John Mueller from Google in the latest SEO office hours said that Google, Googlebot, does not generally try variations of URLs to see if they work. So if you have a URL like domain.com/pagegoeshere1/, Google won’t try domain.com/pagegoeshere2/ to just try it out of curiosity.

Google has updated the first paragraph of its Organization structured data search developer documentation. Google said the update is to clarify “that some properties can influence which logo is shown, while others are used behind the scenes.”

Google is now testing a new user experience for maps in the Google Search local panel section. Normally when you click on the map in the local knowledge panel, you are taken into Google Maps. Now, Google is testing expanding the maps while you stay on the Google Search results page.

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 overhauled its video SEO documentation to vastly clarify the video indexing criteria and technical requirements. Plus, Google added a new watch page section to the document and expanded the examples in the document.

This Google August 2024 core update has been shaking things up since it began to rollout. We saw some early signs of some sites hit by the September 2023 helpful content see some signs of life. Then some saw reversals of sorts, but maybe that was the search ranking bug that got fixed a few days later. Here are some charts a week or so after the August core update was released.

Google has updated its title links search developer documentation to add that Google Search may use your og:title meta tag title for your title link in the Google Search results. The OG title is normally used by social sharing sites for the title of your posts, but Google may also use it for the title of your search result snippets in Google.

Google is a bit delayed with its appeal process for Google Business Profiles. Appeals are now taking seven days or longer, some are saying about 15 days, which is much longer than normal.

A negative SEO question came up in the last Google SEO office hours on the topic of sending “bad actor” fake traffic to a site, to make the destination site look more questionable in Google’s eyes. Martin Splitt from Google said that sending such traffic to a site would not negatively impact the destination site.