Industry News

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.

I really like Basecamp’s concept of “Hill Charts”. The gist of it is that each project we work on has two distinct phases: a “figuring it out” phase and a “making it happen” phase:

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

We had this weird Google local ranking bug that seemed to happen over last weekend but resolved itself by around Tuesday. Then, the other day, we noticed that Reddit may be seeing a decline in Google Search traffic and visibility, but it might...

Google's John Mueller clarified once again that your URLs do not need to be lowercase, they can be uppercase, it really doesn't matter. But he did say, pick either lowercase or uppercase, just be consistent.

Google has turned down some features for the tax specialist vertical in Google Local Service Ads. The big one is that there is no auto-crediting for this vertical. Also, Google removed message leads, booking and all recording for the Tax Specialist vertical in Google LSAs.

Google has announced it has updated its Google Ads political content policy this month for to include a form related to California restrictions. "California residents may use this form to report ads that may violate California Elections Code Division 20, Chapter 7," Google said.

Google is testing adding a share icon to the product detail view within the search results. This comes up at the top of the panel, after you click on a product from the popular products section of the search results. And as you scroll, the share and other icons stick to the top.