Industry News

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

Google Search may be pushing out another search ranking update of sorts, I am seeing more signs of tremors and volatility over the past 24-hours. Some of the tools are already picking up on it but the SEO community is noticing some big movement starting on Monday, May 12th and into today, Tuesday, May 13th.

Google has updated its Google iOS app and with that, the most noticeable change was it updated the super G logo, with a more blended version of the logo. I am not sure if this is going to be the new logo going forward of this is a temporary change for an event, maybe like I/O.

Google made what I would consider a logical clarification to its image SEO best practices help document. It now says don't upload the same image under different URL/file names to your site, even if you embed that image on different pages on your site.

We've only covered the Department of Justice vs Google documents here and there but here are some documents that may be of interest to the community here. Google said Navboost is not a machine learning system, instead it is more of a big table. And there are more documents including one on hand crafting signals and another on a debugging interface.

Ryan Moulton, a Google Search engineer who worked on Google's search rankings algorithms for over 18 years now, went to X to call out some of what the courts are saying as not true. He went on to say, "This is now the second time I've seen my work cited prominently in a major lawsuit against Google, and I have to say, it has not given me a lot of faith in the court process around issues like this."

Google's John Mueller explained that just because you use hreflang tags on your pages, it doesn't mean those pages will be indexed and/or ranked in Google Search. He said on Bluesky, "hreflang doesn't guarantee indexing."

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

Google is testing ways to get more people to try AI Mode with a new AI Mode button in the Google Search bar on the Google home page. We've seen Google test AI Mode promotions with banners in the search results but now Google is placing large buttons in the search bar to get people to use AI Mode.

Google seems to be on the verge of rolling out AI Overviews in within Google Search in more countries and regions. We are seeing signs of Google testing AI Overviews in the wild in Turkey, Sweden and the Netherlands. This is a week or so before Google's big conference, Google I/O.