Industry News

We had two periods of Google Search ranking volatility this week, one last weekend and one on Thursday or so. Google court documents say search quality has improved and not degraded. Google dropped the see more results in the local panel this week for a period of time until it fixed...

Google has posted its post-trial debrief document for the DOJ trial that talks about many different things, including stating that its search quality continues to improve. We covered its statement that Microsoft Bing Search had search quality issues earlier.

Google has added new structured data carousel beta documentation, also known as host carousel. Google wrote that this is "a new carousel rich result that's in beta, which is a list-like rich result that people can scroll horizontally to see more entities from a given site (also known as a host carousel)."

Google has added a form where you can now request to opt out of displaying in the place entity feature in Page Insights to users in the European Economic Area (EEA). Page Insights is that button you can press while on a website using the Google app to get more details about that web page, I think it was called SGE while browsing.

When you search for you Google Business Profile in Google, Google may show you the number of "customer interactions." The question is, how often is that number updated? Matt McGee said in the Local Search Forum that he believes it is updated every 2-3 days.

For the past year or more, Google AdSense (and Ad Manager) has this feature named Offerwall messages (Beta). Google AdSense has recently pushed it more via the AdSense console interface and more publishers are noticing it.

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

I am seeing early signs of a possible Google Search ranking algorithm update starting yesterday, February 28th, and into today, February 29th. The chatter started to spike yesterday amongst the SEO community and some of the third-party rank tracking tools are showing a spike in volatility.

There is no doubt that Google is going through a rough patch right now on many fronts. Between all the complaints about search quality, all the search bugs, the revelations from the DOJ investigation, shaking the cushions, Gemini's faults, the list goes on and on... It is no wonder SEOs like Google far less today than they did years ago.

Google Search is testing a section, a carousel, named "Popular opinions." The section shows articles with opinions on products or other topics. The example below shows, what looks like, review articles probably fitted with affiliate links.