Google has confirmed it is officially testing placing emojis in some search ads. Darcy Burk spotted a pizza emoji on a search ad for Uber Eats and posted the screenshot on Twitter. Ginny Marvin of Google on the Ads Liaison Twitter account confirmed Google is testing placing emojis in some search ads.

Chris Tweten posted a photo the other day on Twitter of a dental office sign with its company name – the company name is named “Dentist Near Me.” Of course, the SEOs in all of you are thinking, oh, this dental practice wants to rank for all [near me] related dental queries.

Google generally likes you to stick with one language per page, that isn’t to say you cannot use different pages throughout your site with different languages. But if you do not listen and you put multiple languages on a page, Google can assign multiple languages to that page, said John Mueller of Google.

Brodie Clark posted a Twitter poll asking “is optimizing a website for search term variations that include “near me” good practice for SEO?” The results were pretty almost evenly split amongst “yes” and “no”, with more people leaning to “it depends.”

Last week we broke the news that Google does some form of deduplication of the top stories and web results in some situations. John Shehata released some data from his Newzdash product showing that 67% of all Google searches have duplicate top stories to web result URLs and about 12% of top stories URLs get duplicated in the web search results.

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 has announced a brand new robots tag it will obey going forward, it is named indexifembedded. It lets you control if you want Google to index a page with embedded content.

I am not going to get into the 301 vs 302 redirect debate, covered that countless times here. But I found an interesting conversation on Twitter about the differences between 301 and 302 redirects and how they consolidate signals forward or back, also known as pull backs.

Google on Friday sent out emails to those who have recorded videos for Cameos on Google that they are discontinuing the service. “Beginning February 17, 2022, you will no longer be able to record videos through Cameos on Google and any existing videos posted to Google Search and Discover won’t be shown,” Google wrote.

Google sent emails to YouTube publishers that their YouTube AdSense payments will be separated from their other AdSense payments. So if you get paid through Google AdSense for AdSense ads on your sites and also in YouTube, you will now get payments individually for each. The issue is, that means each has to hit the $100 payment threshold individually and you might get paid out slower.

Google’s John Mueller was asked if there is a way to better control the images that Google shows in the web search results for product results. The answer is not really, there is no schema or structured data that helps you control or define these for Google, John said. He said Google just decides on its own if it wants to show them for snippets or not.

In part one Riley Hope and I spoke about her SEO career, how she did her thesis on ethics in SEO and we spoke about the automotive SEO space. In part two we talk about women in SEO and more on the automotive space and search results…

Why making acceptable cover art is so important. In the streaming era, you need cover art for every single and album you release. Not only should that artwork LOOK good; it also has to meet the visual guidelines of the big streaming platforms if you want your music to stay available online. Does cover art still matter in a streaming world? Back before streaming and even downloads, when record stores ruled the music world, an album cover was often all a shopper had to go on when they were browsing the shelves. How many unsuspecting teens in the ‘80s stumbled […]

Again I am seeing signals, both a lot of chatter from the SEO community and tools lighting up around a possible but yet unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update. Yes, there has been a ton of unconfirmed updates in the past couple of weeks and let’s add this one to the list.

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