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

Last week, a reader here asked if I would poll the audience to see how the last Google search algorithm update impacted them, the Google August 2024 core update. So, I am asking you to take the poll below or on X to see how SEOs, in general, were impacted by this core update.

Tons of Google Ads advertisers are noticing a new button available in the Google Ads advertiser interface named “internal tools.” There is a lock icon for the internal tools button and when you click on it, it has the headline “audience builder.”

Google Ads announced a number of updates yesterday, across new reporting, shopping tools and more ad features, including, of course, AI ad features. “To help retailers maximize success and stay nimble in this year’s shorter holiday shopping season, today at our annual Think Retail event we shared some new updates to Google tools,” Google wrote.

Google’s Looker Studio has lost access to the Google Ads Auction Insights fields as of August 24, 2024 for new data sources. Then after September 23, 2024 it will no longer be available for existing data sources.

Google has posted a notice that the old customer reviews links in Local Service Ads will expire and the Google Business profile link will be what you should use going forward. The notice is in the reviews section within Local Service Ads.

In the past couple of days, Google has issued many manual actions around Google Discover policy violations. Just to be clear, you may have seen your Google Discover traffic drop with the August core update, and this policy violation notice would be unrelated to that. Google issued manual actions manually (but in batches) and Google never sends notices like this for algorthmic updates.

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. Amazon Web Services blocked Googlebot from my images…

Back in mid-June, I noticed that Google was not showing many of my images in Google Search and Discover and also some readers were pointing it out to me. So I used the handy Google Search Console URL Inspection tool to find out those S3 URLs I was using to host my images were blocking Googlebot from crawling.

For many sites that have customer or client portals, including SaaS companies, the login page is the primary destination for a lot of searchers. It will help your customers bypass your homepage and go right to the login area. The question asked of Google is how do you ensure that login page shows up as a Sitelink in your Google Search results snippet.