Industry News

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

A study released by the Leipzig University, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and ScaDS.AI in Germany asked if Google Search is getting worse. The 16 page paper, downloadable as a PDF over here says that Google has slightly improved in some areas but there is still a lot of spammy content within Google Search.

Advertisers and agencies seem beyond frustrated by the lack of support from the Google Ads support team. Nicola Agius covered it incredibly well, she said, "Google Ads customer service has plummeted to an unacceptable all-time low, according to search marketers."

A recent post on Reddit asked about the impact of having a website where most of the text was within images. Would Google be able to read the text, what is the SEO impact and would the text rank in the search results?

Google Search may not be showing news boxes, like top stories, for some election types of queries. So if you search for [iowa caucus] or [2024 United States primary elections] and others don't seem to trigger news boxes.

Microsoft is testing a new style for when someone hovers their mouse cursor over a search result snippet in the Bing Search results. Bing will add a shadow effect to that snippet on hover over.

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 am seeing an unusual number of complaints around the reported 404 errors within Google Search Console reporting. This is specific to your URLs having /1000 appended to the end of the URL.

Microsoft released Copilot Pro, a premium paid version of its Copilot service, formerly known as Bing Chat. But that doesn't mean Bing Search or Bing Chat is getting worse, Bing will stay the same, said Mikhail Parakhin from Microsoft.

Google Ads is either beta testing or slowly releasing a feature to let you add three campaign-level headlines and two campaign-level descriptions. You can also schedule the headlines and descriptions to run at certain times or stick them on specific positions.