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.

The Google November core update began rolling out...

As you know, the Google November 2024 core update started rolling out Monday, November 11, at 3:30 pm ET. So far, some sites are seeing really big movements, like massive movements, with their search rankings. But it seems like most SEOs are not noticing big changes across their sites. So maybe, this update is not as widespread as some other core updates or maybe it is just too soon to tell...

Google's John Mueller cautioned about relying on and overusing Google Trends for content ideas and generating content for your website. John said that it is "easy to go overboard with tools like these" and that he wants to "caution" about using these tools.

Google has announced an expansion of anchor ads named collapsible anchors. Collapsible anchors automatically enlarge the ad height on mobile devices for better viewability. Your users can collapse them to the standard anchor size, if they want.

Google is testing using a larger but thinner font for the search results snippets. I am not sure which one I like better, one looks like a normal font, and the thinner one looks a bit fancier.

Microsoft seems to be testing a new section in the Bing Search results titled "content from." This shows more links to popular sections from that site, based on the user's query.

Google is testing more of those expandable sections in the mobile search results. We have seen them for ads/sponsored listings and other topics but now also for short videos, articles and popular products that say "in-demand favorites" but I assume they are showing for way more than just these categories.

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

Google's John Mueller said that some SEOs over focus on URL structure and that if your context from your pages aren't clear, then no URL structure can fix that.

This week, Google sent an email to some Google Ads advertisers warning that they may lose access to use Customer Match with their ads cause harm to users or create a poor user experience. Google said they are updating their customer match policy effective January 13, 2025, to enforce this.