Google announced last week that while other companies are planning to replace third-party cookies with alternative user-level identifiers, Google will not. Google said “we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products.”

Microsoft Bing announced a slew of “visually immersive” upgrades to the search results interface. This includes updates to how it shows recipe results, image search similar looking items, expandable search result carousels, infographic knowledge panels and the local answers details.

Google’s John Mueller was asked about an error with Sitemaps files. The question was around Google not being able to fetch and read two of the few XML Sitemap files but those files are perfectly valid. John said it can be a lot of issues but there is a trick you can try.

Over the weekend there are a nice amount of chatter from the SEO community around the Google search results rankings being all over the place. The chatter was unusually high for the weekend and some of the tools have also picked up on the fluctuations in the search results.

Alex Genadinik is in the business of helping businesses and individuals learn about SEO and digital marketing. He owns a company named Problemio and is a top 1% instructor at Udemy and has authored numerous bestselling books on Amazon…

Google just posted a short four-minute video on how Google has changed since it first launched in 1998. In short, it is about going from ten-blue links to a giving you a much richer search experience with answers.

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…

CD Baby paid musicians more than $126,000,000 in 2020. Artists and labels using CD Baby for worldwide music distribution, monetization, and promotion were collectively paid $126,782,389 in 2020, a 26% increase over 2019’s payout of $100,953,195. That’s an encouraging indicator of the health of the independent music sector, especially given that this growth occurred during a year defined by a global pandemic. If you’re an artist, it’s also a good reminder to professionalize all your music rights and fully monetize your music. This includes publishing administration, YouTube Content ID, sync licensing, and more. CD Baby offers all those services, we […]

Google is starting a new Google Ads content policy called “Evasive Ad Content.” Evasive Ad Content will extend the prohibited manipulations of trademark terms in ad text to domains, subdomains, and logos; prohibit usage of invisible UNICODE characters in ads that add no value to the ad content for users; and disallow manipulations of images or videos to hide policy violating content.

Google seems to be rolling out a new interface for key moments videos they have been testing for maybe a year now? The results show the location of the key moment but also add the text from the video of what that section is about. It use to show video clips or thumbnails from that section of the video but now it shows text.

When Google first launched “short videos” in Google Search it seemed to just show videos from YouTube. Shortly after we spotted both TikTok and Instagram videos in this short video carousel. Now we are notified Google can also show videos from Facebook.

Despite all the new messaging that the Google Page Experience update won’t result in massive changes and the impact won’t be huge after it rolls out, many SEOs will still prioritize their Core Web Vitals / Google Page Experience optimization efforts.

Google has added to the Google Ads mobile app custom notifications and review performance insights notifications. Google says this will “help you monitor and improve performance in real time.”

It was a busy week in our search industry on so many levels but I kick off this recap with the monthly Google webmaster report. Then I go into not just one but two different unconfirmed Google algorithm updates that were spotted this week…

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