Industry News

Google is now using its RankBrain machine learning system to process every query that the search engine handles, and the system is changing the rankings of lots of queries.

The news emerged this week as part of Steven Levy’s Backchannel story about machine learning efforts at Google. From the story, in regard to RankBrain:

Google is characteristically fuzzy on exactly how it improves search (something to do with the long tail? Better interpretation of ambiguous requests?) but Dean says...

Gary Illyes from Google said last night at SMX Advanced that you cannot optimize for RankBrain and there is no RankBrain score.

As you know...

Does Google now view search engine optimization as bad, as spam, as something you could get banned for? Almost certainly not, but that’s the takeaway you could now get based on a legal fight between Google and a publisher that was banned from its search results.

The case involves e-ventures Worldwide, which had many of its sites banned by Google and is fighting in court for damages as a result. As we covered earlier, Google lost a battle to have the case dismissed, so the fight continues....

Google has quietly added a "rich result" filter in the Google Search Console's Search Analytics report...

At SMX Advanced yesterday, Google announced that ads are coming to the local pack. That means one of the three local results in the local pack will be an ad and local SEOs need to make sure their clients show up in the top two local results...

We've been covering the phenomenon of Google Zombie traffic since October of last year and covered it several more times in the past.

So John Mueller from Google asked on Twitter for specific examples and then when he got some...

As I reported at Search Engine Land late Friday, Google is testing a new AdWords ad extension that allows searchers to text information to the advertiser through the AdWords ad...

Yesterday we reported that Google added compare option for search analytics queries but it is more than that. As Jennifer Slegg noticed and posted on Twitter they also added it across the Search Analytics across Queries, Pages, Countries...

We've been reporting about the green AdWords ad label for months now and also reported yesterday about a huge increase in the number of searchers seeing the green ad label...

We rarely cover any Google Panda topics anymore, since really it has gone continuous - which makes me wonder.

So at the 18:05 mark into the video, I asked if Panda is still running by itself. John Mueller said it is...