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 initially launched the “women-led” label in the local search results in 2018 with a women icon. Google seems to be testing replacing that icon with a purple heart. Saad AK and Colan Nielsen spotted this change and posted screen shots of it on Twitter.

Martin Splitt from Google explained the concept of centerpiece annotation, a term used in Google to define the primary content of a page or site. Martin said they are able to understand that a page’s primary topic is on A and the rest of the content on that page might not be the primary. So Google will weigh the content differently based on that, Martin said.

Microsoft Bing and Yandex announced a new initiative named IndexNow that lets site owners ping IndexNow’s protocol to achieve instant indexing with the participating search engines. The participating search engines right now are only Bing and Yandex; Google is not a part of it, nor are other search engines as of yet.

Can you imagine Google offering a monthly fee for using Google Search? Can you even imagine an option to remove the search ads in exchange for a monthly fee? I cannot and I’d be shocked if Google would ever launch a subscription model for Google Search without ads.

Frederic Dubut, the PM Lead for the Microsoft Bing Core Ranking team, has announced that after 13 years with Microsoft and over 8 years with the Bing team, he is leaving the company. He said “earlier this month, I closed the chapter on 13+ years at Microsoft.”

Previously Google My Business had labeled the business attributes for women owned businesses as “women-led” and veteran owned businesses and “veteran-led.” Google now put them all in sync by labeling them as as “owned.” So now we have them as Black-owned, Latino-owned, veteran-owned and women-owned.

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

Abel Capella used CD Baby’s Release Plan Generator map a strategy for his single “Só Vem.” This is his story. While Capella is an experienced indie musician, he was still a newcomer in the world of digital distribution. He decided to jump in headfirst with CD Baby. The digital music environment is constantly changing, and there’s certainly a learning curve entering the world of digital distribution from a strictly physical approach. But let’s be clear: the success of any plan depends mostly on the quality, the concept and the identity of your music. It requires you to educate yourself and […]

Miriam Schwab is the co-founder and CEO of Strattic, a static hosting and publishing platform for WordPress. I’ve known Miriam for many many years, maybe as far back as 2004 or 2005…

Over the weekend a webmaster asked John Mueller of Google for assistance around why Google was not indexing his site. John looked at it quickly and noticed the site had AI driven content and then responded that Google shouldn’t be spending time on testing sites when there are other sites that need the assistance first.

Google has updated its review snippet structured data guidelines to say the author name of the reviewer must be less than a 100 characters. If it is longer than 100 characters your page won’t be eligible for an author-based review snippet, Google said.

Google has posted a new policy in the merchant center help area that is “prohibiting offers that make claims that are demonstrably false and could significantly undermine participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process.”

Some SEOs are now seeing the Things To Consider, Refine This Search and Broaden This Search features live in the Google search results. I do not see them yet but they were announced at the Search On event a few weeks ago and they should be going live soon according to that announcement.

I lead with I am sorry for yet reporting on another Google search ranking algorithm update – another unconfirmed one. But like I said on Friday, there seemed to be one ticking up and it seems Google did have some fluctuations from October 15th through today and the chatter in the SEO community supports it this time.