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…

This was an interesting week, let’s start with the Sparktoro study claiming 65% of all searches done on Google do not lead to a click to a website. Then Google responded saying this is a misleading statement. This all led to a lot of debate on…

Gary Illyes from Google said it is an “silly idea” to re-block or re-disallow pages after you allowed them to crawl that page in order for Google to see the noindex tags on that page. I apologize for the title of this story, it was a hard one to write.

Annotations are great in Google Analytics and other tools. You can make a note in the reporting tools on a specific day or data point what happened that you think caused the blip in the data. So if you do a huge redesign one day, annotating that in your reporting tools can be useful when you look back at the data years later.

Ginny Marvin, now of Google, said on Twitter that Google considers subdomains, country TLDs and vanity URLs owned by the same company would be considered a first party context. One caveat is that Google has a 5 domain limit per first-party set for vanity URLs.

Google has new structured data markup for the practice problems and math solver search results. We first saw these results in the Google Search results back in late December 2020. Now, Google has officially launched this feature and with that launch has added new markup and reports in Search Console to debug these markup.

This is a programming note that I will be 100% offline Monday, Marc h 29th for the Passover holiday. Technically, I will be offline straight from Friday night through Monday night, so if anything blows up over the weekend, I won’t get to it until Tuesday.

Google has added isAccessibleForFree to the datasets structured data help document. This new property tells Google Search if the dataset is accessible for free or if you need to pay to access the data.

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 a bug in Google My Business when you try to verify or update an address. The form seems to bug out and show a blank screen. So if you need to update or verify your business address, you will be out of luck until Google fixes the issue.

The topic of hyphens between words is a classic old time SEO question, something we’ve covered here many times. Recently, John Mueller of Google was asked about how Google treats words with hyphenation. For example, is WiFi the same as Wi-Fi to Google. Does Google always ignore the hyphen between words and so on.

With all the unnecessary panic over the Google Page Experience update coming up in May, the question now is, will this update roll out slowly or abruptly? Will Google slowly roll out the impact of this update or will it be a jarring release all at once?

Google posted in the data anomalies page that the crawl stats report deep inside the Google Search Console interface had internal reporting issue between March 10 and March 23, 2021. As a result of the data issues, you may see a “drop in data in this period,” Google said.

Google has launched global availability its property promotion ads within Google Ads hotel campaigns. Google said this is “an ad format that helps advertisers reach users who have not yet identified the exact hotel they would like to book.”

Here is a new question I have never seen asked before; does Google downgrade the search rankings of web sites that receive FTC warning letters about their medical and health content. The answer is no, not that I know of, but it is interesting that someone asked the question.