Industry News

Yahoo is continuing its AI Chat features within Yahoo Search, while also incorporating AI Answers into its search results. The AI powered answers and chat seemed to be powered by OpenAI.

Microsoft Bing is testing placing the sources section of its AI Answers in a carousel view, instead of a list view. This let's you scroll through the sources as opposed to just seeing them below in a list view.

Microsoft is testing different colored URLs for its organic (free) results and its sponsored (paid) results. The organic URL slugs are bold black colored and the sponsored URL slugs are bold green colored.

Google is testing a new job carousel in the search results titled "jobs at similar employers." This likely pulls from the Google Jobs postings schema and more but it can come up if you are just searching for products from that company.

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

Google search ranking volatility is heated this week, but some of the tools are having issues tracking them. Google is sending out penalties, manual actions...

On Thursday, January 23rd, Google updated its search quality raters guidelines PDF document. The last time Google updated this document was for the March 2024 spam update changes, over ten months ago. This update seems to focus on on spam and adds some additional details.

Google announced a number of new Google Ads Performance'¬'­ Max'¬'­ features with the aim to provide advertisers with more control, transparency, and actionable insights within Performance Max campaigns, the company said. These include updates around more campaign control, enhanced Search reporting and guidance, and asset group improvements.

Google's John Mueller said that when it comes to disavowing links "it's in a spammer's best interest to encourage others to spend time on it." Why? Because Google has said there is little reason to disavow links, unless you have a manual action or know you did some bad linking.

Google Ads has made two updates around advertiser verification recently. One, in some countries, Google will no longer require certification for some advertisers. Second, Google has updated and reorganized the Google Ads Advertiser Verification documentation.21