This week, the Google August 2024 core update finished rolling out, a bit earlier than expected. There is still search volatility, a lot of it…

It is like the Google August 2024 core update didn’t finish rolling out, or maybe something else is going on, because I am still seeing a lot of signals of intense search ranking volatility in the Google Search results. The tools are all still heated and the chatter within the SEO community is still pretty lively.

This week I interviewed Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, with the goal of better understanding where Google Search quality is at right now, where it is going in the future and what we as content creators and search marketers need to know.

Google published an internal interview on its Search Off the Record podcast with John Mueller and Lizzi Sassman (who you know) and Irina Tuduce from the Google Shopping team. Irina Tuduce has been with Google for 18 or so years and she provided a super technical overview of Google Shopping and Merchant Center.

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

Google will automatically link Google Ads and Google Merchant Center accounts by October 3, 2024. Google emailed some advertisers who have yet to link those accounts about the change.

Google Ads sent out a notice that it is changing its Content Suitability policy for Parked Domains in Google. Google will opt out new accounts from serving ads on parked domains starting next month, October 2024.

Google confirmed with me that they are testing a new forum display for its search results that shows the top comments and related discussions. This is a new way of showing forum related content in the Google Search results.

Google Ads seems to be rolling out a new tab in its image assets library named “Merchant products.” This tab shows images you uploaded to your linked Google Merchant Center account.

Google Ads said that by November 2024, advertisers with the gambling and games certification must recertify or stop relying on the certification to advertise products in scope of the Gambling and games policy.

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 finished rolling out the August 2024 core update and while there was some positive movements…

Google has updated its search developer canonical documentation to specify that you should not set specify a fragment URL as canonical. Google added that bullet point to the best practices section of the document.

Google Business Profiles seems to have dropped the Q&A feature from businesses in India and some other regions, or at least, a number of them. The issue started a few months ago, and the feature is still missing in that region.

The Google August 2024 core update finished rolling out yesterday at around 3 pm ET. It took over 19 days to roll out, starting on August 15th at 11 am and finishing on September 3rd at 3 pm. The update was expected to take a month but ended up taking less than 3 weeks to roll out.

Microsoft published its updates for September 2024 yesterday and a lot is around Performance Max updates for Microsoft Advertising. Plus, you can now add logos and call to actions to your ads, a new Search term insights report is rolling out, Search themes are available for pilot in Performance Max and more.

Google is testing a new feature, or search refinement, within the image search results that shows you “from this image.” I suspect this shows you matches of other image search results, from the image you are currently looking at.

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