Industry News

Google has overhauled its video SEO documentation to vastly clarify the video indexing criteria and technical requirements. Plus, Google added a new watch page section to the document and expanded the examples in the document.

Google Search is testing new designs for the default favicons it shows in the search results. This is when Google is not showing the site's favicon or the site does not have a favicon, Google will show this default favicon.

A negative SEO question came up in the last Google SEO office hours on the topic of sending "bad actor" fake traffic to a site, to make the destination site look more questionable in Google's eyes. Martin Splitt from Google said that sending such traffic to a site would not negatively impact the destination site.

Google is a bit delayed with its appeal process for Google Business Profiles. Appeals are now taking seven days or longer, some are saying about 15 days, which is much longer than normal.

Google has updated its title links search developer documentation to add that Google Search may use your og:title meta tag title for your title link in the Google Search results. The OG title is normally used by social sharing sites for the title of your posts, but Google may also use it for the title of your search result snippets in Google.

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 Analytics is not showing data from yesterday or today right now...

Google's larger search ranking bug was fixed four days after the issue was confirmed. Google's August core update continues to roll out, some hit by the helpful content update are seeing some surges, but Google says wait until the update is complete...

Google announced that all merchants will be migrated (or as Google put it "upgrading") from the old Google Merchant Center to Google Merchant Center Next by September (next month). We knew this was coming, we covered the upgrade emails back in July but here is the official announcement.

There are many sad stories around sites getting hit by Google algorithm updates, such as core updates and of course the September 2023 helpful content update. But Hardbacon, a financial and budgeting company, was hit hard by those Google updates, then announced the company would file for bankruptcy the day before the August 2024 core update.

Google has updated the local pack, the local results box, in the Google Search results. Now when you click on the results in the local pack, the map slides to the left, behind the local pack listings. Then the detail local listing slides to the right.