Microsoft Advertising this week announced in its August roundup it launched Target impression share bidding, Integral Ad Science (IAS) protection, new automated extensions, labels for account organization and changes to unified accounts.

Danny Sullivan of Google confirmed on Twitter that core updates can sometimes impact both image search and local search results. This comes after Danny said that local updates don’t impact local results. But now he is saying “it depends” and can impact all content types across search.

Microsoft Bing seems to be testing a new chat feature in its search results. Sunny Ujjawal posted a screen shot of this on Twitter, that I cannot replicate. Bing pops open a chat box on the right side of the search results that says “Hello! What would you like to talk about today?”

Here is one of those classic John Mueller responses, where the Googler said “So, asked differently, if you remove a part of your website, will that website rank differently? Yes, of course it will. It’s a different website afterwards.” Classic.

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

Gary Illyes of Google was asked if someone steals your original image, makes no changes to it, and they embed it on their own site, can the original image holder benefit from that. Gary’s short answer was no, but he said it is possible you do get some benefit he said.

Google has added technical, content, and quality guidelines to the Math solver guidelines help documentation. The company also removed solution page markup instructions.

Microsoft Bing has a box and section in its search results named “did you know.” It seems Bing shows more study help sections in this box. Frank Sandtmann, a German based SEO, sent this to me but I can replicate it myself.

John Mueller of Google said on Reddit the other day that generally speaking he has seen that it is faster for sites to return to the Google search results after experiencing site downtime than it takes for the pages to drop out of the Google search results.

Aleyda Solis posted a Twitter poll last week after Google published its suggestions around the link spam update and nofollow vs rel sponsored attributes. The poll showed that SEOs are very split around how they will or will not handle sponsored links.

The Google Search Console Performance report API does not include Google Discover data. We’ve known that for a while. But the question is why? John Mueller of Google said the reason is “partially because there’s no notion of “query”.”

Google has removed the generic rich result type from the Google Search Console performance reports and API. Google told us this was going away back in May and today it is now officially gone.

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

Google announced that it will begin enforcing that Google Merchant Center merchants use Manufacturer Part Number (MPN) and accurate ones. Google said starting in August of 2021, item-level warnings for “Incorrect product identifier [mpn]” will be issued on the Diagnostics page of your Merchant Center account. Then in September of 2021 Google will disapprove merchants with these issues.

Another super interesting and totally geeky aspect to the latest Search Off The Record podcast was Martin Splitt of Google giving a master class on Web Workers and WebAssembly. Specifically how they work and how Google Search thinks about them.