Industry News

Over the weekend I reported that the Google Search ranking volatility tools finally began to calm. But the truth is, I have seen a big spike in chatter around Google ranking changes over the weekend and more so through Monday. It seems that while the tools have calmed, the chatter has heated.

Statcounter's search market share data for the 2024 year is up and there are a lot of ways to look at this data. At Search Engine Land, Danny Goodwin wrote Google's search market share drops below 90% for first time since 2015. But when you dig in, the data might also tell other stories.

Google has added a new checkbox for you to comply with when you upload images to Google Ads. This is Google having you sign a waiver that "own all legal rights to the images on the landing pages."

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.

The Google search volatility tracking tools have finally calmed down but there are still, as always...

Google has reportedly fixed the Google Maps pin attack exploit that has been lingering on with Google for several months. The exploit allowed one to move business locations to another location, making them disappear in the rankings and local pack for relevant searches.

Google Search has these search results snippets that show a related reviews carousel under the snippet. You can swipe through the related reviews and then click on them to reveal a YouTube video or other format of a review.

Microsoft is testing using bold sponsored labels in the Bing Search results. So instead of the very hard to see sponsored labels in Bing Search, Microsoft is testing bolding those sponsored labels.

Microsoft is testing an updated Bing Search AI answer box powered by Copilot is testing an updated interface, that seems to promote links to publishers more. The links are more publisher-friendly, including showing the full domain name of the publisher and includes the site's favicon, which helps with branding.

A few months ago, Google quietly updated the manual action policy violations list for News and Discover policy violations. Google removed the adult-theme and artificial freshening sections and then added a slew of deceptive practices sections, while also updating the hateful content section.

For the first time in forever (see what I did there?) the third-party Google Search volatility tools have cooled down to normal volatility levels. The chatter has been somewhat more typical levels over the past week, that is not to say some have not seen decreases or increases in their search visibility, but as a whole, it seems things have calmed down a bit.