This week, we covered that the Google March 2024 core update is still rolling out 38 days later, but we saw more volatility this week. Just a reminder that the Google helpful content update no longer exists. Gary Illyes from
Since before last year's holiday season, we have been seeing a "Shop All Deals" banner-like ad in the Google Search results for e-commerce and other queries. Boyd Norwood from nozzle.io looked at their data and found that this banner shows up 40-50% of the time over the last four or so months.He looked at 3,760 keywords, although, I am not sure if those keywords are more e-commerce related or not.This is what that banner looks like:Boyd posted a video walk through of his data over here if you...
Mihai Aperghis (@mihaiaperghis), an SEO we reference here from time to time, is also a Google Product Expert and attended the Google Search Central Unconference the other week. He has written this blog post and I am posting it here as a super rare guest post on this site. Why? (1) Mihai rocks and (2) this site is about community and Product Experts are the essence of the Google community. I (Barry) personally was unable to attend due to a conflict. Note: Mihai did not ask for a link or a...
Google launched the style recommendations with thumbs up and down buttons not long ago after testing it in January. Now Google is showing this thumbs up and down buttons in the product grid search results, so Google can see what you like or dislike and then show you more products that you do like.Brodie Clark spotted this and posted some examples on X, he wrote, "Google is now testing out a more personalized experience for organic product grid results on mobile."Here are some of his...
Google has clarified in its image search help documentation that images are only extracted from the src attribute of img tags in Google Search. This is not new, but Google decided to update its documentation based on some questions it received about the topic.The new line reads:Google Search supports images referenced in the src attribute of img in the following file formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG. It's also a good idea to have the extension of your filename match with the file...
Meta's Threads now brings real-time search results on the platform, but not all have it. Meta brings real-time search results for Threads, which was done after the company claimed that it would not add the said feature to the platform any time soon.
Recently, we covered some of Google's rationale for ranking forums like Reddit and Quora so well in the Discussion and Forums box for many queries. Just a few days ago, we covered how I was sad to see Google ranking some dangerous and potentially harmful forum threads for health-related queries. Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liason, posted comments on a LinkedIn post from Lily Ray defending the statement he made on this topic. I'll share them all here, because I am sure many of you did not...
Google this week updated its Search Central documentation to provide clearer guidance on the beta carousels feature.
Tech giant is protesting proposed law that would require large online platforms to pay ‘journalism usage fee’Google has temporarily blocked links from local news outlets in California from appearing in search results in response to the advancement of a bill that would require tech companies to pay publications for links that articles share. The change applies only to some people using Google in California, though it is not clear how many.The California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA) would...
John Mueller from Google said that ranking well in the Google Shopping or Google Image vertical boxes does not impact your ranking in the core web results. He said, "I can't imagine that they'd be connected" when asked about how ranking well in the Merchant Center results can impact the web results.Christian Radny asked:I can see, that my shops have really high exposure of free merchant listings in SERPS. I wonder if the merchant listings push down organic pages to reduce a too high exposure of...
Over the past few weeks, Google's Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, has been replying to complaints about some examples of search results being not just low-quality but also potentially harmful and dangerous. The sad part to me is that a couple of years ago, this was not the case with the Google search results (for the most part).When I interviewed Hyung-Jin Kim, the Vice President of Google Search, at SMX a couple of years back, he told a touching story about this topic. He explained that a...
Google announced today it will cut some links to California-based news sites in its search results to prepare for future actions against the state's possibility of charging Google for news links.