Google has made a change to its performance report around reporting on your Web Stories. This change may lead to seeing more impressions and clicks from Google Discover to your web stories.

Google may have a bug with the URL inspection tool in Google Search Console specific to websites on HTTP/2. The tool shows a malformed response when it is run on the HTTP/2 server.

Brodie Clark spotted a new Google Search snippet test where Google is showing keywords labels or tags above the description and below the title and URL. This reminds me a bit of the tags Google showed in the snippet in 2017 and 2019.

Google told one site owner, this is specific advice to one specific site owner and not meant to be a generalization for all sites, that he should not focus on his individual pages but focus more on the category level pages. The issue was the individual pages on this site had very little content on it and John thought a good strategy would be to create higher level pages that can have more significant content on them.

In part one, Eli Feldblum and I spoke about the good old days and in part two about the SEO industry maturing. The SEO discipline is all about building up equity and it is all about content. We talked about how things were super easy in the old days but now Google understands queries and content on the web way more now that it did years ago. If you write really good content, that is the most important thing you can do, the other stuff matters but the level of your content is more important.

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…

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Danny Sullivan from Google said Google is “looking at” providing a mechanism to block pages or subsections of your site from being displayed in Google Discover. This comes off the controversy that there are new manual actions for Discover and Google News but no way to control if you show in Discover.

Google announced responsive search ads will be the default ad type for Google Search ad campaigns in Google Ads. Google said the expanded text ads can still be created if needed. But Google doesn’t think you will need them because they are wicked smart when it comes to machine learning.

Google announced the Google Search Central Live Conference. It seems to be taking place on February 23, 2021 between the hours of 7:00PM and 8:35 PM (EST). Google said this event is scheduled for the “timezone to suit parts of the Asia-Pacific region.”

Google wrote about some of the efforts it takes towards preventing and removing “fake and fraudulent contributed content” on Google Maps. The numbers of how much Google has removed from the Google Maps ecosystem is pretty amazing.

I got to say, I am a bit frustrated with the release of Google passage based ranking. I rant on it for a while and clarify a lot of things around it, including how it seemed like a small update and the scroll to text misinformation…

Google’s John Mueller said Google may discover and index URLs it finds in form action attributes, just like it does when it finds URLs in simple text files. Again, these are not normal HTML hyperlinks but URLs listed in files.

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’s John Mueller said on Reddit “no” WhoisGuard, the NameCheap domain privacy setting, does not impact your SEO or rankings on Google. Google does not care if you use domain privacy settings or not when you register your domain name.

Google made a small change to how it plots the core web vitals data in Google Search Console. The change goes into effect on February 17, 2021 and using less than as a boundary, Google is using less than or equal to.