Industry News

On Friday afternoon, Danny Goodwin covered a 170 or so page PDF that Search Engine Land received from an anonymous tip named "Preference Ranking Guidelines." It looks to me similar to the Google Quality Raters guidelines that continuously leaked until Google began publishing them for all to see.

Google can show search ads with video formats. I mean, Google has been doing this for a while now, but they are kind of rare to see. This latest one is a video ad from Adidas.

After initially going live on Wednesday morning, Microsoft did not officially announce the launch of Copilot Search in Bing until late Friday afternoon. Microsoft said, "Copilot Search seamlessly blends the best of traditional and generative search together to help you find what you need '" and meet you where you're at in your discovery journey."

Google has a new search refinement or expansion feature they are titling "Relevant topics." This reminds me of People also ask, Things to do, and the other ways Google tries to get you to search more after conducting your first search.

Google's John Mueller said if you have hreflang tags that point to a 301 redirect, it is probably okay. But you probably also want to automate the process of setting up those hreflang tags so that there is no redirect.

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

This week, we covered some more Google Search ranking volatility, post-core update. I also posted some polls on the Google March 2025 core update. Google said they do not have a brand ranking system. Google is ranking AI-translated Reddit results...

Mike Ryan put together the single most comprehensive third-party report on Google Ads Performance Max campaigns. It is free, super detailed, easy to read and chock-full of useful information. And guess what, Google's Ginny Marvin responded to some of the concerns in the report.

Earlier this month we reported that Bing was testing ad labels in blue colors. Well, now I am seeing examples of those ads labels without the blue, but rather normal black text and icons on white backgrounds.

Google sent out a notification that it will automatically opt you into using content from your email campaigns to help Google know what to show in Google Search, Shopping, and Maps. It will look for content around new arrivals, sales or ongoing promotions, social media profiles, and others.