As I mentioned yesterday in my story on the slow rollout for the Google link spam update – there seems to be a Google update going on. It started – maybe Tuesday but spiked in a big way on Wednesday, August 18th. It is not clear if this is related to that link spam update or something else.

A couple of days ago, we broke the news, that many are noticing a change where Google is using the header tag over the title tag more often these days for the Google search result snippet link. Some are suggesting that this change (which is not that huge right now) is related to passaging indexing – it is not.

I can sometimes be naive when it comes to some differences between the USA and the rest of the world. One example is spelling curbside and kerbside. Honestly, I think spelling it kerbside is way cooler and so does other countries like Australia.

If you’re a musician that creates a lot of video content, you now have another creative way to promote your music on YouTube: YouTube Shorts. Over the past few years, the rapid growth of TikTok and Instagram Reels has proven short-form video to be a powerful format for independent creators looking to build and entertain their following. And now YouTube is getting in on the action with their short vertical video feature, aptly called YouTube Shorts. What are YouTube Shorts? Shorts is YouTube’s short-form, vertical video format. As a YouTube user, of course, you can WATCH Shorts. But more to […]

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 top stories carousel is not loading all the images for those articles. It seems like a bug is causing some of the images to not show up as of early this morning.

Google’s John Mueller once again confirmed that Google will continue to retry old, redirected URLs for years and years even if the redirect remains in place for a long time. John said on Twitter “I suspect we’ll keep retrying these for years, on and off.”

Google seems to be testing a new way of showing reviews in the local listing for some businesses. Brandon Schmidt spotted Google showing not just the number of reviews with the review summary in stars, but where Google labels if the reviews are “from the web” or from “independent sites.”

Lily Ray shared an interesting chart from Ahrefs, the SEO toolset, showing how for a single keyword phrase, there were multiple intents from searchers spike over a different time period. In which, John Mueller of Google responded that it makes sense to create content that covers “both possible intents.”

Google is now placing a label (I think it is new) named “paid for by” on some political ads. This label lets searchers click on it to learn more who is sponsoring the ad and even lets you dive into more details on the advertiser and their spend.

Google announced on July 26, 2021, three-weeks and two days ago, that it started to roll the link spam update and that update would take about two-weeks to roll out. Well, like I said, it is three-weeks and two days and it is still not done rolling out.

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…

I am seeing numerous complaints this morning that Google is showing header tags, H1s and H2s, instead of the meta title tags, for its search result snippets. I am seeing some public complaints on Twitter, but also in some of the private forums and emails.

Google announced that all signed-in Google Search Console users who go to the English help form can now submit indexing bug notifications to Google. This ran as a pilot to a limited number of users back in April but is now open to a lot more Search Console users.

Google has added a 3D and AR based periodic table to the search results. If you search for [periodic table] and look at the right side rail, you will see a way to “explore” the periodic table. Clicking that takes you into the experience.