Industry News

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.

I am seeing more ranking volatility from the Google core update today...

As the Google March 2024 core update hits the 36th day of its rollout, we are seeing more ranking fluctuations and volatility being reported both by the Google tracking tools and within the SEO community through a spike in chatter. Maybe this is the last wave of the update before it is done?

As a reminder, with the release of the Google March 2024 core update, the old Google helpful content update is no longer a thing. As we reported, Google has incorporated helpfulness signals into the overall core update, but that old helpful content update is no longer around.

Google's John Mueller had another one-liner, this one he said, "keep in mind that SEO is not really about magic." This was in response to trying to SEOs trying to find some magic by using various HTML elements and thus seeing some sort of SEO benefit to that "magic."

Google Ads has a new warning notification within the Google Ads reports that reads, "The search location doesn't match this campaign's location targeting settings." This is a way for Google Ads to target ads to geographic locations.

Google has published its yearly update for its Merchant Center product data specification. Some of the changes listed below went into effect yesterday, April 9, while some go into effect on July 31, 2024, and others don't go into effect until September 1, 2023.

Microsoft is testing removing the estimated number of search results count in the Bing Search results interface. This comes after Bing began testing removing the cache link from the search result snippets.

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 SGE is testing tabs in the AI overview snapshots. Google says Ad Strength is not used in the ad auction...

Google Image search now has pixel-level segmentation of objects in the foreground as you swipe from one image to the next. We saw this being tested on product images within the mobile search results, and now, according to Rajan Patel, VP of Engineering at Google.

Google is once again testing a larger font size in the search box in the mobile search results. We saw this back in 2021 with the mobile search box, also in early 2022 with the desktop search box and then several other times over the years.