Industry News

Google is sending some domain holders who were with Google Domains and who are automatically being migrated to Squarespace notices that their Search Console verification may go away. This is only if you do not host your DNS records with Google and you set up DNS verification with Google Search Console.

Google is testing adding the ability to search for just web results, like you would filter by just video results, just image results, just news results, just shopping results and so on. Google is testing placing "web results" to the top search bar under the search box.

Last November, Google told its AdSense publishers that it would be switching how it pays them for the Google Ads they embed on their websites. Now, it seems like many AdSense publishers are noticing that Google has completely switched over to this new payment model. Note that not all are switched from CPC to CPM bidding fully.

Google Ads has some new bugs today, one that Google confirmed over advertisers received a notice for "confusing text" for their ads and the other not yet confirmed around advertisers being unable to update their credit cards on file.

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 doesn't say core web vitals are a direct search ranking factor. Google revised its SEO starter guide...

Google's Danny Sullivan said on Friday, "We don't confirm any of the things [page experience or core web vitals] as a direct ranking factor." He added, "But to reiterate we look at many things not one thing and even the one thing might not be a direct ranking factor."

Google might be having some weird bug with XML sitemap files that have hyphens within the final name. So if your sitemap file name is /sitemap-10.xml it will trigger a "couldn't fetch" error, but using /sitemap10.xml with the same exact file will not trigger any errors.

On Friday afternoon, I was able to play a bit with Bing Deep Search, Microsoft's "enhancement" to Bing Search that provides a "deeper and richer exploration of the web." And honestly, my quick impression was that I was not too impressed, mostly because some results were not returned and because it took about a full minute for it to provide results.

As expected, Google has finally released its updated SEO starter guide and it was cut down in a big way. Google said this update was aimed at making it work for someone first getting into SEO and less for an advanced SEO professional.

Microsoft is officially testing a new version of the base model of Copilot (formerly known as Bing Chat), which they code-named Deucalion. Mikhail Parakhin from Microsoft confirmed this over the weekend saying on X, "We are continually improving Microsoft Copilot, testing a new version of the base model in a flight."