Industry News

Google has updated its crawler help documentation to add a new section for HTTP caching, which explains how Google's crawlers handle cache control headers. Google also posted a blog post begging us to let Google cache our pages.

Google's John Mueller was asked about over-optimization and if that can cause issues for ranking in Google Search. John replied saying, "Sometimes "over optimization" does drift towards "SEO-spam"."

Google has dropped Google Analytics data from its Google Search Console Insights tool and reporting. Google posted this notice on social saying, "we're focusing on data from Search Console, no longer including metrics from Google Analytics."

In October, Microsoft announced it was testing adding Copilot features to Bing Webmaster Tools. This is not showing Copilot data in the performance reports, but rather using Copilot to ask questions about your data and website in Bing Webmaster Tools. Well, now it is officially in beta and Microsoft said 10,000 users now have access to it.

Google continues its testing of labels and tags in the search results, including trending labels, by showing variations of "trending with" and "popular with" labels and tags added to search result snippets.

Google Search is testing a new design and user interface for the search tools menu. Instead of it showing below the search bar, it now shows right under the tools button, with a new interface.

Google Search is once again having indexing issues where new content is not showing in the index for all sites. Google wrote this is about a "delayed indexing in Google Search" that is "affecting a small number of sites."

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.

Post November 2024 Google core update...

The Google November 2024 core update finished on December 5th, but we have continued to see search ranking volatility after the update was finished. That ranking volatility seemed to spike more over the weekend. Did you notice any big ranking movement over the weekend?

Late Friday afternoon, Google quietly updated its expanded site reputation abuse policy notice with a section of 9 FAQs. This includes what happens if you try to move the content, redirect the URLs and links, and much more.