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 fixed two bugs, the favicon bug and the crawl stats bug in …

Google has updated the Google Ads help document for About Maximize conversion value bidding with a number of changes. The change that stood out the most was Google lowering the conversion cycles requirement from three cycles to one or two …

Typically, when Google highlights phrases in a featured snippet or AI Overview within Google Search, the highlighter color is blue. We’ve seen Google test other colors before, but here is a new one – a pink highlight.…

Google sent out an email to Google Merchant Center advertisers and users that the minimum size for product images is going up to 500 x 500 pixels starting on January 31, 2027. Google recommends at least 1500×1500 pixels or above, …

Google is aware of and in the process of addressing an issue where reviews are missing after a Google Business Profile gets reinstated after it was suspended. Google is reportedly actively working on a resolution but there is no estimated …

Google has made some minor updates to the canonicalization help documents including the What is canonicalization and Fix canonicalization issues. I am not sure if anything fundamentally is different on the page outside of making it easier to understand and …

Google has fixed two bugs this weekend related to Google Search. The first is the bug with many favicons not showing up in the Google Search result snippets. The second is the bug with two days of data missing from …

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 …