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
Over the last few days or so, Bankrate has been gaining a lot of attention in the SEO space. They are using AI to write a lot of content and not hide it. With that, Google's Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, responded to the SEO community about Google's stance on such AI-generated content.| Search Engine Roundtable
The days after the Google March 2024 spam and core updates were released, Google issued tons of manual actions. They were mostly pure spam manual actions that resulted in all or parts of a website being deindexed for violating Google's search spam policies, as Google calls it. Most, if not all, of those sites that were hit have not recovered yet.| Search Engine Roundtable
Google has completed the rollout of the March 2024 spam update after a 14-day and 21-hour period. This update started on March 5, 2024, and was completed on March 20, 2024. Remember, the March 2024 core update is still rolling out and will do so for the next couple of weeks.| Search Engine Roundtable
If you've been glancing at the comments on this site or reading the feedback thus far on social media, you can tell that so far, SEOs and site owners are not that happy with the Google Search results. Google has told us to be patient and wait to see the results when the updates are both completed but Google is also saying that it will open up a feedback form for you all to submit feedback about the update.| Search Engine Roundtable
Nilay Patel of The Verge had a great one-on-one conversation with Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO. Nilay did put on the pressure around how the changes with AI Overviews and AI Mode in Google Search are impacting publishers in a very negative way, but Sundar seemed unconvinced that web publishing is dead.| Search Engine Roundtable
Google had a lot of news out of Google I/O, as you would expect. The big item, which we predicted, was that AI Mode is now available to all US searchers without having to opt into it within Search Labs. Plus, Google is testing a number of new features in AI mode including Deep Search, Live Search, personal context, custom charts, AI shopping and yes - Agentic features.| Search Engine Roundtable
Bloomberg's Emily Chang interviewed Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, last night at the Bloomberg Tech summit in San Francisco. The interview covered a ton of topics and was pretty fast-paced. It goes across AI, search, the monopoly case and more.| Search Engine Roundtable
There are a lot of folks in the community saying that implementing structured data / schema on your pages will help you with AI Search visibility. But few have really tested it until now. And those few tests show that adding structured data / schema does not help with your visibility in AI search, at least not yet.| Search Engine Roundtable
Yesterday at SMX Advanced, I interviewed the Google executive who announced the March 2024 core update on the main Google blog. I asked Elizabeth Tucker a boatload of questions around SEO, the core update, the helpful content update, the search data leak and of course AI Overviews.| Search Engine Roundtable
Google's Head of Search, Liz Reid, wrote a blog post last night named "AI Overviews: About last week." She basically said that overall the vast majority of the AI Overviews are really good and they did find examples of where they can make improvements. But AI Overviews are here to stay and Google will continue to show them in Google Search.| Search Engine Roundtable
Google, as expected, has officially launched AI Overviews in the US and will expand the launch to other countries by the end of this year. AI Overviews were in Search Labs under the Search Generative Experience last year and has finally launched.| Search Engine Roundtable
Just this week, Google brought a new filter to the Google Search Console's Search Analytics report for showing AMP results in the report. Well, it seems like two additional filters are coming to the Google Search Analytics report including featured snippets and rich result...| Search Engine Roundtable
Gary Illyes from Google said in last night's Google Central Live event that there is a benefit, I assume an SEO benefit, to having title tags longer than what is displayed in the search. He later added that you should keep the title tag "precise" to the topic of the page and do not worry how long it is or if it is too long.| Search Engine Roundtable
The new AI advanced version of Google Search, aka Google SGE or Search Generative Experience, provides wicked smart AI answers to your queries. And if you ask it how to pass kidney stones quickly, Google will tell you to drink at least two quarts of urine every 24 hours.| Search Engine Roundtable
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
