Industry News

Google has tweaked its hreflang search developer documentation to clarify that link tags for denoting alternate versions of a page must not be combined in a single link tag. Google said it wanted to document this "quirk" in its documentation.

Google Ads will update its Healthcare and medicines policy this month to allow advertisers to discuss opioid painkillers without promoting or selling them. The example given is that you can have ads to discuss public policy solutions for opioid painkiller abuse.

Happy Father's Day - it looks like we are seeing some pretty significant ranking fluctuations and volatility within the Google Search results over the past day or so. Yep, yet another big Google weekend update of sorts - of course - not confirmed by Google.

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

Google Search had more weekend volatility, surprise, surprise. Google responded more to the search leak around Navboost, clicks and user interactions. I interviewed Google's Elizabeth Tucker on the March core update and much more. Google said you can recover from the helpful content update after a core update...

Google is testing a new look for the "from sources across the web" search results feature. This one looks like the multiple features snippets look, with the perspectives design, but is titled under the "from sources across the web" search results.

In the last Search Off The Record podcast, Gary Illyes from the Google Search team said that sometimes issues can arise within the Google Search results due to two experiments that conflict with each other. He said at the 19:41 mark, "Very often there are experiments that need to be rolled back because two experiments might interact very badly with each other."

Google Business Profiles websites, which stopped loading websites and began redirecting to the Google Business Profiles listing on Google Maps now completely 404 - as expected. It was supposed to stop working completely this past Sunday, but it did not stop working until later this week.

Google may be testing a new call extension and location extension ad format. This format shows up as a carousel of links or buttons that you can scroll through below the ad snippet in the search results.

Did you know that SEO bloggers, like myself, are the reason you see fewer and less nuanced responses from Google Search reps? John Mueller from Google said so on Reddit, where he wrote, "Love the SEO news/bloggers, but it also means I can't reply to things with nuance publicly."