Industry News

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...

About a week ago, if you searched for [disney account] and looked at the Disney search result listing in Google Search, you'd see a sitelink that reads, "Black hat SEO approaches..." And guess what, that sitelink is still live.

Google Merchant Center Next added new analytics data to the Promotions tab/section. This shows you two new analytics charts including "Your promotions at a glance" and "Performance in the last 28 days." These are summary cards to see how well your promotions are performing in Google Search.

Google updated the Google Ads Gambling and Games policy this week to define that sweepstake casinos are not social casino games. Google said this update was added on October 28, 2025. This now prohibits sweepstake casinos from using Google Ads for advertising.

Google's John Mueller reminded us about when case sensitivity matters for Google Search and SEO when it comes to your URLs. In short, Google will probably figure it out based on two URLs having the same content on it but why leave it up to Google, so make sure to be consistent with your URLs so Google doesn't need to figure it out.

Microsoft is testing a way to change the country and region you are in when doing searches on Bing. There is a new country/region selector for this, similar to how Google handles it.

Microsoft Advertising advertiser web interface is down and Microsoft's Navah Hopkins said the "engineering team is investigating this issue with priority." This only impacts the web interface, according to Hopkins and ad serving does not seem to be impacted.

Both Google and Microsoft reported its earnings today; Alphabet's Q3 2025 earnings and Microsoft's Q1 2026 earnings. Google reported ad revenues up by XX% with $ and Microsoft reported ad revenues up by XX%.

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.

Google Search ranking volatility is heating up again...

There may have been another Google Search ranking algorithm tweak around October 28th or so. I am seeing some rumblings both within the SEO community chatter and the third-party Google tracking tools. It seems some are noticing big search ranking swings around October 28th.