Industry News

Google has updated the event structured data and recipe structured data help documentation. The changes include removing the online event properties, adding more examples and also saying that recipe markup has no impact on the image chosen for a text result image.

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 updated its explicit search ranking algorithm to target sites hiding explicit videos...

Google has updated its search ranking algorithm to "more strongly affect the sites that host explicit videos but don't allow Googlebot to fetch those video files" which may lead to a "significant drop in ranking" for some of these sites. Google also updated its SafeSearch documentation with new best practices and details.

Google has released version 20 of the Google Ads API, this is a major release, and we are expecting two more major releases in 2025. Google updated its API release schedule update, there is new Demand Gen ad_network_type reporting, Platform comparable conversions and Campaign-level negative keywords for PMax - plus more.

Several individuals have inquired whether Google has been indexing fewer pages on websites since late May. I've seen a number of complaints, and while nothing is verified on Google's end, I wanted to share these reports with you.

Cyrus Shepard posted about how FTX, you know, the company Sam Bankman-Fried ran, is now suing Neil Patel and his company, for $55 million. There are a ton of whoppers in this lawsuit, and I have no idea who is right or wrong here, but as Cyrus noted, Neil Patel went through lots of efforts to hide this in the Google search results.

Bloomberg's Emily Chang interviewed Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, last night at the Bloomberg Tech summit in San Francisco. The interview covered a ton of topics and was pretty fast-paced. It goes across AI, search, the monopoly case and more.

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

Google Search ranking volatility is heating up today, June 4th. Many of the tools and some of the chatter within the SEO community are showing signs of a Google ranking update of some sorts. Again, Google has not confirmed an update since the March 2025 core update but we've seen volatility since then almost every week.

Microsoft is testing putting a shopping bag icon on its "Shop Now" Bing Ads layout. I cannot replicate this but normally Bing shows a button that says "Shop Now" and that is it, but in this test, Bing is adding a bag icon before the "Shop Now" text.