Search Engine Roundtable Podcast

This week, we covered yet another Google search ranking algorithm update this past weekend. Some of the tracking tools went nuts this week, but I think it might be related to the UI changes Google rolled out, I am not sure. Google released new help docs on titles and snippets, with a new term named title link. Google responded to the crawled, not indexed errors saying it is a reporting delay. Goog...

This week, I started off with the big monthly Google webmaster report - it is a good way to catch up or remind yourself of what changed. Google Search had this really weird Google Search update this past weekend, maybe. And then October 6th and 7th we saw yet another Google ranking update. Facebook had a 6 hour outage and I discussed how Google Search dealt with it. Google’s John Mueller dropped t...

Google had an unconfirmed but pretty big Google Search ranking algorithm update on September 24th and 25th. Google hosted its big search event called the Search On event, Google spoke about MUM being added to more places in search and a bunch of other features. Google said it is going away from the 200 ranking signals figure because it is somewhat misleading. Google said product rich results enhan...

This weekend we had yet another Google search ranking algorithm update that went unconfirmed. Google Search Console had some major bugs and stability issues but it all caught up now. Google said do not remove old news articles from your site for SEO reasons. Google spoke more about the importance of author bylines for EAT reasons. Google has a new automobile specs view for car searches that upset...

Last weekend we saw a long and large Google search ranking update lasting for about four days, it went unconfirmed of course. Google may be making improvements to the titles it chooses in the search results. Google said smart internal linking can help your site earn trust. Google said site quality is not only about the pages missing from the Google index. Google said it does not differentiate betw...

This past Saturday, September 4th, there may have been another Google search ranking update. Microsoft Bing launched the content submission API out of beta. Google may automatically remove recipe rich results for listicles and category pages. Google Ads search term report gained more queries but some will be going away in the name of privacy. Google sent an email to Google News publishers by remov...

This week, I posted the monthly Google webmaster report - catch up there on search topics you may have missed. Google may have done a search ranking algorithm update on September 1st. Google did say the page experience update is done rolling out, for the most part. The title changes in Google continue, I discussed an idea on how to control titles, that the title change does not impact rankings, th...

Google, two weeks longer than expected, has finally finished rolling out the link spam update. Google confirmed it made changes to the titles it generates in search, it said it no longer uses the query when generating the title. Google has heard about some of the issues and may come up with a Search Console tool to help control titles. There are some complaints, you can submit those complaints to...

This week, we had not just one, but two different unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm updates - one on Saturday and one on Wednesday. Google said the link spam update that was suppose to be done rolling out about two weeks ago, is still rolling out. Google made a change to the title link it shows for snippets, it now pulls more from headers. There was a bug with images not being displayed...

This past weekend we had yet another unconfirmed update around August 6th. Google may be having an indexing bug for the past month or so where pages are dropping in and out of the index. Google may investigate cases where big brand publishers are ranking too highly for keywords when their content is really not all that great for those phrases. Google now added the ability to specify the author det...

I start off this week with the big Google webmaster report for August, it is a good one. Google has decided not to use safe browsing as a ranking signal in the Google page experience update. Google is now saying that the page experience update is not just a tie breaker ranking factor. Google said core updates can impact local and image search, which is a bit of a turn from what Google said before....

I am sorry for the random static issues, I kept touching the wireless mic by accident. On Monday, Google pushed out a new algorithm update the company called the link spam update. Before that, we saw some movement and ranking changes over the weekend but then it remained quiet, even after the link spam update until Thursday where we saw more fluctuations. Just one clarification, there seems to be...

Google is rolling out a feature to show in the about this result overlay why the company ranked that page for that query, it is pretty cool. John Mueller of Google confirmed that core updates can influence the people also ask (PAA) results in Google Search. Gary Illyes of Google said that if a redirect is in place for a year, the signals passed will remain forever, even after the redirect is remov...

Google has confirmed the July 2021 core update is “effectively complete” rolling out but what does that really mean. We saw spikes for the July core update on July 2nd and July 9th and maybe even on the 12th. Google confirmed that local results are not impacted by core updates. Posts for Google Knowledge panels, not the local panels, are going away this Tuesday. Google said you would see a positiv...

We had a bit of a breather this week with the July 4th weekend and a bit of a slower news week. I did post a recap of the past month of Google SEO and webmaster topics, it was a big month. Google reminded us to include customer support methods on our own websites, is this a sign Google may crack down on these types of scams? Google’s Gary Illyes described how Google does ranking, it was interestin...

Google kicked off the July 2021 core update yesterday, right after the spam update. Google ran part two of the spam update on June 28th, the first part ran in June 23rd. While those spam updates ran on only those days, we did see that two days after the spam update there was ranking fluctuations in Google Search on June 30th. Google said they have now used MUM for the first time in search, it was...

Google released yet another confirmed Google Search update it called a “Spam Update” on June 23rd. This past weekend we saw more of the same ranking fluctuations in Google Search. Do you think Google doesn’t confirm some updates because they worry about webmaster, site owner anxiety? Google said again that it can take several months for Google to reprocess and reevaluate sites after a quality upda...

It was an insanely busy week this week, and we also ran SMX Advanced during all the chaos. We had Google tell that the June 2021 core update finished rolling out on June 12th, Google didn’t tell us this until two days after it finished rolling out. But that makes sense since we saw a ton of tremors in Google Search on June 11 and June 12. Google then said that the Page Experience Update has begun...

It was a pretty busy week, but to start off, I posted my big monthly Google webmaster report - catch up there on the month. Google released the June 2021 core update on June 2nd, but most SEOs didn’t really feel it until Saturday June 5th or Sunday June 6th and they did indeed feel it. This core update may have impacted product review sites, but there was no specific product reviews update that wa...