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

Google Search had an incredibly volatile month of July and it ended the month with a huge bang. The volatility in the Google Search results yesterday, July 31st, going into today, August 1st, is heavy. This may be Google testing a new Google search ranking algorithm update, maybe the expected core update, or maybe not…

In May, we reported that Google Search algorithms lowered the rankings of deepfake sites. Now, Google has gone into more detail on how this algorithm works and how you can manually remove deepfakes from Google Search.

Google Merchant Center may have recently added to the product feed report the number of products found by Google, not by way of a feed you provided or manually submitted but automatically found through crawling or other means.

Google is testing a new section on knowledge panels named “videos from.” This section can contain videos from the brand’s social channels. This seems to be a larger extension of Google showing social posts from the brand’s channels, maybe?

The folks at Vercel and MERJ put together a super deep dive on how Google Search handles indexing JavaScript. They analyzed over 100,000 Googlebot fetches across various sites to test and validate Google’s SEO capabilities. In short, Google Search handles JavaScript incredibly well, almost as well as normal web pages.

A few weeks ago, we saw Google testing pill formats, bubble formats, for sitelinks in the mobile search results. Now Google is testing that format on the desktop search results.

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

Google announced new Performance Max reporting updates and asset generation and image editing expansions. “We’re adding asset-level conversion reporting to Performance Max, expanding asset generation to App and Display campaigns, improving image editing and much more,” Google wrote.

Google seems to be testing a new search feature named “Hidden gem stores.” This shows you shopping and merchant listings from various stores and brands. This does not seem to be the Google hidden gems algorithm, but rather just a fancy title for a search feature box.

Over the past few days, Google has come under fire over its autocomplete predictions in Google Search around former President, Donald Trump. In the wake of the issue, Google updated its autocomplete prediction system to make improvements in these cases.

Google Ads lets you set up message assets to click-to WhatsApp for some advertisers. Message assets allow you to configure an ad asset or button with your responsive search ads in Google Ads, these can lead some users to WhatsApp.

Microsoft reported its fourth quarter 2024 earnings and it showed that its search and advertising revenue was up 19%. The last time it was up over 19% in a quarter was 10 quarterly earning reports ago, in Q3 2022.

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 Search Console has a bug with the search appearance filters…

Google Search may be replacing the heading for “X (Twitter)” posts with “Latest Posts from.” This would be a step to removing more X branding from the Google Search results page.

Google Search Console has a bug with the Search Performance report, where if you want to filter by Search Appearance, it won’t show you all the options. Google is aware of the bug and it should be fixed soon.

Google may be testing a new search ad format named “for your consideration.” These ads, at least in the example below, show hotel websites that you can go to to find hotels in the area. This may work for other categories of queries, outside of hotels, but this is the example I see right now.