Industry News

On Friday, Google began to test SGE-based AI overviews in the real Google search results. That means you may see AI overview snapshot answers in Google search results without being opted into the Google search labs experiment. This is being tested on a small subset of searchers based in the U.S., Google told me.

A couple of weeks ago, Gary Illyes and Lizzi Sassman of Google had Dave Smart as a guest on the Search Off The Record podcast and they spoke about crawling. In one part, they said again that the quality of your site can impact how fast and how much Google will crawl your website.

Google is now testing placing "product sites" as its own search bar filter tab in the search results. Also, Google is testing replacing "Shopping" with "Products" in that search bar.

Let's say you have a subdomain of a subdomain, such as sub.sub.domain.tld, how do you remove sub.sub.domain.tld from Google while keeping sub.domain.tld in the Google search results. The answer is to verify the sub.sub.domain.tld property directly in Search Console and remove just that property.

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...

This week we covered that the Google March 2024 spam update is done rolling out. Google says to wait for the March 2024 core update to be done before making changes. Google will collect feedback after the core and spam updates are done...

As you know, the September 2023 helpful content update was brutal to many small site owners, bloggers, SEOs and others. Some of these folks were desperately waiting for a recovery and were hopeful that this March 2024 core update (which is still rolling out) would result in a recovery. But it does not appear that any site has yet recovered from the ranking declines they saw in September 2023.

Google announced changes to Google Analytics to help the conversion metrics match across Google Ads and Google Analytics. Google will rename legacy conversion to key events, and there are new cross-channel conversion performance reporting beyond Google Ads will be added to the Advertising workspace in GA4.

Microsoft is buying Google Ads to promote its search engine, Bing, on Google Search. I think this has been going on a long time, but you can trigger Bing Ads on Google Search through the Google Ads system for some queries.

Microsoft has been pushing Copilot within Bing Search a heck of a lot. Now Microsoft is showing a chat icon that says "Ask Copilot" in the People also ask section of the Bing search results.