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

This week, we had some interesting tremors and ranking shifts from an unconfirmed Juneteenth Google search ranking update that really spiked a day or so ago. Google News revamped its design…

Google has made changes to a few of its Google search help documentation over the past couple of days. The documents updated include HTTP status codes, the Googlebot and job posting help documentation.

Google has added yet another business attribute for Google Business Profiles – LGBTQ+ owned businesses. This is a new label that can be added to your business in Google Maps and Google Search “making it easier for customers to find and support them,” Google said.

Back in March, Gary Illyes and friends hinted that they may try creating short form video content for the Google help documents. Well, Google’s Alan Kent produced one of the first ones on the topic of why it is important to specify image dimensions.

Microsoft Bing is once again testing security labels on the search result snippets. Here is Bing testing adding a “secure” and “HTTPS” label on some search results based on my tests in multiple browser types.

Google’s John Mueller said it is safe to ignore black hat traffic, he said it is just spam and there is no need to worry about it from an SEO perspective. He said on Twitter that black hat traffic is just spam and you should ignore it.

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…

Gary Illyes from Google reiterated that it is still best for SEO purposes to use hyphens as separators in your URLs over using underscores are separators in your URLs. Why? Gary explained “we can’t easily segment at underscore and that’s why we are recommending dashes.”

In the recent Search Off The Record podcast, Gary Illyes of Google said Google no longer assigns less importance to content or items that are not visible on the page. It just needs to be in the HTML or “immediate JavaScript” and it matters to Google.

Google is testing a rounded corner design for the favicons displayed in the mobile search results on snippets. Brodie Clark shared some examples on Twitter saying “On the back of recent testing of favicon sizing on mobile, a rounded version with a grey background has appeared. Similar to previous tests, the brand name/domain is also repeated at the top.”

I am not even sure what to call this, maybe a brand story snippet, maybe story boxes, I am just not sure. But Google seems to be testing showing two rows of article boxes with images (even including social media sites) about a brand below the brand’s search result snippet.

We have been watching what I named the Google Juneteenth Search Ranking Algorithm tremors since the weekend and it is now spiking even more this morning. Seems like some sites hit by the May 2022 core update are seeing some big recoveries, many are not, and sites in general are reporting on big swings in the Google 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 is rolling out the new Google News design with more features, plus after 8 years…