Google has updated its Google Maps contributor guidelines to disallow “discouraging or prohibiting negative reviews, or selectively soliciting positive reviews from customers.” This line was added to these guidelines under deceptive content and fake engagement section. Here is the new line t…
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. Just a quick heads up, I am offline for Yom Kippur tonight/tomorrow, no stories will be posted on Wednesday. Today, Google confirmed a data issue…
There are some reports that in some industries, like the auto dealership industry, there is a bug with Google Business Profile insights reporting. There shows a large and unaccounted-for spike in traffic from Google Local and Google Maps for some of these businesses in these Google reports. The…
Imagine you’re on vacation, it’s approaching noon and you’re starting to feel hungry. You’re eager to enjoy the best local cuisine your destination has to offer. So you go to Google Maps and search for “best lunch restaurant near me”, a topic that’s more than doubled in search volume on Google in t…
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 is suspending a lot more businesses in Google Business Profiles now. Google also dropped the health and safety attributes from Business Pro…
We had another Google Search On event yesterday and in case you missed it or you simply do not want to read through a lot of fluff, here is the short version. Note, I am pretty sure we covered tests of all of these announcements in the past at this site, so everything should look familiar. A…
It’s the biggest mystery and controversy of Google’s search ranking algorithm. For a long time, the SEO community has debated: is the click-through rate (“CTR”) of search results listings a ranking factor? Or the closely related “bounce rate” and “dwell time”? I present to you everything Goog…
What a week, we had the launch of the September 2022 core update that started off strong and fast. Google confirmed the helpful content update is done rolling out but I bet most of you didn’t notice anything. Google even possibly had a local search ranking update, or it might be some ranking bug…
Google may have also pushed out a local search ranking update around September 7th. This is in addition to the helpful content update between August 25th and September 9th and the September 2022 core update that kicked off on September 12th. Let’s not forget, we are on the verge of a fift…
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 announced a new core update yesterday and so far and early on, this one seems very big. Google also may be showing fewer featured snippets…
