If you go to Microsoft Bing and conduct a search that triggers a video preview box to show up, there may be a little holiday easter egg for you. A Santa hat on the play button of the video that wiggles when you hover your mouse cursor over the video.

Google’s April 2021 and December 2021 product reviews update only targeted English language content. But John Mueller of Google said he suspects it will roll out to other languages in the future. He actually thought it did already but no, it did not.

Google Business Profiles (formerly Google My Business) seems to have added or is testing adding a new check box for products. There is an option named “mark as special” that will show that product at the top of the page in Google Search.

Shaun Elley posted a screenshot of one of his ads in Google Ads showing a status of “eligible (limited) policy (past violation).” This seems to mean that an ad you once had was disapproved because of a past violation but now that ad is not longer disapproved because Google later decided to no longer disapprove such types of ads.

Alan Bleiweiss, a smart and fun SEO, asked John Mueller of Google if Google has a “Google Book of Secrets” where it stores all the algorithmic changes it makes in a single location. The short answer is, yes, Google does store all the changes it makes but the long answer from John is that it isn’t always useful.

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

Did you know that most of the search algorithms Google launches work across all languages? There are exceptions, like when Panda first launched and the product reviews update and some others. Some launch first in some languages, like the English language, and some launch globally in all languages – like Penguin.

In part one, we spoke about how Colt Sliva became an SEO engineer and some topics around visualizing search graphs. In part two we spoke more about entities, python for SEO and winning over developers…

Google’s John Mueller was asked on Twitter why the pipeline to get data into the link report within Google Search Console seems slower than most the other reports. In short, John said that links is not an area they think SEOs should focus too much on and thus the report is not an area where Google thinks there is “any need to spend lots of resources” on.

Google’s John Mueller again, actually since 2007, year-after-year, has jumped into the Google support forums and on social media to answer webmaster questions on Google Search. It is a tradition for him…

If you do a search in Google or Bing for [adam and eve] or [jack and jill], both very G rated phrases that also have very X rated companies behind it, you will get mixed results. On the Google Search organic results, by default, the sex toy companies websites are filtered out by SafeSearch. But the Google Ads, by default, show ads to those sex toy company brands.

Google Image search on mobile has these labels for sections of the images it sometimes shows in the search results. A new label I have not seen before is showing “top categorized results.” I have no clue what that means – do you?

Google has a new serving issue with Google Ads that is impacting ad serving on the desktop version of Gmail. So if you are serving Google Ads on Gmail, your ads may not show to a “significant subset of users,” according to Google.

There is a Reddit thread I found via John Mueller that claims a site owner woke up to an additional $80,000 in monthly traffic. The person said that over the past several days his traffic skyrocketed 6,000 percent because his rankings for a very competitive term reached the fifth position in Google Search.

Like last year, Google’s John Mueller put together a year end meme report of SEO for 2021. John said on Twitter “It’s time for the dreaded end-of-year reports. Here’s a compilation from the monthly internal reports that I put together. There’s more to them, but this is the fun part. The memes of 2021 SEO.”