A few days ago in the Black Hat World forums I spotted a thread that I honestly thought was trying to fool me. It showed a screenshot of the Google Search results page, that had no results found, but where Google added these animated GIF of the fishing game. I thought I was being spoofed.

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 John Mueller posted a two minute video answering four SEO related questions on the topics of blocking CSS files, how to update a sitemap, deleting RSS files and reintroducing a site into Google Search. Most are pretty basic SEO questions, I guess that is why he answered them all in about two minutes.

Today is Veterans Day in the United States and to pay respect to the day, a bunch of search engines have special logos or themes up for the day. We have a Doodle from Google, a special logo from Yahoo, Bing has their home page updated and we have a new design up for the day.

Google Ads has a policy that it can immediately and without notice, suspend your Google Ads account, if you violate the Google Webmaster Guidelines. This is not a new policy, it goes back years and years but it may surprise some folks that there is this overlap between organic and paid search.

Google has renamed Google My Business to Google Business Profile on November 4th. Starting on November 9th, I saw Google begin to swap out the Google My Business logo with the Google Business Profile Manager logo at google.com/business.

Google has a legacy Search Console feature to let you limit, or slow down, how fast Google can crawl your site under the crawl rate setting. This feature, as we know, takes a day or so to kick in, and does not speed up crawling, it only can slow crawling of your site.

Back in 2007, Google came up with a mechanism for SEOs or site owners to verify that Googlebot is who it says it is through reverse DNS checks. But now, Google has also decided to publish a list of IP addresses that Googlebot will use to crawl your site.

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. The Google November spam update seems to be significant and making an impact…

Danielle Marshak, Product Manager at Google, posted an absolutely outstanding video on how video key moments work in Google Search and how to get them working for your videos. While the details on the implementation are not new, they have been in the help documents for months, the video walkthrough is new and it is done super well.

Surprise, surprise, Google has confirmed it is testing the new IndexNow protocol that was headed by Microsoft Bing and launched a few weeks ago. I am honestly shocked and I didn’t expect Google to participate since the search company has been shy when it comes to pushing content to its index over the years.

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter this morning “you shouldn’t be creating links to your site in general.” So there you have it – do not create links to your site, he added that he recommends you check out the webmaster guidelines.

Google has said before that legal interstitials are fine and you don’t really have to worry about any penalty or ding for those types of legal banners. But John Mueller of Google said the other day that the search company actually thought of coming up with “proposal for implementing legal interstitials / banners” but decided it was not currently needed.

Google has released version 1.8 of Google Ads Editor. This version has a new overview page, support for additional ad extensions, recommendations for display modes, upgraded match type support, a new sign in process and so much more.

It was a busy morning for Google in the European region; first losing its EU antitrust case for $2.8 billion for abusing search engine dominance by promoting its own shopping service. Then the UK Supreme Court dismissing the case against Google for allegedly tracking iOS Safari users without their consent for $4 billion.