The other day I saw Paul Haahr, a Google Search engineer vet, retweet something shared by Daphne Keller, former Google Search lawyer, who shared Facebook VP’s Nick Clegg Medium piece. With me so far? Anyway, the tweet from Daphne Keller “we will reward this behavior until you adapt your business and get too good at it, and then we will punish it” caught my attention.

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

A webmaster asked on Twitter if having “a lot of bot traffic coming in” and if that bot traffic is “tagged under organic traffic, will this have an adverse any effect or does google ignore this.” The answer is no, John Mueller of Google said “That has no effect on Google Search.”

It was yet another busy month in terms of Google algorithm updates, all of which are unconfirmed. But we had six, maybe seven, unconfirmed updates in March. This is all while we wait for the next Google core update. The good news, featured snippets returned to normal levels in the Google search results.

Google announced it has begun testing FLoC, Federated Learning of Cohorts, in Chrome. Specifically the FLoC origin trial in Chrome 89 will work on websites that don’t opt out of it.

Despite all of Google’s efforts to remove and prevent vaccine misinformation, some do slip through the cracks. Here is one example that was spotted by a former Googler who is now the California Chief Technology Innovation Officer at the California Department of Technology, Rick Klau.

I met up with the Director of SEO and Marketing of AJH Co, Fay Friedman, in a nice park in New Jersey named Branch Brook Park. Fay has been doing SEO now for over 10 years for a multitude of companies but did a ton of e-commerce SEO in the first part…

If you go to Google on desktop or mobile and search for [easter] and/or [passover] you will get a special theme in the search results. This is similar to the themes Google has for the holidays when you search for [christmas], [hanukkah] or [kwanzaa].

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 answered five different SEO related questions in a video less than two minutes long. It is called the SEO Lighting Round video where he answered the following questions.

I covered this the other day but it needs to be pulled out and emphasized as its own story. Google said that pages can be included in the top stories carousel and section even if the core web vitals is not “cleared” or met.

Google’s John Mueller said when it comes to crawl budget, it is possible that Google may group your subdomains together for crawl budget purposes. John explained “our systems try to figure out which infrastructure belongs together.”

Rand Fishkin posted on Twitter several updated stats and information around his most recent zero-click search study. There are some interesting tidbits in this update but more importantly, I think if Rand can take the industry feedback and work to update the study, Google can take the industry feedback and share some of its data.

This past weekend we had yet another unconfirmed update from Google Search, this is while we wait for the core update to be released. Google has updated its FAQs document around the core web vitals and page experience update including…

I am still not over losing rel prev/rel next and Google’s John Mueller was asked about it on a video hangout from yesterday. In short, John said Google is no longer using this and no longer needs to. Google is now “able to recognize common types of pagination setups on our own,” he said.