Google working on fixing latency issues with the Search Performance reports
The reports within Search Console are now delayed by over 52 hours.
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Barry Schwartz's latest articles
Prompt injection added to Bing Webmaster Guidelines
The addition of content to your webpages that attempts to perform prompt injection is against Bing's guidelines.
Report: Menu items, busier businesses may be Google local ranking signals
Google has not specifically confirmed this but a new local SEO report says these may be newly discovered local ranking signals.
Google June 2024 spam update done rolling out
This spam update took 7 days to fully roll out and is now complete.
Google testing AI Overviews with link cards at the top
This makes clicking to publishers and content creators way more likely than the current version of AI Overviews.
Google Chrome mobile adds local places to Chrome Actions
Searchers with this Chrome Action enabled can quickly call, get directions and read reviews from the Chrome search bar.
Google dropping continuous scroll in search results
Continuous scroll launched in Google mobile search in October 2021 and on desktop in December 2022.
Google Search resolves indexing bug that lasted several hours
The issue affected indexing in Google Search and impacted new content published across both large and small publishers.
Google Search now supports return policy markup at the organization-level
A year ago, Google added support for return policy structured data support for merchant listing and now Google is expanding that support to the organization level.
Google Search Console Performance report adds merchant listings to images report
Google now will show the merchant listing performance within the Google Search Image tab in Search Console data.
Google Search fixes issues with Site names not appearing for internal pages
This has been an issue since last December but Google said it still needs to reprocess your page for the issue to be resolved.
Google’s link reporting tool is now fixed
Last week there was a bug with the Google Search Console report.
Google won’t index sites that do not work on mobile devices after July 5
if your website is not accessible using a mobile device, then Google will no longer index it and rank it.
Google restores News and Discover after widespread disruption
Google identified and fixed its technical difficulties with serving, but it may have impacted news publisher traffic.
Google explains how it is improving its AI Overviews
Google said only one in every 7 million unique queries resulted in a Google policy violation.
Google Search Console link report may be broken today
Many are noticing huge declines in the number of links reported in the link report within the Google tool.
Google Search Console reporting error for product snippets
You may have noticed a spike in impressions and clicks between May 15 to May 27 - it was a bug.
Google responds to leak: Documentation lacks context
Google won't comment on the specific elements in the document, in order to keep its ranking system safe and secure.
Google Business Profile chat and call history going away
July 31, 2024 Google will shut down call history and chat - you can download your history now.
Google testing blue visit button for search result snippets
These are really big and visible buttons that may encourage a higher click-through rate from the search results.
Google Analytics GA4 shows real-time users in the last 5 minutes
Previously, GA4 only showed this metric over the past 30 minutes.
Bing Search back online after 5-hour outage
Third-party search services that use Bing are also offline, including DuckDuckGo, ChatGPT Search, Copilot and more.
Google is testing special snippet treatment for Reddit search results
This will very likely lead to even more traffic sent by Google Search to Reddit.
WordPress 6.5 gains lastmod date for sitemaps files
Google and Bing both encourage sites to include accurate lastmod dates within sitemap files.
Google Lens and Circle to Search gains more links, facts and AI Overviews
Not only are the search results more graphical, they have richer information for these more interactive ways of searching.
Google adds two new Googlebot crawlers: GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video
Google said these new crawlers are to "better support crawling of binary data that may be used for research and development."
Google adds “web” filter to only show text-based links in Google Search results
Google said the filter appears on the top of the results page alongside other filters.
New Google Search AI features to help you plan, research and learn
New features include AI Overviews, multistep reasoning capabilities, planning capabilities, AI-organized search results, and a new Google Lens ask with video feature.
Google rolls out AI Overviews in US with more countries coming soon
AI Overview link cards get a higher click through rate than normal web search results but Google won't break out click data in Search Consoles for content creators.
Google hides search results count under tools section
Is the results count one step closer to fully going away?
Google begins enforcement of site reputation abuse policy with portions of sites being delisted
Sites like CNN, USA Today, LA Times and others are seeing their rented subdomains and subfolders dropping in rankings after they were hit by manual actions.
Google disavow link tool will go away at some point
John Mueller said, "At some point, I'm sure we'll remove it," referring to the disavow link tool in Google Search Console.
Google March 2024 core update rollout is now complete
The first core update of 2024 finished rolling out on April 19 - this was a pretty big one but it overlapped with other big changes leading to a 45% reduction in unhelpful content.
Google Publisher Center to stop allowing you to add publications
Instead, Google will automatically add eligible publishers and will eventually remove those publishers not eligible.
Google Search Console security update improves management of ownership tokens
You can now more easily see and remove which have access to your Search Console profiles.
Google structured data carousels (beta) clarified for summary pages
Google also added the feature availability for this carousel beta.
Bing Search tests removing cache link
This comes after Google Search officially dropped its cache link a couple of months go.
Google did not drop Web Stories from image results
Google issued a correction plus explained Search Console had a reporting bug with Web Stories in Image Search.
Google still has not announced a launch date for SGE
It can go live at Google I/O in May but likely not on queries with ads.