Industry News

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.

Microsoft will soon bring Copilot Pro, the premium $20 per month version of its AI search features, to the Copilot iOS and Android app. Microsoft's Mikhail Parakhin said the app updates are being processed within the respective app store submission process.

A couple of months ago, Google launched course info rich results in the Engish regions but now it may be rolling out beyond those regions. Some SEOs in India are now seeing it for the first time, keep in mind, they are English results but not necessarily in English regions.

Google seems to be testing a new interface for the job search results. The old interface was more like a boxed in module, the new interface seems to flow more nicely and be more integrated into the search results user interface.

I spotted a complaint where Google was showing a paid real estate listing in the Google News portal, not just the Google News search results. The issue was that the site that published the listing seems to have published it as a news article and the Google News filters didn't filter it out, as it probably should.

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