Google posted an FAQ around Core Web Vitals and the upcoming Google Page Experience update. Google’s Cheney Tsai said the company has compiled some of the most frequently asked questions about Core Web Vitals and Page Experience.

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 has released a help document named large site owner’s guide to managing your crawl budget. It is an advanced help document on helping developers manage Googlebot crawls on their web site. It reminds me of the blog post Gary Illyes of Google wrote in 2017 about crawl budget.

Google announced a new Google Discover ads format to choose from. There is a new 4:5 portrait aspect ratio format that helps advertisers visually showcase their products and services more prominently with consumers as they scroll and it leads into the lead form extensions.

Lily Ray ran a poll (I am kicking myself for not seeing it to retweet it but it has over 500 results). The poll asked how would you handle a lot of really spammy links pointing to your clients sites. The response was most would ignore the links but many will disavow them.

Today marks the 17th anniversary of starting this site, the Search Engine Roundtable. I’ve been writing about search for over 40% of my life – which is weird to think about. And I’ve been doing it consistently every workday, several times per day, even through a pandemic, for 17 years. It is hard for me to fathom that.

So let’s say you are searching for pizza stores in Saint Moritz, Switzerland – does that mean you live there or you are about to travel there. Google’s John Mueller said while Google does try to understand where you are searching from, it does not differentiate between “living in X” from “traveling in X”.

Google has made a small tweak to the “suggest an edit” feature in the local panel results. Yes, you can still suggest an edit but now if you click on the arrow to expand the hours of that business or store, Google will let you suggest an edit specific to the hours of the local business.

Google Merchant Center seems to be rolling out a new reporting feature that lets you build your own performance report. You should be able to access this in the Google Merchant Center under the “Performance” tab.

There may be another Google search ranking algorithm update rolling out again. This one started around Tuesday, December 1, 2020. Google has not confirmed this but there is chatter and the tracking tools are also showing an update.

Ryan Siddle, an SEO, asked John Mueller of Google if Google supports nested XML sitemap index files. The answer is no, Google does not support it. But Google does have a help document on how to split up your large sitemap files.

Google Maps has added a new social feature in the map software named the “community feed.” It can be found in the explorer tab within the Google Maps app on Android and iOS. It is a way for you to find out what the community is sharing about a specific business with the ability to follow those suggestions in your Google feed going forward.

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…

In part two of my interview with Elie Orgel (you can see part one here) we talked about how to get content and data that Google has not indexed yet. A lot of governmental web sites and portals do provide data exports and weird charting solutions that Google has not indexed…

I am a bit surprised I am writing this but yes, anchor text is a signal Google uses for ranking purposes. Yes, Google can ignore spammy links that try to manipulate rankings but normal anchor text does help Google rank a page for what the anchor text says about the page. Hence giving Google more context about the page.