Industry News

There is a lot of talk in the wider SEO community around pound signs, #, in the Google Search Console reports, meaning something about canonicalization. John Mueller from Google, along with a number of SEOs, said it has nothing to do with canonicalization. Instead, it has to do with Google tracking on-page sitelinks from the Google Search results.

Google has added an "edit" and "post" button more prominently as big buttons to Google Business Profiles within the Google Maps interface. Previously, these buttons were not as accessible in the Google Maps interface.

Google's John Mueller said in the last SEO Google Office Hours video that Google's "search results are not an indication of what Google's systems consider to be the original source." This means that just because Google ranks a piece of content, it does not necessarily mean that the content is the original source.

Did you ever sort the Bing Webmaster Tools clickthrough-rate column from highest to lowest and notice that you can see a CTR higher than 100%, I even see 300%. Well, Fabrice Canel from Microsoft said this is possible when a searcher clicks on your listing more than once from the same search result set.

Google is testing another variation of its sitelinks design, this one uses black font colors for the sitelinks. Of course, Google generally uses blue for those links, because links are generally in blue underlined font.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

Google launched AI overviews in the SERPs in the United States officially on May 14th at I/O. This follows the launch of Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE) in May of 2023...

Google Ads is forcing many of its advertisers off the credit card option for paying for their ad accounts and onto bank-based payment methods, such as ACH, wire, or paper check. If you do not comply by July 31, 2024, your account can be suspended.

Apple has made some really big changes to the Applebot documentation after the Apple WWDC event, where Apple announced Apple Intelligence. Apple added more about Applebot, reverse DNS details, Applebot-Extended and much more.

Google has updated its Google Maps contributor fake engagement policy to flesh out in more detail how the policy works. The new text is like 40% longer and seems to have received a nice refresh.