Craig Hordlow

The crawl stats report within Google Search Console has a data gap again. This time the crawl stats report is missing August 15 and 16th crawl data. Normally, Google can fix the data but Google has not yet fixed it.…

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

Microsoft Advertising sent out emails yesterday announcing changes coming to Max CPC bidding. Microsoft wrote, “Max CPC will no longer be available when creating new non-portfolio campaigns” after October 1, 2026.…

Google has updated the Preferred Sources button that publishers have on their websites to make it so that the user is taken right back to the page they were originally on. There is new embed code that handles this process …

Google has released its third spam update of the 2026 year, the August 2026 spam update this week and finished rolling out Friday morning at 4:50am. Google Search’s AI Mode is now being powered sometimes by……

Google updated the Google Tag and Google Tag Manager. Google said, “these changes are designed to streamline your measurement setup, improve performance and management, and provide a more unified experience across Google’s tagging products.”…

Google is rolling out the ability to tailor your Google Discover feed by using your words, in a conversational chat-like experience. You are taken to a screen that lets you enter your desired topics, then you can go back and …

Google’s crawler now strictly enforces standard JSON formatting when reading your site’s structured data, schema markup, instead of auto-correcting double-escaped HTML text. “To bring our parser up to JSON and other standards, we changed our JSON-LD extraction and are now …

Google announced it is rolling out new experimentation and planning capabilities in Google Ads and AI Max. There are new A/B test capabilities, brand and location parameters options and new Performance Planner predictions.…

Google has made some big updates to Local Service Ads. Even though LSAs are transitioning to Google Ads, Google is clearly still investing in the LSA product. Google added something called pre-badge ads, massively expanded the verticals and the verified …

The Google August 2026 spam update is now done rolling out. It started on Tuesday, August 18, 2026 at around 12:30 pm ET and completed on August 21, 2026 at around 4:50 am. Despite some people feeling the update started …

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

Google Ads seems to be rolling out a new customer match option named “enhanced matching.” Google writes this allows you to “Expand your audience reach with your consented user lists.” Google will then “match your consented users with publishers’ consented …

Google Ads can now help you find sitelinks for your ad extensions. A new feature within the Google Ads advertiser console will now suggest new sitelinks to add to your ads.…

As you know, Google does smaller core updates and algorithm search updates all the time without announcing them. So why does Google announce some of those updates and not the others. Well, as Google told us before, Google announces the …

Google has released version 25.1 of the Google Ads API, this is a minor release with several of updates. This update includes text disclaimer assets, AI Max tracking, Brand and Conversion Lift measurements, brand sentiment insights, and several more features …

In the past couple of days, I have seen a spike in the number of complaints around favicons disappearing from the Google Search result snippets. The complaints started a couple of days before Google’s August 2026 spam update, so I …