There is this SEO scam going around where scammers are saying you pay Google to fix your rankings in Google Search. All you need to do is prepay them and Google will fix your site. John Mueller from Google said “this is a scam,” that Google does not offer such a service.

Judge Amit Mehta, a US federal judge ruled on Monday that Google is a monopoly. “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Mehta wrote in his 286-page filing (PDF).

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

Google seems to know handle or obey the RateLimit Header Fields for HTTP. Mike Blazer asked John Mueller from Google about this and John said he never heard of it, so he assumes Google Search does not handle it.

Google has dropped the title from the “see results about” disambiguous search feature in the mobile search results interface. The feature is still very much alive, but on mobile search, Google removed the title of it and just shows the feature. On desktop, the title of the search feature remains.

Google seems to be showing photos from reviews from actual users in the Google Shopping product image carousel. So when you click on a product listing and then swipe through the images, you may see actual photos submitted by users from their reviews.

Google seems to have launched the interactive knowledge panel layout for local knowledge panels in Google Search. This design is from a couple of years ago but now seems to be rolling out for the local version of knowledge panels.

Microsoft looks to have pushed out a Bing Search ranking algorithm update around May 29th. I don’t track Bing Search ranking volatility that closely anymore but Glenn Gabe looked back at some data and believes that around May 29, 2024, there was a big Bing core update (if you will). Fabrice Canel from Microsoft responded by saying, no, “nothing unusual was released around this date.”

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. There is a Google Ads reporting outage that has been going on for a while now…

Google seems to be encouraging searchers to search more for more types of queries with a new “Explore more with Search” carousel. It shows the searcher other topics, with photos, on what they can search on.

Google will update its Google Ads policy on September 3, 2024, to allow public hair grooming services to be advertised on the Google Ads network, including Display, YouTube, and Search.

A few weeks ago, Google announced it is doing away with how it does credits and disputes for Local Service Ads and is switching to an automated system. It seems like that system is now live, up and running.

Google notified advertisers in Canada they are charging a 2.5% surcharge on top of everything for buying ads on Google. This is on top of many of these advertisers losing the credit card payment option, which was as good as cash for many of them.

Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads Liaison, said if you put similar keywords in separate ad groups that can essentially make both eligible to be considered for auction selection. It would essentially remove AI-theming (if that is a word) because they are in different ad groups.

Here is the big monthly Google webmaster report, where I catch you up on what changes with Google Search related to Google updates, ranking volatility, SEO, Search Console, UI changes, local and much more. This month we had intense ranking volatility all month, we had autocomplete updates, deepfakes algorithm changes and a big search indexing bug.

This week we covered how Google said the core update isn’t extremely far away. We also reported on super intense Google Search ranking volatility change later this week and then the ongoing volatility with Google Search over the past few weeks…

Google Ads is currently having an outage for many of its reporting interfaces across Report Editor, Dashboards, and Saved Reports in the Google Ads web interface. Plus, The Products, Product Groups and Listing Groups pages are down across the web interface, API, and Google Ads Editor.