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 published its annual webspam report and it is just more of the same. In short, there is more spam, Google is getting better at detecting and thus blocking that spam and of course a bit on the COVID stuff. Here are some bulleted highlights from this webspam report.

This past weekend, maybe around the 23rd of April, we saw another Google ranking update and also there has been a lot of local fluctuations as well. Google released a new tool to report indexing issues to the company…

Back in February 2020, Google due to EU pressure began showing a new carousel box in the EU based search results to show search results from other search providers. The box is named “find results on” and can link you to Yelp, Groupon, Craigslist, and many other search providers. John Mueller of Google said this is algorithmic and not hand curated, as far as he knows.

Dan Brickley, a developer advocate at Google who managed Schema.org, had a really great line that I wanted to amplify here. He was asked by a seasoned SEO about which schema one should use in a specific case. In which Dan Brickley replied “that question is a bit like asking a dictionary maintainer what to say.”

Google’s John Mueller said that if you are seeing “seeing a drop in valid, and not a rise in invalid, that’s possibly just a matter of the sample used for testing becoming smaller for that site.” This is specific to the Search Console structured data enhancement report sections.

Google is giving us about a year to switch over from the old Google AdWords API to the newer Google Ads API. The Google Ads API replaced the AdWords API when Google released it as a beta I believe in 2019.

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

Google has a new method to debug and ultimately report indexing issues with Google Search. Google opened up a new form where currently US based site owners can report issues directly to Google around Google Search indexing. This is how it works.

There was an interesting thread on Twitter about DA, Moz’s domain authority metrics. In short, a blogger named ChloÃ

Google’s Paul Bakaus, he is very involved in web stories these days, said on Twitter that at Google “we don’t generally ‘suspend’ sites, and when you fix issues, you are always eligible to reappear.” Truth is, and I posted this reminder before, Google Discover is impacted by core updates and requires a higher level of all those good E-A-Ts we talk about.

Google announced a few new features in Google Search around travel features specifically as “many people are eager to start planning vacations again,” Google said. Google is getting ready for a post pandemic world with these updates that include new travel COVID advisories, new ways to explore destinations and a road trip planner.

Google has released version 7.0 of the Google Ads API. This is a jump from version 6.1.0 which was released on April 10, 2021. To use the v7 features, you will need to upgrade your client libraries and client code, Google said.

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