Daily Search Forum Recap: January 8, 2025

It’s been a while since Google has come out with a new search spam policy and penalty to accompany it with and now we have a new one, “back button hijacking.” Back button hijacking is something many of us were surprised Google didn’t specifically disallow but now, Google said it is on the rise and it is adding it to the list – officially.

Google Ads announced a number of updates and changes this morning including changes to bidding target optimization, expanding access to Smart Bidding Exploration and promotion mode beta rolling out. My biggest concern is with bidding target optimization, as Google said it will deliver more predictable performance campaigns with fixed spending limits.

Both Google and Microsoft Bing are testing hover effects that will bold elements of the search results. Google is testing bolding the description of the snippet and Bing is testing bolding the title of the snippet.