Google is testing showing the last time you viewed an ad, a Google Local Service Ad, by adding a label with those details. In this case, Google is showing “You viewed 15 minutes ago” next to this ad.

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. Saturday night…

Google has posted a new document about the way Google may apply restrictions to your Google Business Profiles over review or other policy violations. In the document, Google wrote that it takes “take fake and/or incentivized reviews and ratings on businesses very seriously.”

In one of the more disassociated social posts Google has made in a while, Google’s Small Business account posted a poll asking if you will use Gemini, Google’s AI models, to help with your SEO, to help boost your search rankings.

As many of you know, Google is now in court over its monopoly ruling by the Department of Justice before the court rules on the remedy for such a ruling. The ruling may not come for a year or so, and Google will be in court for some time.

Google has completely reorganized its crawlers and user-triggered fetchers documentation. It used to be all on one page and now it is in several pages. Most of the changes were just moving content around but Google did add sections for what product each crawler affects, and added a robots.txt snippet for each crawler to demonstrate how to use the user agent tokens.

Google Search is testing a new recent posts carousel in the desktop and mobile search results. This carousel can show YouTube videos, TikTok videos, Reddit or other “hidden gems” of sorts.

The Google Search App stopped working last night for a few hours. Google was quick to fix it in the middle of the night but by then, hundreds, if not, thousands of complaints flooded the support forums and social media.

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 Ads is launching confidential matching…

For the original iTunes version, click here. Well over a week after the Google August 2024 core update finished, we still have a ton of volatility. Apple Visual Intelligence was demoed at the Apple event this week…

Google Ads announced what it calls “confidential matching.” Confidential matching is a “way to securely connect your first-party data for our measurement and audience solutions,” Google said. And it will be used on Google Ads in numerous areas.

Google is testing showing search results snippets without the breadcrumbs in the URL section of the snippet. Google has tested removing URLs and breadcrumbs completely before, but now Google is testing removing just the breadcrumb and leaving the URL.

Google is testing removing the large “show more” button and replacing it with a small “more” link at the bottom of the AI Overview snippet. Also, the AI Overview header and Gemini logo at the top left is being removed, or at least being tested being removed.

I am seeing a spike in complaints from the PPC community around there being an increase in fraudulent traffic from the Google Ads Search Partner network. Many have seen an unusual spike in fraud from that network in the past week, say some advertisers.

Google is testing a new search box named “for reference” which is placed under a set of search results and contains more news articles related to the query. This seems similar to some other features Google has tested over the years.

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. I covered some old statements from former Googlers on Navboost from Hacker News…

Over the years Google has been wishy-washy on if they use or do not use Exif (Exchangeable image file format) data for rankings. In 2014, Google’s Matt Cutts said Google can parse the data and reserves the right to use it. But in 2019, Gary Illyes from Google said it was not used for rankings. Now in 2024, Martin Splitt of Google said it is not used for rankings.