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.

I have a deep dive into the new Google March 2024 core update...

Google announced the March 2024 core update has now started to roll out and that this core update will take up to a month to fully roll out because it has updates to a few systems within the core ranking system. Google's Helpful content system is now also part of the core update. In addition, Google also released the March 2024 spam updates, with new spam policies.

Google is rolling out its new March 2024 spam updates accompanying the very big March 2024 core update and three new spam policies. The new spam updates kick off this week and target scaled content and expired domain abuse, plus other spam, while giving notice of site reputation abuse for a May 2024 update.

Microsoft updated Bing Webmaster Tools to build out the IndexNow reports, now named IndexNow Insights, add new Top SEO Insights to the main page and also cleaned up the side bar navigation within the tool. Plus, Fabrice Canel announced how IndexNow has grown to over 2.5 billion submitted URLs.

Google has updated the Google search quality raters guidelines untrustworthy pages section. The previous version was 168 pages and not it is 170 pages and that previous version was released last November 2023. This update is probably to fit the changes with the new March 2024 core update and spam updates / policy updates.

Google posted a notice in the Google Search Console data anomalies section that "Google Search has changed the way event rich results appear in Search results." This was dated March 4th and onwards.

Microsoft has relaunched Bing Deep Search today after pulling it offline after a failed initial launch. Now the Deep Search link comes with a disclaimer "GPT-powered results takes ~30 secs." But it does seem to work better than my last test.

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

Microsoft announced that Performance Max campaigns are available globally on Microsoft Advertising today, March 5th. So now any advertiser can start using PMax campaigns.

Microsoft is adding new copilot settings to Bing Search. These settings let you define if you want Copilot to show responses on the search results page and if you want to scroll up to see Copilot.