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

If you do a search on Google for [ever given] or [suez canal], you will see a new Google easter egg. You will see boats floating along under the search bar. Yes, this was an easter egg Google made to celebrate when the Ever Given was freed from being stuck and blocking the Suez Canal.

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that Google “generally recommends not keeping open redirects.” An open redirect is when a parameter values (the portion of URL after “?”) in an HTTP GET request allow for information that will redirect a user to a new website without any validation of the target of redirect.

In December 2020, Google posted a Core Web Vitals & Page Experience FAQs. Well, Google has just updated those FAQs to add a lot more detail. The most important thing that I wanted to pull out are these line “out systems will continue to prioritize pages with the best information overall, even if some aspects of page experience are subpar. A good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content.”

Google has updated its help documents to explain that now it has limited which video providers can show up with the key moments interface in Google Search. It is available for all YouTube videos based on just adding a video description and now a “small set” of video providers at this time.

Joy Hawkins is saying she is noticing evidence that Google is testing, testing heavily, showing a two-pack instead of a three-pack. I personally cannot replicate this and I only rarely ever see two results in the local pack (for extremely remote queries), but she is saying Google is testing showing two instead of three results in the local pack more often.

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

Back in December 2019 or so, Google stopped the requirement for news publishers to manually submit their news site to be included in Google News. Instead, Google said it will automatically through its algorithms figure out what sites to include in Google News. The problem is, this new process is a complete failure for new publishers.

In October 2019, Fabrice Canel of Microsoft told us about a new content submission API to not feed just URLs to Bing but to feed the content on those URLs to Bing as well. Well, more details about this API are coming next month said Fabrice Canel.

Often when it comes to getting a better score in some of the core web vital metrics it is about making your images faster to load. One SEO asked if they can downsize the images in a very heavy way where the image would become blurry in order to improve the score. John Mueller of Google said “that sounds like a bad idea.”

Martin Splitt from Google confirmed that Google Search does not measure title tags by the number of pixels. He said “that was a joke” when it was mentioned in the live version of the Search Off The Record podcast.

Google announced this morning new features to improve Google Maps, including improved curbside pickup and delivery options. Plus, the company announced improvements to indoor live view navigation, air quality data and driving directions that are eco-friendly. But let’s focus on the curbside and delivery features here.

Before going offline for this long three-day holiday, I saw rumblings of a possible Google update about to rollout. I was a bit nervous it was a core update but Google did not confirm any update and now that I am back online, the chatter, although elevated, is not at core update levels.

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