Do you want to use the same design theme on multiple websites? Well, Google’s John Mueller said it is fine to do that, in fact, he said many sites do share a similar or the same theme.

Google has updated the Google Business Profiles Get Reviews help document to explicitly say that having a mix of positive and negative reviews are more trustworthy, than I guess just all positive reviews. Joy Hawkins spotted this and posted on Twitter saying “I know countless studies have shown this but it’s nice to see Google acknowledge it too.”

So now that we know that bolding works for SEO and rankings in 2021, we need to start bolding everything. Or maybe we need to be more random about our bolding efforts. Or maybe we need to really think about what we bold. In all seriousness, it is kind of funny how much we are talking about bolding things.

A couple of months ago, Google upset the automotive industry by adding more data sets to its search results for automobiles. As a reminder, Google said it licensed that data. Google is seems to be expanding those search features with new sliders.

Google’s John Mueller said that semantic HTML is not a quality signal used in Google Search for ranking purposes. An SEO said “Proper HTML semantics and tag hierarchy must be a quality signal.” John Mueller responded saying “I don’t see it as a quality signal.”

I am sure you’ve all seen websites that have a section on their website for “As Featured On” or something like that, then a carousel or listing of logos from those brands. Well, those links should not be feared, John Mueller from Google said putting those links on your site “sounds like a normal link.”

Happy Thanksgiving – we had a surprise from Google again, where the second wave of the Google November 2021 core update happened on Wednesday and Thursday – yes, the busiest time for online shopping. Prior…

Google has another bug, this time with Google Search Console’s crawl stats report. The report has a gap in the data, missing data on November 19th and November 20th. Google’s John Mueller confirmed the issue and said on Twitter the team is working on a fix.

Remember the Google Ads bug where CPC, cost per click, prices soared out of control on a Friday night? Well, about two weeks later, Google started to issue credits to those accounts that were impacted by the bug.

We are seeing big volatility again in the Google Search results as of yesterday and today, which might be the tail-end of the November 2021 Google core update. Yep, talk about timing – the Black Friday shopping is in high gear today and tomorrow.

I’ve been checking for the past week, multiple times per day, and just now, Google has launched the Chanukah/Hanukkah decorations for the 2021 season. Chanukah starts this Sunday night, so I was expecting it to come soon and it is here.

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 announced that it is shutting down the AdSense Matched content ad unit types beginning on March 1, 2022. This is due to “decreasing usage of the content promotion service” and “positive customer feedback and performance results from the ads-only Matched content ad format.”

After several months of testing variations of what Microsoft Bing is calling “Page insights” – it is finally live. The lightbulb and page explorer snippet tool is now live for all to play with.