Craig Hordlow

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 Local reviews are disappearing from many businesses……

Microsoft Advertising has opened up a new betas for Performance Max experiments. There are now Max upgrade or uplift experiment available in Microsoft Advertising.…

Google added a note to the About Google third-party rates for hotel ads saying after September 30, 2026 this will become unavailable. Google said campaigns will stop serving ads across all Hotel Ads inventory after September 30th.…

Google is testing updating the design for the local pack and places listings within Google Search. The map was moved to the top, instead of on the right and the action buttons are also moved and changed. I am not …

Google has posted its Fourth of July Doodle for 2026, the United States Semiquincentennial celebrates the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence. The Doodle is an animated GIF of the American flag in the background.…

Google will add to existing penalties or restrictions on your Google Business Profiles if you continue to violate the same policy over and over again. The initial restriction might be 30 days but then if you are caught doing the …

This week, I covered that Google’s June 2026 spam update completed last Friday afternoon. Fraudulent DMCA takedown requests are breaking Google Search and no one seems to be doing anything. Google AI Mode improved links……

Google reviews seem to be disappearing from Google Business Profile local listings. In the past few days or so there has been an influx of complaints in the Google Business Profile forums. I have not seen Google respond to the …

Google has fixed the page indexing report within Google Search Console after it was struck and delayed for over three weeks. It was literally just fixed within minutes of this story going live, as I continuously check the report like …

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

Google has now added an unsubscribe option to those book a call with your Google Ads expert emails that you find in your inbox just way too often. This has been a complaint for a while, like since 2005 and …

Google Ads is testing a new Channel Diagnostics feature for Performance Max campaigns within “Channel Performance” under the “Insights & Reports” section. This shows you the diagnostic data of all the channels together and of a specific channel in particular, …

Google updated how it handles sending searchers to AMP pages within Google Search. Now Google will send searchers directly to publisher-hosted AMP pages instead of the cached pages displayed in an AMP viewer. Google said this was done because it …

If you take a look at the Bing Webmaster Tools newish AI performance reports, you may see more data, impressions, etc showing up on and after June 1, 2026. Microsoft said this is just “regular data backfilling” and there are …

Google has reportedly updated the Google Ads “All Campaigns” drop-down selection box to be from the center of the screen to the top-left corner and added the full campaign hierarchy in an expandable view.…

Here is the monthly Google Webmaster report, where I summarize the major organic Google Search news and SEO topics from the past month. The big news was the Google June 2026 spam update, which took only two days to roll …

Google Ads, as we covered earlier, made changes to Target CPA & Target ROAS. But now, Google sent out an email about even more changes starting on August 17, 2026 around bidding for campaigns limited by budget. It seems like …