For many sites that have customer or client portals, including SaaS companies, the login page is the primary destination for a lot of searchers. It will help your customers bypass your homepage and go right to the login area. The question asked of Google is how do you ensure that login page shows up as a Sitelink in your Google Search results snippet.

Google is now testing a new user experience for maps in the Google Search local panel section. Normally when you click on the map in the local knowledge panel, you are taken into Google Maps. Now, Google is testing expanding the maps while you stay on the Google Search results page.

Google has updated the first paragraph of its Organization structured data search developer documentation. Google said the update is to clarify “that some properties can influence which logo is shown, while others are used behind the scenes.”

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…

This Google August 2024 core update has been shaking things up since it began to rollout. We saw some early signs of some sites hit by the September 2023 helpful content see some signs of life. Then some saw reversals of sorts, but maybe that was the search ranking bug that got fixed a few days later. Here are some charts a week or so after the August core update was released.

Google has overhauled its video SEO documentation to vastly clarify the video indexing criteria and technical requirements. Plus, Google added a new watch page section to the document and expanded the examples in the document.

Google has updated its title links search developer documentation to add that Google Search may use your og:title meta tag title for your title link in the Google Search results. The OG title is normally used by social sharing sites for the title of your posts, but Google may also use it for the title of your search result snippets in Google.

Google Search is testing new designs for the default favicons it shows in the search results. This is when Google is not showing the site’s favicon or the site does not have a favicon, Google will show this default favicon.

A negative SEO question came up in the last Google SEO office hours on the topic of sending “bad actor” fake traffic to a site, to make the destination site look more questionable in Google’s eyes. Martin Splitt from Google said that sending such traffic to a site would not negatively impact the destination site.

Google is a bit delayed with its appeal process for Google Business Profiles. Appeals are now taking seven days or longer, some are saying about 15 days, which is much longer than normal.

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 Analytics is not showing data from yesterday or today right now…

Google announced that all merchants will be migrated (or as Google put it “upgrading”) from the old Google Merchant Center to Google Merchant Center Next by September (next month). We knew this was coming, we covered the upgrade emails back in July but here is the official announcement.

There are many sad stories around sites getting hit by Google algorithm updates, such as core updates and of course the September 2023 helpful content update. But Hardbacon, a financial and budgeting company, was hit hard by those Google updates, then announced the company would file for bankruptcy the day before the August 2024 core update.

Google’s larger search ranking bug was fixed four days after the issue was confirmed. Google’s August core update continues to roll out, some hit by the helpful content update are seeing some surges, but Google says wait until the update is complete…

Martin Splitt from Google said on the latest SEO office hours that having lots of nofollow or noindex tags or attributes on your site does not signal to Google that you have quality issues with your site or many low quality pages.

Microsoft now has these refinement cards or boxes directly in the Bing Image Search results interface. In these cards, Bing will show you a refinement option for your query with example photos you might find for that refined search query.

Google has greatly expanded and clarified its documentation around how Search Appearances work within the Google Search Console reports. Google wrote on X, “We improved our documentation on Search Appearances supported in Search Console.” Daniel Waisberg from Google said, “I’ve been asked about this 1000 times, hope you’re all happy now.”