Google added sustainability and eco certifications to the top of the hotel listing attributes options. Nevena Ivanova spotted this and shared the screenshot below on Twitter. Nevena wrote “Sustainability and Eco certifications were added to the top of the list. Not seeing them published on the live pages yet.”

Both Alphabet, Google’s parent company and Microsoft, Bing’s parent company, released earnings last night. Both companies reported significant increases in ad revenue from search and other areas from last year to this year.

Google Ads emailed a bunch of advertisers yesterday morning about new surcharges to be added to your Google Ads bills for ads served in certain countries. Google has been doing this for some time but Google added a slew of new countries to the list that it will start taking on 2% to 5% in surcharges as of October 2, 2021.

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 launched a new link spam algorithm update, reminded us about the nofollow attributes and warned us to use them…

Gary Illyes from Google said on Twitter “I don’t know who needs to hear this but putting work in core web vitals doesn’t mean that the site can’t lose rankings over time.” He then added “I also washed my car hundreds of times and it still left me standing on the highway.”

Google has launched numerous search algorithms around speed in the past. The question some folks have is does Google still use those old ones or does the new Page Experience Update replace those. John Mueller of Google said he would assume the Page Experience Update replaced the old ones.

Google is testing indenting search results snippets from within the same domain name. So if Google shows two results from domain.com, it will show the first one and then under it, indent it a little under the one above it.

As Google told us in April, in the next couple of weeks, the the old Target CPA or Target ROAS bid strategies for standard campaigns are going away. Google said instead you can use the updated bid strategies by setting optional targets.

On Friday, Google published a detailed timeline for the rollout of its Privacy Sandbox. Google said this “timeline reflects when we expect new technologies will be ready to support key use cases, so that Chrome can responsibly phase out third-party cookies.”

Google now has some of the more well known Olympic athletes in 3D and AR (augmented reality) in Google Search. You can easily access it by going to Google.com on mobile or in the Google App and scrolling down until you find the “athletes in 3d” section.

Bing has a search feature that lets searchers see relevant images from a search result for a specific query. There is an “images” button next to the search result snippet, that when you click on it, it pops up a carousel of relevant images from that site.

Google said it began rolling out a new algorithm update for Google Search named the link spam update. This update “is even more effective at identifying and nullifying link spam more broadly, across multiple languages,” Google wrote. It will roll out from yesterday, July 26th, over a two week period or so.

On Friday, Google updated its FAQ structured data guidelines to provide examples around the guideline that reads “all FAQ content must be visible to the user on the source page.” The examples explain that it is okay to have the content in expandable sections.

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

We may have had one of those smaller unconfirmed Google Search algorithm and ranking updates over the weekend. It may have started on Friday, July 23rd and spiked more on Saturday July 24th. I am also wondering if the fluctuations may be related to the soft 404 bug fix, but I do not know.