Industry News

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

I am seeing early signs of a possible Google Search ranking algorithm update starting yesterday, February 28th, and into today, February 29th. The chatter started to spike yesterday amongst the SEO community and some of the third-party rank tracking tools are showing a spike in volatility.

There is no doubt that Google is going through a rough patch right now on many fronts. Between all the complaints about search quality, all the search bugs, the revelations from the DOJ investigation, shaking the cushions, Gemini's faults, the list goes on and on... It is no wonder SEOs like Google far less today than they did years ago.

Google Search is testing a section, a carousel, named "Popular opinions." The section shows articles with opinions on products or other topics. The example below shows, what looks like, review articles probably fitted with affiliate links.

Did you know that some Google Ads support representatives you are chatting with may be using Google Translate? They may be automatically translating your questions from English or whatever language and then responding with Google Translate from their language to yours.

Microsoft may start to test Bing's Deep Search features again in the wild after pulling back its testing earlier this month. As a reminder, Deep Search is an enhancement to Bing Search that provides "deeper and richer exploration of the web," Microsoft originally said.

Google is testing a new design and feature for its local justifications section. There is this "people likes" section that is shaded in blue and really stands out under the local pack snippet results.

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

Google's John Mueller said on Reddit that disallowing URLs with UTM parameters in them won't help you to improve crawling or rating with Google Search. He added that a site should try to keep its internal URLs clean and consistent, but over time, the canonical tags should help with external links that carry UTM parameters on them.

Google Ads will soon support showing the Search Partner Network in the Performance Max Placement report. This means Google will show you which sites your PMax ads are running on - which is a first.