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.

The Google Search ranking volatility continues, with another big swing yesterday...

To be honest, the Google Search ranking volatility has not cooled at all since the pre-launch of the Google August 2024 core update. But something happened yesterday which caused a bit more of a swing of things in the rankings at Google Search.

I am seeing a flood of complaints in the Google Business Profiles forums where businesses are complaining that their Google Business Profiles were suspended. Supposedly, Google is mass disabling Business Profiles in specific sets of industries or niches.

Google again has downplayed the importance of Core Web Vitals as a Google Search ranking signal. Google's Martin Splitt said in a video yesterday, "also core web vitals aren't as important as some people might think." He added, "they are they are not irrelevant though but do not over focus on these things."

Google is now showing videos, I guess from YouTube but I suspect it can support other video sites, within the top insights section of the product detail results. Previously, Google would just show review content but now Google added video content to this section.

Did you know that 96% of the links Google displays and shows in the AI Overviews link to content that has informational intent? A new study from seoClarity says this is the case, after analyzing over 1 million keywords in its data set.

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 Search will soon show if an image is AI-generated...

Google Search will soon label images as AI-generated, edited with photo editing software or if it was taken with a camera in the image search results. This label will be added to the about this image feature, according to The Verge who spoke to Laurie Richardson, vice president of trust and safety at Google.

Bing now lets you scroll within a specific search result snippet. So if you are looking at a specific search result, that specific snippet, you can scroll through, until you get to the next snippet.

Some advertisers received an email from Google this week with the subject line, "Changes in validation logic for bid modifications." This email was sent to Google Local Service Ads advertisers who potentially used the API for that service.