Industry News

It has been almost 12 weeks since the last confirmed Google search ranking algorithm was released. That was the November 2023 reviews update. Before that was the November 2023 core update. Since then, we have had plenty of unconfirmed updates (or ranking bugs), but none have been confirmed.

Google seems to have launched a new feature for some restaurants to make corrections and updates to the feedback customers leave about their menus and dishes. This feature is called Menu Highlights and you can select an item and submit feedback to Google to let them know if the dish is no longer served or if the name of the dish is not accurate.

A new report says that custom Google Business Profile services also impact rankings, maybe to a lesser degree than normal services. This report was from the folks at Sterling Sky who shared some limited data on the topic.

Google seems to be testing moving the reports around in the Google Ads advertiser console. There is a bit of a debate amongst advertisers if this is a good change or not.

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft introduced Copilot Pro, the paid premium version of Copilot, formerly known as Bing Chat. And on Friday, Microsoft finally added support for Copilot Pro to the iOS app (with Android coming really soon).

Google has added the "add note" search labs notes feature to the URL bar and in SGE while browsing. This makes it way more visible to add a note to a document than before, by placing the add note button directly on the web page you are reading, and not just in the search result snippets.

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 is cutting their SEO starter guide in half...

Google has confirmed that issue where sites would rank during the week and then not rank on the weekends - just wild. We had an unconfirmed Google ranking update this week after having a calm weekend. Google has dropped Appen...

Google is in the process of reworking its popular SEO starter guide, which it initially released in 2010. The starter guide is about 8,500 words right now, but it will be less than half that when the revised SEO starter guide comes out.

Google is testing a price slider for some queries where narrowing by price may make sense. We've seen Google show price range sliders for products and price slider filters for hotels but now we are seeing a price slider filter for normal product results.