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 released the much anticipated August 2024 core update…

You may have heard, the Federal Trade Commission announced that they have officially banned fake reviews and AI-generated fake reviews. But will this actually end up doing anything?

Google’s Gary Illyes clarified on the Search Off The Record podcast that Google technically does not follow links. Instead, Google will extract the links, collect them in a database, and then check them later. Of course, most of you know this already and it doesn’t really matter much for SEO to know the difference but hey.

Google announced a number of new features across its AI Overviews, including the new links test we saw going live. Google also is adding new Search Labs features and is expanding AI Overviews to more countries.

The time has finally arrived; the day you all have been waiting for is here – the Google August 2024 core update started rolling out on Thursday at 11 am ET. Yea, you all saw it coming, Google told us it was near and now it has finally landed. It will take about a month to fully roll out and “useful” small and independent publishers will see their rankings improve with this one – at least that is what Google implied.

It finally happened: Google released the August 2024 core update; this one should reward small and independent publishers more, should it? Google had another search ranking bug, today, this was a big one. There has been tremendous Google ranking volatility this week, maybe the core update, but…

Google is highlighting review content within its search results snippets for some queries that ask for reviews. At least, Google is testing this – since I cannot replicate it.

This morning at 1:48 am ET, Google confirmed a Google Search ranking bug impacting a large number of the Google Search results. Google wrote, “There’s an ongoing issue with ranking in Google Search that’s affecting a large number of search results. We’ve identified the root cause and this issue is unrelated to the ongoing core update rollout.”

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

Google is testing showing AI Overviews for users not signed in to their Google account. Some users are seeing AI Overviews for searches when using Chrome in Incognito mode (i.e. private mode, not signed in).

Google is still at it, maybe it is angry again about the possibility of it being broken up by the DOJ after being ruled a monopoly. But in all seriousness, the search ranking volatility is super heating, almost combusting. The chatter is still super heated and many of the tools are showing extreme volatility.

Summer’s going by rather fast, but one event that’s already come and gone has been this year’s edition of Google’s PE Summit for the EMEA region. It took place on June 20th and 21st in Zürich, Switzerland, and was hosted at Google’s own offices as well as in a virtual format, similar to previous years.

Google has confirmed it is testing more than 10 ads (some 18) in the Google Shopping ad box. Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads Liaison, said “This is a small experiment exploring different configurations for shopping ads to promote greater discovery.”

Google Search changed how many stories it shows for political figures recently. Now Google shows the two by two top stories grid in search for searches on Harris, Trump and other political figures. Google use to show 7 top stories formats for these figures.