Industry News

Google seems to be testing a new ad label on the search ads that is way more noticeable than the normal ad label. This one has the black ad text but it is outlined in a curved green border making the ad label stand out much more than previous ad labels.

Over the past couple of days, some of the Google search algorithm tracking tools were reporting large swings in volatility in the search results - thus signaling a possible Google search update. But the chatter amongst the SEO industry during that time has been super quiet, showing no signs of an update.

So I wrote this pretty deep dive into how Google uses AI in Google Search at Search Engine Land, and Google posted a shorter version on their blog. I noticed after that, some folks were saying that Google uses MUM for search rankings. Truth is, Google uses MUM for only two things in search, COVID vaccine names and a related topics in videos results feature - that is it.

This month was packed with a handful of unconfirmed Google search algorithm updates, as you will see in the bulleted list below. In fact, there may be a more subtle update going on now...

About a year ago, Google first introduced guidelines around manual actions for Google Discover and Google News. In the past week, I have seen numerous news publishers, both large and small, receive such manual actions.

Google this morning launched a new API for Search Console - the URL Inspection API. This API lets you programmatically interact with the URL Inspection Tool that you would manually interact with within Google Search Console, but with code. SEOs and developers are super excited about this new API - as you'd imagine.

Surprise, surprise - Google has decided to drop FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts), its cookie alternative, with something called Topics API. The Topics API will use browsing topics into 300 or so categories. Yep, FLoC is a FLoP.

Again I am seeing signals, both a lot of chatter from the SEO community and tools lighting up around a possible but yet unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update. Yes, there has been a ton of unconfirmed updates in the past couple of weeks and let's add this one to the list.

Google has been busy over the last couple of weeks after being taking a bit of a break with the new years. It seems we are seeing again signs of another Google search ranking algorithm update occurring yesterday and today, January 19th and 20th. There is both SEO industry chatter and data from the tracking tools that support this but yes, we do not have a Google confirmation about an update.

We know Google has deduplication efforts for when a featured snippet is displayed so that it might remove the snippet from the main web results. Google may do the same, in some cases, for when a URL is listed in the top stories section and then not show it in the main web results.