Industry News

Martin Splitt from Google said on the latest SEO office hours that having lots of nofollow or noindex tags or attributes on your site does not signal to Google that you have quality issues with your site or many low quality pages.

Microsoft now has these refinement cards or boxes directly in the Bing Image Search results interface. In these cards, Bing will show you a refinement option for your query with example photos you might find for that refined search query.

Google has greatly expanded and clarified its documentation around how Search Appearances work within the Google Search Console reports. Google wrote on X, "We improved our documentation on Search Appearances supported in Search Console." Daniel Waisberg from Google said, "I've been asked about this 1000 times, hope you're all happy now."

There are a ton of complaints and a lot of concern around Google Analytics missing data in the normal overview report for yesterday and today. I see it also, I am seeing no data from this site and others in my GA4 reports for yesterday or today - although the real time reports work.

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.

Now we are seeing some early reports of those early August core update gains are being reversed...

I am starting to see some early reports from some site owners and SEOs that the gains they may have seen early on with the Google August 2024 core update, is slowly starting to slip away or vanish as you would... Meaning, some are noticing a surge (small relative to pre-helpful content update) increases but now some are seeing that surge slide back down.

Do you want to get links in the new Google AI Overviews that show up in Google Search? Well, a new report says all you need to do is rank well in Google Search organically and you are incredibly likely to have links in the AI Overviews.

Martin Splitt from Google said that having unanswered comments on your site or webpages does not negatively hurt your rankings in Google Search and is not a bad SEO thing. He said Google Search does not look to see of your comments get answered or do not get answered.

Google has confirmed another bug with Google Ads where it accidentally attributed traffic to a match type that should not exist anymore - smart matching. Ginny Marvin, the Google Ad Liaison, confirmed the issue and said, "Advertisers will not be charged for these clicks, and we've reverted the change."

After testing the blue verification icons and labels for ads in the Google Search results, now Google seems to be testing them on the free organic search results. Oh, and Google also tested them in gold, and Microsoft tested verification labels in organic free listings too.