Industry News

Google Search has this new feature named "mentioned in key answers." This shows you which personalities, entities, within Google's knowledge graph, are mentioned in the search results in Google.

John Mueller from Google did it again with his site and this time uploaded an audio file, in wav format, for his robots.txt file. You can go to it and listen to him read out his robots.txt rules in his own voice. It is a valid robots.txt file but I suspect zero search engines can understand it.

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 released the much anticipated August 2024 core update...

It finally happened: Google released the August 2024 core update; this one should reward small and independent publishers more, should it? Google had another search ranking bug, today, this was a big one. There has been tremendous Google ranking volatility this week, maybe the core update, but...

The time has finally arrived; the day you all have been waiting for is here - the Google August 2024 core update started rolling out on Thursday at 11 am ET. Yea, you all saw it coming, Google told us it was near and now it has finally landed. It will take about a month to fully roll out and "useful" small and independent publishers will see their rankings improve with this one - at least that is what Google implied.

Google announced a number of new features across its AI Overviews, including the new links test we saw going live. Google also is adding new Search Labs features and is expanding AI Overviews to more countries.

Google's Gary Illyes clarified on the Search Off The Record podcast that Google technically does not follow links. Instead, Google will extract the links, collect them in a database, and then check them later. Of course, most of you know this already and it doesn't really matter much for SEO to know the difference but hey.

You may have heard, the Federal Trade Commission announced that they have officially banned fake reviews and AI-generated fake reviews. But will this actually end up doing anything?

Google is highlighting review content within its search results snippets for some queries that ask for reviews. At least, Google is testing this - since I cannot replicate it.

This morning at 1:48 am ET, Google confirmed a Google Search ranking bug impacting a large number of the Google Search results. Google wrote, "There's an ongoing issue with ranking in Google Search that's affecting a large number of search results. We've identified the root cause and this issue is unrelated to the ongoing core update rollout."