Google is having a hard time holding on to its data in Google Search Console. Google posted yet another data logging issue on its site, this time it impacted the performance reports for all – Google Search, Google Discover, and Google News. This happened between February 1st through February 3rd.

There is a new SEO myth floating around that says CTAs, call to action buttons, placed above the fold is bad for Google search ranking and SEO. That is simply not true and John Mueller of Google said so on Reddit saying “Google search doesn’t say anything about CTA buttons.”

Google Ads is testing a new feature for the global site tag that can be configured to automatically collect user data. Dario Zannoni spotted this and wrote on Twitter “Global Site Tag can now automatically collect the information that the user submits on the website (like email and telephone).”

Microsoft Bing, in this crazy car market, has expanded its search features to help you buy a car. Bing also lets you filter the results in numerous ways and a lot of this is powered off of the MSN Autos Marketplace.

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 confirmed some sort of issue with crawling Shopify websites…

Google’s John Mueller said it only makes sense to update the date on a piece of content or article when you either “write something new or significantly change something existing.” He said this on Twitter and it goes along with previous advice John has given before.

Starting in mid-December, Google seemed to start showing more product rich results in the search results for many snippets even if those pages did not have product structured data on them. Brodie Clark first posted about it on January 12th (which we covered in our newsletter the day after) and Lily Ray and her co-worker, and so does Glenn Gabe posted screenshots of Google Search Console’s performance report showing the uptick in mid-December.

Over the past couple of days, some of the Google search algorithm tracking tools were reporting large swings in volatility in the search results – thus signaling a possible Google search update. But the chatter amongst the SEO industry during that time has been super quiet, showing no signs of an update.

In part one we spoke about how Brian Wallace of NowSourcing got into infographics, how it is not just about links but much more and some cool scores he had with them. In part two…

Last week, we saw reports that some Shopify sites were showing massive declines in crawling activity from Google’s Googlebot. John Mueller of Google responded this morning that this was “temporary drop in how we calculate how much we can crawl” adding these sites are in a “good state” and there is nothing to worry about.

Yesterday, Brian Freiesleben and Khushal Bherwani both noticed a new design for some of the knowledge and local panels on the mobile search results. Google is showing a more sleek black bar for some of these panels. I personally can replicate it and noticed the links within the black bar do not work.

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

Aleyda Solis did a Twitter poll thread, multiple polls in a Twitter thread, around the Google page experience update. In short, the poll shows that page experience related metrics, such as core web vitals, is more important to their SEO recommendations despite most saying they saw no impact at all from implementing improvements there.

Google is testing, at least I can’t replicate it right now, enhanced buying guides in the search results. Basically this “buying guide” in Google Search lets you really drill into the options around what products you can buy based on your query.