Industry News

Google has announced a new search ranking quality algorithm update to its search engine it is called the product reviews update. This update is aimed at rewarding high-level product review content, above thinner product review content. This is not a core update and is only aimed at product review types of content.

After many months of Google teasing us that Google Search Console will gain support for regular expressions, even sharing a help document around it, Google has finally launched regex support in the performance report filters.

The other day I saw Paul Haahr, a Google Search engineer vet, retweet something shared by Daphne Keller, former Google Search lawyer, who shared Facebook VP's Nick Clegg Medium piece. With me so far? Anyway, the tweet from Daphne Keller "we will reward this behavior until you adapt your business and get too good at it, and then we will punish it" caught my attention.

Before going offline for this long three-day holiday, I saw rumblings of a possible Google update about to rollout. I was a bit nervous it was a core update but Google did not confirm any update and now that I am back online, the chatter, although elevated, is not at core update levels.

Google's John Mueller said in a video hangout on Friday that Google has stopped automatically moving sites to the mobile-first indexing system. Instead, the last batch of sites are being queued up and will all be moved over sometime in the coming month or months.

I am seeing some early signs of yet another Google Search ranking algorithm update - it is early but the chatter is kicking up and some of the tools are already picking up on the fluctuations and tremors in the search results. Yes, we had some quiet this week but it was super busy the past couple of months.

Google has published its annual "Ads Safety Report" and disclosed that it has blocked or removed over 3.1 billion ads for violating its Google Ads policies, it restricted over 6.4 billion ads, suspended over 1.7 million advertiser accounts, and removed ads from over 1.3 billion pages in 2020. Google also said it added or updated over 40 policies for both advertisers and publishers.

I know, I know, this is getting ridiculous, at what won't do I stop reporting on all these Google algorithm updates that are unconfirmed. But the beginning of 2021 is unlike anything I've seen from Google in terms of how volatile the organic search results are.

The BrightLocal tool picked up one of the the biggest updates I've seen it report in a long time or maybe even ever. It normally runs at the 2.x in terms of local pack changes but yesterday, Wednesday March 11th, it showed 6.78 out of 10 in terms of fluctuations in the local search results.

Question Answering Using Neural Networks Google performs question answering of queries and returns URLs in response to queries. Google shows answers when the intent of a searcher is to expect an answer for a question and to provide a list of...