Google Search is testing new designs for the default favicons it shows in the search results. This is when Google is not showing the site’s favicon or the site does not have a favicon, Google will show this default favicon.

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 Analytics is not showing data from yesterday or today right now…

There are many sad stories around sites getting hit by Google algorithm updates, such as core updates and of course the September 2023 helpful content update. But Hardbacon, a financial and budgeting company, was hit hard by those Google updates, then announced the company would file for bankruptcy the day before the August 2024 core update.

Google announced that all merchants will be migrated (or as Google put it “upgrading”) from the old Google Merchant Center to Google Merchant Center Next by September (next month). We knew this was coming, we covered the upgrade emails back in July but here is the official announcement.

Google’s larger search ranking bug was fixed four days after the issue was confirmed. Google’s August core update continues to roll out, some hit by the helpful content update are seeing some surges, but Google says wait until the update is complete…

Google has greatly expanded and clarified its documentation around how Search Appearances work within the Google Search Console reports. Google wrote on X, “We improved our documentation on Search Appearances supported in Search Console.” Daniel Waisberg from Google said, “I’ve been asked about this 1000 times, hope you’re all happy now.”

Microsoft now has these refinement cards or boxes directly in the Bing Image Search results interface. In these cards, Bing will show you a refinement option for your query with example photos you might find for that refined search query.

Martin Splitt from Google said on the latest SEO office hours that having lots of nofollow or noindex tags or attributes on your site does not signal to Google that you have quality issues with your site or many low quality pages.

Google has updated the local pack, the local results box, in the Google Search results. Now when you click on the results in the local pack, the map slides to the left, behind the local pack listings. Then the detail local listing slides to the right.

There are a ton of complaints and a lot of concern around Google Analytics missing data in the normal overview report for yesterday and today. I see it also, I am seeing no data from this site and others in my GA4 reports for yesterday or today – although the real time reports work.

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. Now we are seeing some early reports of those early August core update gains are being reversed…

I am starting to see some early reports from some site owners and SEOs that the gains they may have seen early on with the Google August 2024 core update, is slowly starting to slip away or vanish as you would… Meaning, some are noticing a surge (small relative to pre-helpful content update) increases but now some are seeing that surge slide back down.