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.

There may be a large Google local search ranking update going on right now...

There are reports of a major local search ranking change with Google Maps and Local Search results. The reports of this local search algorithm update started to funnel in over the weekend, with some saying they saw local listings rankings drastically change from its previous position.

Google is showing now sometimes showing more than one source for a story in the Google home page, Google Discover, feed. This can show up in a carousel format or a stacked format, just beneath the main story in your Discover feed.

The topic of URLs for SEO and ranking is one that has been around since search engines first existed and 25+ years later, it is still a popular topic. Google has said time and time again that keywords in URLs don't offer a significant ranking boost for SEO and ranking purposes and Google said it again in 2025.

Google said that core updates should have no impact on a site name in the Google Search results being updated or changed. When asked, John Mueller of Google wrote, "That shouldn't be related to a core update."

Did you ever run the Google Search Console URL inspection tool, and click on the view crawled page link, and then see a blank screenshot under the screenshot tab? It might not be an issue, says Gary Illyes of Google. As long as you see the HTML you want Google to see in the HTML tab, you are fine.

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 says you do not need a blog in 2025...

It's the new year and why should that mean that Google Search calm down at all, in fact, it has been heated all holiday season, through New Years. I posted the 2024 Google algorithm update infographic. I also posted the January 2025 Google webmaster report...

We've seen various flavors of the what people are saying sections in the search results before. We've even see Google use AI to return results within them. But it seems this expandable carousel format is live in the mobile Google search results now.

The Google Ads API currently does not accept or support placement exclusions for Performance Max campaigns. This is also the case even if specified at the account level, Michael Cloonan, a Google Ads API specialist, wrote.