Jason Brown reported that Microsoft dropped using Yelp reviews within Bing Local. Now instead, it seems Bing is using Facebook and Foursqaure and maybe others. Here is a screen shot of my business listing in Microsoft Bing showing Foursquare tips.

Brian Freiesleben spotted yet another Google search feature that may be new. If you search for products and find the organic popular products section, if you click on one, it now lets you swipe left or right to scan through the different products. There is also a new section for “style ideas” that first launched as a Google Lens product in 2017.

A couple of weeks ago, the SEO industry couldn’t stop talking about stop words. SEMrush posted a list of “SEO stop words” and the community began buzzing. John Mueller of Google even responding saying on Twitter “I wouldn’t worry about stop words at all; write naturally.”

Google has added a new AMP error to the Search Console AMP enhancements report for disallowed !important CSS qualifier. This was added back on January 19, 2021 and as a result, you may see an increase in the number of AMP errors reported after that date.

Google is rolling out to some businesses the ability to respond to Google My Business messaging through your desktop browser. Previously you were only able to manage it from your mobile phone and before that, through SMS.

Google may be testing showing the “find results on” other search providers in the US. This is a feature Google launched in the European Union after the anti-competitive legislation and issues they had their. But now, I am seeing reports of this in the US, maybe it is a bug, but Austin Holdsworth based in Tennessee said he sees it.

With the launch of passage ranking this past week, there has been a lot of confusion about if you can “see” these in the Google search results. The answer is no, you cannot see them in the search results as we covered last week and December 2020.

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

For the past few months or so, Google seems to have been auto populating the services section of your Google My Business listing. It is believed that Google is pulling the services based on the content of your web site.

In part one, Eli Feldblum and I spoke about the good old days. He left a company he co-founded and is now at Search Interactions he does a lot of proactive search reputation management for up and coming names and brands. Here is part two.

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 shared a number of tweets the other day with specific SEO advice around what to do when you remove or disable functionality of parts of your website or your whole website in order to encourage users to take action on an issue. So maybe you replace your home page with a message or something else, you want to avoid any SEO issues with doing that.

Google’s John Mueller said that having a shorter domain name or a shorter URL is not going to benefit you in terms of your SEO and ranking in Google Search. He said on Twitter “domain name or URL length is not a factor, adding that “shorter is not better for SEO.”

Google is expanding the scroll-to-text feature it has on featured snippets and some other search elements to the free top product listings boxes. Brodie Clark spotted this for a search on [bluetooth headphones] and I was able to replicate this.

Google announced it rolled out a Google Image Search algorithm update in November 2020 aimed at reducing duplicate images in the search results, to instead show “relevant yet visually distinct” images. Plus, Google made the alternative meanings refinement boxes more helpful with better images – the company said on Twitter.

Google’s John Mueller said Google does not have manual action penalties for building sites that are missing logos, or missing the menu links at the top or even the footers at the bottom. John said on Twitter “I’m not aware of any manual actions / penalties that we’d apply for lack of those items. Sometimes minimal, old, simplified, or even ugly pages rank well, sometimes that also changes over time.”