Industry News

Google has a new beta feature to encourage searchers to add comments and have discussions around a specific topic. It is called "Discussions" and has a beta label on it. You can add your own thoughts/comments to the topic and those comments can appear across a number of Google properties and services.

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

It's been calm for the past two weeks but we are seeing Google ranking volatility hit on May 8th. Google held another creator summit, this one in Washington, D.C. Apple said Google searches are declining in Safari, but Google said...

Google is showing the number of followers for a Facebook profile in the Google Ads, the search ads. We saw Google testing this for organic / free results two years ago, but now we see them being tested on sponsored search listings.

Did you know that you can quickly add parameters to the end of your Google Search URL to see search results in a specific language and/or country? Yes, you can do this from the advanced search settings screen in Google Search but you can also append &hl=(languagecode) + &gl=(countrycode) URL parameters, if you want to save some clicks.

Google said it is now able to catch "20-times the number of scammy pages," that it did in the past, leading to a reduction of "these scams by more than 80% in Search." Google credits investments in AI-powered scam detection systems and improved scam classifiers.

Google AdSense announced that the Auto optimize feature is now configurable at the site level. Google moved it out of the Experiments section and made several improvements to Auto optimize.

Microsoft is testing a new pagination bar for its Bing Search results. Instead of the left arrow, page numbers and then right arrow, Bing is testing showing a "Next" button and then a "Prev" button.

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 Search ranking volatility may be heating up today...

It has been a couple of weeks since we last reported on a Google search ranking update, I bet a ton of you were wondering if I was feeling off. But it has been relatively calm for the past couple of weeks, that is until today. I am seeing renewed volatility over the past 24-hours and the SEO community chatter is picking up on it as well.