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

This week, I published the monthly Google Webmaster report, it is a good place to catch up and get a quick refresher on the month. Google has begun rolling out their third broad core update yesterday…

Google News Showcase was officially announced last October as an experience for publishers to show news in Google. Well, now it is expanding in many ways including paywalled content for free, a News Showcase panels from suggested publications, News Showcase will expand to show on news.google.com and on Discover. And most exciting for me is that News Showcase metrics will come to Google Search Console.

We’ve been covering a couple of the changes to the suggest edit feature in Google Maps, Google Local, Google My Business, Google Places or whatever you want to call it. Amy Toman spotted many of these but now she is seeing more including more explanatory options when you click suggest an edit.

Microsoft Bing Search added to its video search user interface the ability to drag and drop videos into a box to create your own playlists. If you search for videos in Bing Search and click on the videos tab, on the bottom left corner a playlist button will show you how to add videos to your playlist to watch later.

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that Google is able to read unsupported structured data, structured data that is in the schema.org docs but is not listed by Google as something they support on the Google developers site. But I would not expect you to see rich results from any of those unsupported structured data schema elements.

Remember Google said they would soon begin testing a visual indicator in the search results for the upcoming Google Page Experience Update? Well, we may be seeing Google testing this visual indicator or icon or label in the search results. It looks like a star within a gray circle.

Alan Rabinowitz got started doing SEO in the early days of Google and he is the CEO of a company named SEO Image. He got started when he was trying to figure out how he can get his art web site to rank well in the search engines…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that Google is able to read unsupported structured data, structured data that is in the schema.org docs but is not listed by Google as something they support on the Google developers site. But I would not expect you to see rich results from any of those unsupported structured data schema elements.

There has been some speculation or questions if Google, along with the December 2020 core update, released the passage indexing feature. Google did say passage indexing would be live by the end of the year, so is it live?

As you know, Google released the December 2020 broad core update at 1pm ET on December 3, 2020. This was after Black Friday (November 27) and Cyber Monday (November 30) but before the actual holiday season – Chanukah is Thursday night (December 10th) and Christmas is later this month. Was this the right time to release a core update or should Google have held off until after January 1st?

It looks like Google has now re-enabled the ability for businesses to request phone support from the Google My Business team. This feature went away during when COVID hit but now it seems to be back, as Ben Fisher noted on Twitter the other day.