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 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.

Google has confirmed it is testing allowing showing the same ad, from the same advertiser, on the same search results page. Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison said, "We're conducting a small experiment testing different ad configurations" in regards to this test being spotted.

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

Jonathan Jones attended the Google Search Central Live event in Zurich last week and posted excellent and detailed notes about the event, including a bit more on the more often core updates. But he also covered how Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, said how Google thinks about site reputation and how treating some sites within a site, as a solution to this problem.

Google's John Mueller reiterated in a big way that SEOs and site owners should not spend time disavowing "toxic" links. He said it is a "billable waste of time" to disavow toxic links, as provided in some of these SEO toolsets.

Google has repurposed its 2014 blog post on faceted navigation best practices (which we covered a decade ago) and created a new help document page named Managing crawling of faceted navigation URLs.