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.

Google's search rankings are highly volatile...

I was hoping, well, not really, that Google would calm down a bit since we had such a volatile January. But the Google Search results volatility is still very volatile, and the shuffling in those results is still shaking up.

Microsoft announced the expansion of the Microsoft Publisher Content Marketplace. This marketplace is designed to give publishers a new revenue stream, provides AI systems with scaled access to premium content, and deliver better responses for consumers. In short, it will pay for using your content in its AI.

Google may have hit those self-promotional and self-serving listicle articles in one of the more recent unconfirmed Google search ranking updates. Lily Ray dug into a pattern she spotted with these types of pieces of content, mostly in the SaaS space, being hit hard with the January Google updates.

Google's John Mueller responded to a question on the pros and cons of serving raw markdown pages to LLM crawlers and bots. John didn't say much but he did list a number of concerns and things you should be on top of, if you do go down that avenue.

Mike Ryan posted data on the percentage of invalid clicks on the Google Ad Network, broken down by fraudulent clicks or likely accidental clicks. It shows the Google Display Network has the most invalid clicks, but search partners have the most fraudulent invalid clicks.

We have known for a long time that Google can crawl web pages up to the first 15MB but now Google updated some of its help documentation to clarify that it will crawl the first 64MB of a PDF file and the first 2MB of other supported file types.

Google posted its first Winter Olympics Doodle, special logo, for the 2026 Winter Olympics. The first sport Google covered is curling. The Doodle is an animated GIF of an Olympian pushing the curling stone down the ice.

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 search algorithms, spam detection...

Google's John Mueller said that when it comes to AI Search and the changes that come with that, Google's core search algorithms, spam detection methods, spam policies, and other search systems do not fundamentally change.