As you know, Google Ads served other advertiser’s Merchant Center shopping ads on other advertiser accounts. Google promised to issue credits after hiding the data in reports because of privacy issues. Now, Google emailed advertisers who were impacted about the issue, letting them know they asked the advertisers who have their data to delete that data.

Google has been placing listen buttons in the Google Search results in various locations, like knowledge panels and local packs. So it comes as no surprise to see them also in the AI Overviews.

Google is now testing rounded outlines around some of its search result snippet features. This includes around the snippets in the local pack and also knowledge panels. I do wonder if this is a variation of the snippet background highlights from the other day.

Recently we saw a hidden gems stores section in the Google Search results, which seemed nothing like the hidden gems algorithm from last year. And now I am seeing another variation of that just named hidden gems, under a stores search refinement.

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

John Mueller from Google did it again with his site and this time uploaded an audio file, in wav format, for his robots.txt file. You can go to it and listen to him read out his robots.txt rules in his own voice. It is a valid robots.txt file but I suspect zero search engines can understand it.

Google is testing adding a dynamic blue colored background highlight color when you hover your mouse cursor over a search result snippet. The whole background just behind that specific search result snippet will change from white, to a highlight blue color.

For the past several months, many sites have been complaining over and over again that their image thumbnails for their websites were not showing up in the Google Search result snippets. Well, with the release of the August 2024 core update, many small publishers are starting to see their images show up in the search results again.

Google Search has this new feature named “mentioned in key answers.” This shows you which personalities, entities, within Google’s knowledge graph, are mentioned in the search results in Google.

As you know, Google released the August 2024 core update on Thursday and then shortly after confirmed a ranking bug impacting a large number of search results. During that time, we have seen many reports from SEOs and site owners that they are starting to see positive movement for sites hit by the infamous September 2023 helpful content update.

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…

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.

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?

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…

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.

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.

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.