It finally happened, we got a new core update, the Google August 2024 core update touched down on August 15th. It resulted in some movement with some sites hit by the September helpful content update and also many sad stories, including many sites that were hit.

A few months ago, we posted some answers about how YouTube ranking is affected by various variables and factors – YouTube SEO questions and answers, if you will. Well, the YouTube Liaison posted a number of short video answers around the YouTube algorithm and YouTube SEO over the past week that I wanted to share.

Microsoft recently added an animation or highlight effect on its featured answers or knowledge panels at the top of its Bing Search results. When you hover your mouse over the table of content on the left side, the section it corresponds to in the answer, will expand.

Google is testing a new shape and maybe colors for the map pins they use in Google Search and Google Maps. The new shape is less of a pin/diamond shape and more of a circle shape.

Google will discontinue the Google Trends email subscription service on October 29, 2024. Google sent emails to those who had subscribed to Google Trends over email saying, “Google Trends trend notifications will no longer be supported and existing alerts will no longer be sent.”

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

Google Analytics, GA4, seems to be rolling out benchmarking data, similar to Universal Analytics before it. This feature lets you compare your analytics data to others in your same industry – so you can benchmark how well or poorly you are doing.

Google announced on Friday that they finally natively support AVIF image file types for Google Search, Google Images and anywhere Google Search uses images, such as Google News, Google Discover and more.

Google is testing a new design for its mobile shopping search interface. The new design has a new Google logo, a gradient background theme, new headers, various sections and labels. It looks pretty cool but a bit less clean than the normal Google Search interface.

Google Ads has improved its ads reporting specifically, with the product reports now showing category-level insights. You can see the performance, demand trends, and actionable recommendations for your e-commerce campaigns.

Google is testing a new design and user experience for the “you visit often” labels. This time Google is giving you a way to see multiple sites you visit often in an accordion box user interface.

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 posted the poll results for the Google August 2024 core update…

Some advertisers see Google Ads show this request dialog popup asking them to change their bid strategies. This shows in the Google Ads advertiser console, which asks the advertiser to change their bid strategy from one option to another.

Google is now showing video reviews in the reviews of popular products section in the Google Store ratings landing area on Google Search. Got all that?

Google has this ad format, I don’t think it is new, but it is titled “Here are some in the area.” These look like a version of Local Service Ads, but they look different.

Earlier this week, I posted polls across numerous sites, asking SEOs how they were impacted by the last Google August 2024 core update – knowing the update is not done rolling out yet. Overall, most said their rankings and traffic from Google Search are down but honestly, it is a pretty even distribution of responses.

We have been tracking the Google core update and seeing more surges and changes with those hit by the September helpful content update. I ran a survey asking how SEOs were impacted so far by the August 2024 core update…