Industry News

Google Business Profiles has outages for some of its business management tools. The outages started yesterday, March 7th, at about 5 pm ET or earlier. It impacts the ability to manage reviews, appeals and also to check your verification status.

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

Google has unleashed tons of manual actions, search ranking penalties you can see within Google Search Console, after it released its search spam policy updates on Tuesday. The manual actions seemed to mostly have been distributed yesterday, Wednesday, March 6th, a day after Google announced the new spam policy changes.

I ran a poll asking my X/Twitter followers if they think the new Google March core and spam updates will reduce unhelpful content from showing up in the search results by 40%? About 80% of the 1,XXX votes said no, they don't think it will reduce the low-quality, unhelpful content from showing up in the Google search results.

Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, was asked does Google currently validate/verify if information or data within content, is accurate, correct, true or even "commonly accepted". In which Sullivan replied it isn't a simple yes/no response, Google Search wants to rank content people like, and people like content that has reliable information.

Google is no longer showing the number of views a review gets on Google Maps. You will be able to see the older reviews view-counts for now but the new reviews are not showing those counts.

Google has updated the recipe rich results report within Google Search Console. Google also cleaned up some of its recipe structured data documentation. You may see an increase in warnings for your Recipe items related to the reporting update.

Google is getting serious with where their ads show since all the bad PR and now Google AdSense is requiring new site-level approval process for AdSense for Search (AFS) sites. This started on March 4, 2024, but Google didn't announce it until yesterday afternoon.

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.

I have a deep dive into the new Google March 2024 core update...

Google announced the March 2024 core update has now started to roll out and that this core update will take up to a month to fully roll out because it has updates to a few systems within the core ranking system. Google's Helpful content system is now also part of the core update. In addition, Google also released the March 2024 spam updates, with new spam policies.