Industry News

A week after Google made a change to the titles it produces in its search results, the search company confirmed it actually did make these changes. I mean, why didn't Google just write about it when they first noticed it, did they think we wouldn't notice?

Last week we were the first to report on the change Google made around its titles in the Google search results. In short, Google seems to be showing less titles from the title tags than it did the week prior. Google has been listening to the feedback and has said it hopes to make improvements based on what SEOs have been sharing.

As I mentioned yesterday in my story on the slow rollout for the Google link spam update - there seems to be a Google update going on. It started - maybe Tuesday but spiked in a big way on Wednesday, August 18th. It is not clear if this is related to that link spam update or something else.

Google announced on July 26, 2021, three-weeks and two days ago, that it started to roll the link spam update and that update would take about two-weeks to roll out. Well, like I said, it is three-weeks and two days and it is still not done rolling out.

Google's top stories carousel is not loading all the images for those articles. It seems like a bug is causing some of the images to not show up as of early this morning.

I am seeing signs again of yet another weekend search ranking update from Google Search. Again, this is unconfirmed and it is hard to tell what this is from. It might be the tail-end of the Google link spam update, which is not fully done rolling out, even as of Friday. Or it might be something new.

Determining Locally Prominent Semantic Features Using a Computer This patent relates to determining locally prominent semantic features using a computer. Operations associated with the state of a geographic area can get implemented on a variety...

Ever since Friday morning, August 6th, I've been seeing signals of a possible Google Search ranking algorithm update. This looks like a typical unconfirmed Google search update with both chatter from the SEO community and the automated tracking tools picking up the fluctuations.

Google's John Mueller said on Reddit this morning that the page experience update that incorporates core web vitals is more than a tie breaker ranking signal. He said "it is a ranking factor, and it's more than a tie-breaker, but it also doesn't replace relevance."

Google announced that it has removed the safe browsing signal as part of the page experience update. In fact, Google implied it was never used as a signal, saying the it is "clarifying that Safe Browsing isn't used as a ranking signal."