to improve your bid strategy and campaign performance, even if they don't seem directly related to sales, Google says.

Every year I report on how some Google representatives are active within the SEO communities, offering SEO support and encouragement of sorts, to the SEO community. This year is no different and we have numerous Googlers and Microsoft Bing representatives active on New Years Eve and New Years Day (the day is not over) online and active in the SEO communities.

I love reading end-of-year music wrap-ups from the personal blogs I follow (two highlights this year include the posts by Sarah K. Moore and Simon Collison), so I wanted to make an attempt at my own as well. I decided to wait until Dec 31 so I can have accurate data from my Last.fm profile, where all my listening stats go (I use Spotify and Roon for streaming, and I also send my physical media listening stats there).

So according to my listening stats, here are my favorite releases from...

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.

Why should New Years eve be any different...

The Google December 2024 core update and the December 2024 spam updates are both complete, but yet, the Google search ranking volatility is still intensely heated. It feels like one or both of these update never ended and it continues to cause heated ranking volatility the week following the end of the last Google update of 2024.