Industry News

Jonathan Jones attended the Google Search Central Live event in Zurich last week and posted excellent and detailed notes about the event, including a bit more on the more often core updates. But he also covered how Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, said how Google thinks about site reputation and how treating some sites within a site, as a solution to this problem.

Google's John Mueller reiterated in a big way that SEOs and site owners should not spend time disavowing "toxic" links. He said it is a "billable waste of time" to disavow toxic links, as provided in some of these SEO toolsets.

Google has repurposed its 2014 blog post on faceted navigation best practices (which we covered a decade ago) and created a new help document page named Managing crawling of faceted navigation URLs.

Google Merchant Center added a new field in the "Promotion conditions" section for "first order" discount. This seems to be for shopping ads set up in Merchant Center.

When OpenAI launched ChatGPT Search several weeks ago, it was just available to paid users. Now, anyone who logs into ChatGPT should have access to the Search the Web button on ChatGPT.com.

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 December 2024 core update landed hard over the weekend...

Google's Daniel Waisberg confirmed that the new 24-hour date filter that is in the Google Search Console web interface is not yet supported by the Google Search Console API. Of course, you can query the API for any date range and it will bring back data, when it is there, but the new 24-hour view is not there.

Google is testing yet another design for favicons in the search result snippets. This one has these backgrounds, grayish backgrounds added behind the favicons in the search results.

Google is testing a "Research more" section in its search results that shows articles on the topic you queried. This looks like the list articles section we covered in October, but renamed to research more...

Google is sending out emails asking business owners to add their social profiles to their Google Business Profiles. The email says, "Link your social profiles so customers can see your posts from Instagram, X, Facebook, and more when they search for your business."