Industry News

As you know, the September 2023 helpful content update was brutal to many small site owners, bloggers, SEOs and others. Some of these folks were desperately waiting for a recovery and were hopeful that this March 2024 core update (which is still rolling out) would result in a recovery. But it does not appear that any site has yet recovered from the ranking declines they saw in September 2023.

Google announced changes to Google Analytics to help the conversion metrics match across Google Ads and Google Analytics. Google will rename legacy conversion to key events, and there are new cross-channel conversion performance reporting beyond Google Ads will be added to the Advertising workspace in GA4.

Microsoft is buying Google Ads to promote its search engine, Bing, on Google Search. I think this has been going on a long time, but you can trigger Bing Ads on Google Search through the Google Ads system for some queries.

Microsoft has been pushing Copilot within Bing Search a heck of a lot. Now Microsoft is showing a chat icon that says "Ask Copilot" in the People also ask section of the Bing search results.

Bing Search has a new refine your search box that sends searchers from Bing Search to Microsoft Copilot (formerly Bing Chat). You can check off the topics below and then click on the blue "chat" button to be taken into Copilot.

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 has completed the rollout of the March 2024 spam update after a 14-day and 21-hour period. This update started on March 5, 2024, and was completed on March 20, 2024. Remember, the March 2024 core update is still rolling out and will do so for the next couple of weeks.

In November we were expecting to see parts of the new Yahoo Search soon but at this point, we have not seen it yet. Brian Provost, the Senior VP and General Manager of Yahoo Search, said on X last night that we should hang tight, the team is still wiring up some new stuff.

Google is once again investigating issues with recipe images and other images not showing for some sites within the Google Search results. We reported on several issues with recipe sites several weeks ago and it seems to be happening again for some of these sites.

The days after the Google March 2024 spam and core updates were released, Google issued tons of manual actions. They were mostly pure spam manual actions that resulted in all or parts of a website being deindexed for violating Google's search spam policies, as Google calls it. Most, if not all, of those sites that were hit have not recovered yet.