Industry News

Google Search seems to be ranking some websites just fine during the weekdays and then removing that ranking over the weekends. It seems to be focusing heavily on non-standard TLDs, you know, those new vanity TLDs that you can make up. I am just not sure if this is a Google Search issue or if the issue is with the quality of those websites.

Google's flexible sampling solution that replaced the first-click-free solution for gated, subscription or paywalled content launched in 2017. Since then, many publishers use the structured data to communicate to Google the full content that is behind the content gate. Some are calling this solution "leaky" in which Google responded saying it is not.

The big news from the weekend is that Google has terminated its contract with Appen, one of the largest sources of its third-party human search quality raters sources. Appen announced this in this PDF, saying it received notice of this on January 20th, and the contract ends on March 19, 2024.

For the past few weeks Google has been testing out a new local search box titled "Nearby events and deals." This box contains links to local stores and places that have events and/or deals in the area.

Google News now lets you filter news by publisher for a specific news search query. I think it works the same way as a site command, which Google News has supported for at least 17 years now, but now there is a button that shows some relevant publishers for the topic.

For years now, Google has shown phone numbers on some search result snippets when Google thinks you want to call that store. We have screen captures of this from 2016 and 2014. But now Google is testing a new button that is more button-like.

We have had intense Google search ranking volatility over the past few weeks over the weekends. That weekend trend kind of stopped when we had a mid-week Google update around January 9th/10th. And for the past couple of weekends, including this one, the volatility with the Google search results has been relatively calm.

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

This week, I reported about a weird ranking pattern that has been emerging with these weekend ranking Google updates. Google Search Console shows a spike in 404 errors for URLs ending in /1000. Google launched Circle to Search and a new AI-powered multisearch. A new...

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, responded to the article from 404 Media titled Google News Is Boosting Garbage AI-Generated Articles. In short, Sullivan said that the way they filtered Google News was by date and not relevancy (relevancy filtering is the default) and that Google can always do better.