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

Earlier this month we reported that Google said there is a backlog with the manual actions in the queue, some as far back as over several months ago. Well, I am seeing some reports from SEOs that some of those manual actions are now being processed.

As a reminder, Google Ads will be removing some query data from your search terms report on February 1, 2022. Google warned us of this change in September 2021 and tomorrow is the day where historical query data that was collected prior to September 1, 2020 and does not meet the current thresholds for the search terms report will be removed on February 1, 2022.

Google this morning launched a new API for Search Console – the URL Inspection API. This API lets you programmatically interact with the URL Inspection Tool that you would manually interact with within Google Search Console, but with code. SEOs and developers are super excited about this new API – as you’d imagine.

Google has said it changed the error and issues reporting in Google Search Console for Breadcrumbs and HowTo structured data. This may result in new errors, warnings and issues or changes to the severity of the issues already reported by Google in Search Console’s enhancement reports.

About a year ago, Google first introduced guidelines around manual actions for Google Discover and Google News. In the past week, I have seen numerous news publishers, both large and small, receive such manual actions.

Google’s John Mueller said the location of internal links, links you place on your website to other parts of that same web site, does not necessarily matter if they are in the body content, footer, header or other sections on the page. The content, the anchor text, of those links helps Google understand what the page is about but the links aren’t really used more than just for crawling your site.

Danny Sullivan of Google said that no one was infected by the search spam issue around untitled documents. He said this is a spam issue, not a malware issue and “no one is infected with anything.” Sullivan added that the spam team is already on the issue and things are already improving.

Brian Wallace is the Founder and President of NowSourcing, an industry leading infographic design agency and he was in my neighborhood, which is actually his old neighborhood and stop by to talk shop. He now kind of jumps between Louisville, Kentucky and Cincinnati…

Google has confirmed it has been testing Google Search result listings without any descriptions, again. Google first tested this in 2015 and is now testing it again for the past couple of weeks. Aishwarya Tapadar from Google confirmed this in a Google Web Search Help thread saying “this is a small experiment that will be ending in the next day or so.”

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

Google has released a set of new tools and features to help advertisers when Google existing and future Smart Shopping campaigns and Local Campaigns get replaced by Performance Max campaigns. This includes a new migration tool and API migrations.

This week, we had another unconfirmed Google search ranking update on January 22nd. Google has admitted defeat with its FLoC cookieless proposal and is now going with Topics API. Google launched a new robots tag named…

Google has confirmed an issue with the Google Search Console Performance reports specific to image search. The issue is a logging issue that may result in your clicks and impressions data in those reports being lower than normal. Google said the issue began on Monday, January 24, 2022 and is still ongoing.

Google will be deprecating the Google My Business API on April 30, 2022 and replacing it with new APIs in the Google federated model. So you will have to update any of the old APIs you may be using with the new ones within the next few months.