Industry News

Gary Illyes from Google said that the HTML structure for your web pages does not matter much for rankings. He said this on the latest Search Off The Record podcast, saying, "I know that some people like to think that HTML structure matters all so much for rankings, but in fact, it doesn't matter that much."

Just like Microsoft has been testing swapping out the Bing Chat link with the Copilot link within the Bing Search results pages, now Microsoft is testing swapping out the Bing logo with a Copilot logo. This is all for the rebranding of Bing Chat to Copilot, which started two months ago.

Earlier this week, we reported that Google said we should expect a decline in the number of driving directions reported in the Google Business Profiles performance reporting tool. Well, the opposite happened. Everyone is seeing a significant increase in the number of driving directions reported in that Google tool.

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

Google's John Mueller had a nice one-liner again on X; he said, "Nobody can guarantee you traffic, sorry." This means you can't say making X changes will result in Y traffic for sure. You can't guarantee it he said.

Google does not read or use the content within your HTML comments for Google Search or ranking purposes. Google's John Mueller confirmed this once again saying, "Googlebot doesn't understand your HTML comments."

It looks like Google is testing an update to the Google Business Profile design where Google shows new icons and a slightly updated layout from the old version. The new layout also seems to make the information a bit easier to see and click on from while on your mobile phone.

Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, said that Google may soon target or penalize recipe collection pages using recipe structured data, when recipe structured data should be used on pages that list out the food item and include both ingredients and steps.

Google is testing showing video results on the right side of the search results page. Google tested this a few years ago, in a different format and now seems to be testing it again in a more basic video thumbnail format.

After a couple of months of testing, it seems Google has now removed the cache link from the search results page. I no longer see a link to the Google cache within search result snippets but that doesn't mean you cannot access to cache, you can.