Industry News

Over the past couple of weeks, the Google search rankings have been pretty stable and calm. It actually has been unusually calm that some SEOs are getting nervous. I recently saw some super early signs of an update brewing. Is this the calm before the storm?

I am seeing tons of reports over the past 24 hours of complaints around mass disapproving of ads and suspensions of accounts within Google Ads. Some are specific to being disapproved around "government documents and circumventing systems."

It looks like there is a missing day, a data gap, in the Google Search Console crawl stats report. I am personally missing Tuesday, February 8th crawl data but it seems others are missing February 9th.

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.