There are many searchers who have been using Google daily that are heading to the Google Web Search Help forums to ask how they can turn off the new AI Overviews within the Google Search results. As you know, AI Overviews started to roll out on Tuesday and some searchers simply do not want it.| Search Engine Roundtable
One of the things I see so often in the SEO space is that SEOs say you need your pages to have a word count of X for Google to want to index and rank it well. The truth is, that is not true - if it was, Google wouldn't rank Twitter URLs or stories here. :) John Mueller said on Twitter this morning "word count is not indicative of quality." "Some pages have a lot of words that say nothing. Some pages have very few words that are very important & relevant to queries," he added. I have been a hu...| Search Engine Roundtable
Over the past few days the SEO industry has been chattering it up about how a site received a Google Search manual action for unnatural links for a "legit guest blog" post. But when you look, this manual action only affected "some pages," not the whole site.| Search Engine Roundtable
Back in May 2016, a year ago, we reported some people seeing a filter in the Search Analytics tool in Google Search Console...| Search Engine Roundtable
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...| Search Engine Roundtable
Google's Robby Stein said that over the coming weeks, Google will be testing changes to AI Mode that will aim to encourage clicks to publishers. He said on X that Google has "been experimenting with how and where to show links in ways that are most helpful to users and sites."| Search Engine Roundtable
Did you notice that one of the only reports in Google Search Console that does not have a "last updated" time stamp is the links report. I asked John Mueller from Google why and he said, "No particular reason. Different reports are different."| Search Engine Roundtable
I've covered the almost invisible and incredibly hard to see experiments with Microsoft Advertising placing hard to see search/sponsored ads in the Bing search results many times. Well, now that we have a Microsoft Advertising Ads Liaison, we finally got a response from Microsoft on the topic.| Search Engine Roundtable
New research released by Rand Fishkin and friends at Sparktoro says that traditional search is not dipping in usage, even as searchers continue to adopt AI search features and tools. "95% of Americans continue to use them each month, and 86% are heavy users," Rand wrote.| Search Engine Roundtable
To those of you who run advertising campaigns with Microsoft Advertising to show ads on Bing and other Microsoft properties, here are the dos and don'ts of handling suspensions and appeals.| Search Engine Roundtable
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...| Search Engine Roundtable
Earlier we reported that ChatGPT from OpenAI seems to be using parts of Google search results for its answers. Well, according to The Information, OpenAI has been partially using Google search results scraped by a startup called SerpApi for ChatGPT responses on current events like news and sports.| Search Engine Roundtable
Google Ads seems to now have PMax, Performance Max, channel reporting on the account level. This allows you to compare multiple PMax campaigns on the same screen, the same report.| Search Engine Roundtable
Google posted a new job for an External Communications Manager, Search - this job seems a lot like what Danny Sullivan, the former Google Search Liaison, did, but I am not sure if this is the job posting to find a new Google Search Liaison.| Search Engine Roundtable
The last time I covered the ongoing Google search ranking volatility was when I said there was a bit of a cooling period. The weird thing is that most of the week that Google volatility was calm but chatter did spike up towards the end of the week, but the tools that track it didn't show that volatility heat up until a couple days later.| Search Engine Roundtable
Google is now testing adding an "Ask Anything" box within the AI Overviews, and when you type in that box and click search, it takes you into the Google AI Mode results.| Search Engine Roundtable
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. Google Discover has these new publisher entity pages with follow counts...| Search Engine Roundtable
This week, we did a check in on the ongoing Google Search ranking volatility. Google AI Mode expanded to 180 countries, added agentic experiences, got more personalized and gained sharable links. ChatGPT may be...| Search Engine Roundtable
Google is now showing the deals and loyalty benefits details in the retailer/merchant knowledge panels. Plus, Google Shopping Ads show a "discount code" link that opens a dialog box with the code and a button to "continue to site."| Search Engine Roundtable
While we have still not seen any sites recover from the September 2023 helpful content update, we have seen sites recover from previous core updates. We were hoping by now to see sites recover from that September 2023 helpful content update with this March 2024 core update (since it incorporated the helpful content system in part), but no, not yet.| Search Engine Roundtable
Another interesting tidbit from Marie Haynes interview of John Mueller was a snippet around how people place text on the bottom of e-commerce category pages. John kind of suggested that 90% of that content is unnecessary but it is useful to have a sentence or two.| Search Engine Roundtable
On Friday, we reported some early chatter around a Google update possibly kicking off Friday morning. Well, as expected, it seems to have heated up over the weekend. Not only has the chatter spiked up a lot...| Search Engine Roundtable
Yesterday, as I covered at Search Engine Land, Google said at SMX East on stage that the Google Panda 4.2 update that began rolling out around July 18th of this year is indeed still rolling out.| Search Engine Roundtable
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...| Search Engine Roundtable
Pew Research Center released a report that showed Google searchers who encounter an AI Overview are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who do not see one. The study showed that 8% clicked on links to websites when an AI Overview was on the search results page, as opposed to 15% when an AI Overview was not on the page.| Search Engine Roundtable
Microsoft has added two new options to the Bing Webmaster Tools Search Performance report. There is a new list by for "device" and for "country," which was added to the existing "keywords" and "pages" options.| Search Engine Roundtable
Google's John Mueller said in black and white in a Google Webmaster Help thread that using Google Translate to translate your whole site, is the same thing as "auto-generated content." This should come to no surprise to anyone here. In fact, the first time Google came out on this was back in August 2010 and then it became really official when Matt Cutts released a video on the this topic on March 2011. If you read the content guidelines section on automatically generated content, it spells it...| Search Engine Roundtable
Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, has confirmed that a Google ad representative, a Google employee, has made unauthorized changes to a Google ad account. Marvin wrote that following up after an investigation on the matter, "we did not properly follow our processes for ensuring approvals are granted before making changes."| Search Engine Roundtable
Google's John Mueller was asked if Google allows for FAQ schema markup and structured data that appears in different sections of a blog post and that are not formatted as a traditional FAQ list. The answer, John gave was yes, assuming the FAQs are visible on the page.| Search Engine Roundtable
Google has officially announced Google AI Mode, after hearing rumors about it for months and then seeing leaked screenshots of it a few weeks ago. Google said AI mode gives you more advanced reasoning, thinking and multimodal capabilities so you can get help with even your toughest questions.| Search Engine Roundtable
Google is testing a new section in the search results titled "Posts on Reddit." This section seems to maybe replacing or be in addition to the Discussions and Forums section, which also shows Reddit threads in a dedicated section.| Search Engine Roundtable
Google is testing grouping the favicons from the sites from advertisers at the top of the sponsored results, on the right side of the sponsored label. This is part of when Google has the larger sponsored label and groups expandable sponsored ads below.| Search Engine Roundtable
Rand Fishkin came out with yet an eye popping study, saying that based on SimilarWeb data "64.82% of searches on Google (desktop and mobile combined) ended in the search results without clicking to another web property." The previous year he used JumpShot data which showed 50.33% of all Google searches ended without a click to any web property in the results.| Search Engine Roundtable
As we reported earlier this week, Google Search ranking volatility was more heated (and for longer) after the Google June 2025 core update completed than during the core update. Well, that volatility continues and it is not just the tools but the chatter within the industry is super high right now.| Search Engine Roundtable
A well-rounded view on search engines and search engine marketing from five segments of the Web population represented by senior members of the major SEO/SEM forums on the Internet.| Search Engine Roundtable
The term, The Great Decoupling has really been catching on over the past couple of weeks. It is being used to describe what we are seeing with impressions and clicks moving further and further apart since AI Overviews has become more of the norm in the Google Search results.| Search Engine Roundtable
I am seeing a ton of complaints in the Google Business Profiles forums about reviews going missing. A lot of people are saying the review counts have dropped from one number to a lower number.| Search Engine Roundtable
Lex Fridman had a really great interview with Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai. In that interview, Sundar explained that the "current plan is AI mode" will remain in a separate tab but over time, Google will "keep migrating it to the main page." Meaning, Google will move AI Mode features into AI Overviews and the main search experience.| Search Engine Roundtable
A week or so ago, Cloudflare announced it would block AI bots by default and offer a new pay per crawl initiative to compensate you all for your content that AI just consumes for free. But as most SEOs know, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews can't be blocked without really blocking your site from Google Search.| Search Engine Roundtable
Some may speculate that Google doesn't just index a URL and the content on that URL as a whole, but may index parts of a page independently. That is not true, Google's John Mueller said on Twitter "We don't index parts of a page independently, we index the pages as a whole, and try to understand the context of the content there."| Search Engine Roundtable
Today is the first day I have seen solid evidence of serious ranking volatility and changes related to the big Google March 2024 Core Update. As a reminder, the Google March 2024 Core Update officially started on March 5, 2024 and will take up to a month to fully roll out, we are expecting numerous ranking changes during the next few weeks.| Search Engine Roundtable
We reported on Saturday that the Google March 2024 core update seemed to have touched down on land, and we saw a lot of sites start to report major ranking drops, and the third-party tracking tools noticed big volatility. That all calmed on Sunday through today but we also had reports of reversals.| Search Engine Roundtable
Did you know that sites and pages with manual actions can potentially show up in the Google AI Overviews. So while the page has a search penalty and won't show up in the main Google search results, it can still show up in the AI Overviews at the top of the Google search results page.| Search Engine Roundtable
Here is a not new piece of data, 15% of the searches Google sees each day are new. Google shared this stat, again, on Twitter the other day saying "Fun fact: 15% of all Google searches have never been searched before."| Search Engine Roundtable
This week I interviewed Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, with the goal of better understanding where Google Search quality is at right now, where it is going in the future and what we as content creators and search marketers need to know.| Search Engine Roundtable
Last night, Google began to roll out an update to the Helpful content system - the Google September 2023 Helpful Content Update. What is new is not the part about finding hidden gems (that will come later) but a new "improved classifier."| Search Engine Roundtable
Last week we reported how Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, said how they are looking for ways to better promote sites that were hit by that helpful content update in September. Now, over the weekend, John Mueller from Google added, "the team working on this is explictly evaluating how sites can / will improve in Search for the next update."| Search Engine Roundtable
For the past week, we've been discussing how most of the third-party tracking tools have been showing much calmer and cooler search ranking volatility. This is all while the chatter within the SEO community still seems super heated. The reason may be that Google has been deploying new and more advanced blocking mechanisms towards these SEO tools.| Search Engine Roundtable
Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, said that he expects the next core update will be rolling out in the coming weeks. He said it is hard to predict because these updates are not scheduled to a particular day but rather tested and then once approved are launched.| Search Engine Roundtable
Brandon Saltalamacchia, the founder of Retro Dodo, covered his meeting he had with Danny Sullivan at Google - he covered it under the title A Brief Meeting With Google After The Apocalypse. Danny Sullivan said later that this was the second time he recently had such a meeting and he is working on setting up the third one soon.| Search Engine Roundtable
Examples demonstrating how tracking AI overviews in Google Search Console is a tough and confusing situation for site owners and SEOs.| Search Engine Roundtable
As you know, the September 2023 helpful content update was brutal to many small site owners, bloggers, SEOs and others. Some of these folks were desperately waiting for a recovery and were hopeful that this March 2024 core update (which is still rolling out) would result in a recovery. But it does not appear that any site has yet recovered from the ranking declines they saw in September 2023.| Search Engine Roundtable
Google is urging site owners and SEOs to have patience as the Google March 2024 core update continues to roll out over the coming weeks. Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, said on X to wait for the update to complete before deciding on what changes you may want to make.| Search Engine Roundtable
Today is day 10 of the Google March 2024 core update rollout and Google March 2024 spam update. We believe we saw the core update touch down on March 8th and 9th and some possible recoveries or fluctuations on March 12th. Now I see more signs of Google search ranking volatility likely related to the core and spam updates today.| Search Engine Roundtable
For the past few months now, Google has been saying there are big improvements coming to address some of the search quality issues we've all been seeing in the Google Search results. Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liason, wrote yesterday that these improvements "are on the way in the near future."| Search Engine Roundtable
Google announced the March 2024 core update has now started to roll out and that this core update will take up to a month to fully roll out because it has updates to a few systems within the core ranking system. Google's Helpful content system is now also part of the core update. In addition, Google also released the March 2024 spam updates, with new spam policies.| Search Engine Roundtable
It took almost the full 14 days, but the Google October 2023 core update is now officially done rolling out. The October 2023 core update started rolling out on October 5, 2023, at 11:54 AM ET and was completed on October 19, 2023, at 11:08 AM ET.| Search Engine Roundtable
After a couple of months of testing, it seems Google has now removed the cache link from the search results page. I no longer see a link to the Google cache within search result snippets but that doesn't mean you cannot access to cache, you can.| Search Engine Roundtable
The big core Google search algorithm update is being named the Google Medic Update. The reason for this name is because it seemed to be heavily targeting the health and medical space based on our survey data.| Search Engine Roundtable
Supposedly there was a local event at the main Google headquarters in Mountain View, California the other day and at that event a Googler said that 46% of all queries have local intent. I do trust the source but all I have is a tweet from this SEO on this stat.| Search Engine Roundtable
We've covered the topic of social signals and Google way way too much. But since John Mueller of Google mentioned it in a hangout last week, I figured why not repeat what he said...| Search Engine Roundtable
Another point Google's John Mueller made in the hangout from earlier this week at the 42:47 mark was that Google does not have a "website authority score." He said "we don't have anything like a website authority score...| Search Engine Roundtable
Google has been downplaying the importance of links in its ranking algorithm for the past couple of years now. But last Thursday, at PubCon, Gary Illyes from the Google Search team said he wouldn't even put links into the top three ranking signals Google Search uses.| Search Engine Roundtable
Duy Nguyen from Google's search quality team said in the Google office hours video that "backlinks as a signal has a lot less significant impact compared to when Google Search first started out many years ago."| Search Engine Roundtable
I am a bit surprised I am writing this but yes, anchor text is a signal Google uses for ranking purposes. Yes, Google can ignore spammy links that try to manipulate rankings but normal anchor text does help Google rank a page for what the anchor text says about the page. Hence giving Google more context about the page.| Search Engine Roundtable
