SEARCHENGINES
Daily Search Forum Recap: April 22, 2022
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 has introduced a new term, Google SpamBrain, which it has used since 2018 to combat search spam. Google Sitelinks scroll to text is now fully live in the US. Google is testing larger images on desktop search results again. Google video search shows special icons for YouTube channels. And I posted my weekly video today. Just a heads up, I am offline Thursday night through Saturday night – so anything you see from me between then was pre-written and pre-scheduled.
Search Engine Roundtable Stories:
- Google’s 2021 Web Spam Report: Hello Google SpamBrain
Google has published its annual web spam report and in that report, Google has named its machine learning based systems for spam identification with its own name – SpamBrain. - Google Search Displays Larger Images Again On Desktop Results
Google Search is testing displaying much larger images again in the desktop search results. Here is a comparison of the normal image thumbnails in the desktop search results compared to the larger images in the desktop… - Google Video Search YouTube Channel Label/Icon
I am not sure if this is new because when I search for videos, I use YouTube directly. But in Google Video search, Google will label YouTube channel landing pages with a play button and without a timestamp because… - Google Search Scroll To Text For Sitelinks Live In US Search Results
Back in November 2021 Google began testing Sitelinks that support the scroll to text feature. Well, it seems like this is fully live in the US desktop search results… - Search News Buzz Video Recap: Google Search Volatility, Google SpamBrain & Spam Report, Google Search Tests & Analytics Bugs
That being said, it was a busy week with a lot of Google search ranking volatility this week, both on April 18th and April 21st or so. Google published its 2021 web spam report and told us about SpamBrain, spam AI Google has used since 2018. Google Search Console sent out notices… - SEOs Want Featured Snippet & Indexing Coverage API In Google Search Console
A poll on Twitter by Brodie Clark shows that SEOs really do want both a featured snippets filter in the performance reports in Google Search Console and also an index coverage API. The poll also has a number of other requests but… - Google Meeting Room Named “More Cowbells” – Cowbells Hanging From Ceiling
In the YouTube office, there is a meeting room that is named “More Cowbells” and when you walk into the room, there are cowbells hanging from the ceiling.
Other Great Search Threads:
Search Engine Land Stories:
Other Great Search Stories:
Analytics
Industry & Business
Links & Content Marketing
Local & Maps
Mobile & Voice
SEO
PPC
Search Features
Other Search
Feedback:
Have feedback on this daily recap; let me know on Twitter @rustybrick or @seroundtable, you can follow us on Facebook and make sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or just contact us the old fashion way.
Source: www.seroundtable.com
SEARCHENGINES
Google Revamps The Canonicalization Search Help Documentation

Google has updated its search help documentation around canonicalization this morning. The Google Search Relations team split in three distinct sections and updated a lot of the content to provide clearer details around how Google Search and canonicalization works.
The three sections include:
All of this use to be on a single help page, which you can review on the Wayback Machine over here to compare.
With this, Gary Illyes from Google dropped another LinkedIn tip on the topic of canonicalization, he wrote:
Friday ramble: you can stack canonicalization signals to strengthen that hint.
You have a rel=canonical pointing from A to B, but A is HTTPS, it’s in your hreflang clusters, all your links are pointing to A, and A is included in your sitemaps instead of B. Which one should search engines pick as canonical, A or B?
If you just change the URLs from A to B in your sitemaps and hreflang clusters, combined with that rel=canonical it might already be enough to tip over canonicalization to B. Change the links also, and you have an even greater chance to convince search engines about your canonical preference.
Recently, Gary also mentioned to use absoluate URLs for rel-canonical.
So check out these new docs and learn a bit more on canonicalization and Google Search.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
SEARCHENGINES
Microsoft Bing’s New BingBot Now Fully Live Today

As a reminder, since April, Bing has been slowly testing a new BingBot user agent, slowly rolling it out to more percentages of crawls over the year. It should have rolled out to 100% of all crawls last month. But now Fabrice Canel said this week that it is near 100%, and an announcement is coming sometime today from Microsoft.
Fabrice Canel from Microsoft Bing wrote on Twitter, “We are near 100% and are proactively monitoring and rolling back any website having issues. Stay tuned for more communication Friday.”
Initially, Bing said it would be rolled out by Fall 2022, then January 2023. Maybe today is the day?
Here has been the rollout so far:
- April 2022: Less than 5% of crawls
- July 2022: 5% of all crawls
- September 2022: 20% of all crawls
- October 2022: 50% of all crawls
- February 2023: New 100% of all crawls
Let’s see what Fabrice announces today.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Update: Confirmed, it is fully live according to Fabrice on LinkedIn.
Yes @rustybrick 💯% today (we fallback to previous user agents where appropriate). More information on Bing Crawler User Agents: https://t.co/n0ILIEUz0I https://t.co/49ILtJDuL0
— Fabrice Canel (@facan) February 3, 2023
SEARCHENGINES
Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai Confirms New Chat Based Search Feature

Last night I reported on Search Engine Land, based on the Google earnings report and earnings call, that Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai has confirmed the search company will release a chat based search feature based on its own AI, LaMDA, in the coming weeks and months. Plus, there is a big new search event this Wednesday – so maybe we will hear about it there?
Yes, the other day we reported about Apprentice Bard, the reports of Google’s ChatGPT answer to OpenAI and Microsoft Bing.
Here is what Sundar said on the call:
Sundar Pichai said, “In the coming weeks and months, we’ll make these language models available, starting with LaMDA, so that people can engage directly with them. This will help us continue to get feedback, test, and safely improve them. These models are particularly amazing for composing, constructing, and summarizing. They will become even more useful for people as they provide up-to-date more factual information.”
Sundar Pichai said that he “first spoke about Google being an AI-first company” more than “six years ago.” “We have been preparing for this moment since early last year, and you’re going to see a lot from us in the coming few months across three big areas of opportunity; first, large models. We published extensively about LaMDA and PoN, the industry’s largest, most sophisticated model plus extensive work at DeepMind,” he continued to say.
During the question and answer period, Sundar added “We’ll be launching — we’ll — more as labs products in certain cases, beta features in certain cases and just slowly scaling up from there. Obviously, we need to make sure we’re iterating in public, these models will keep getting better, so the field is fast changing. The serving costs will need to be improved.”
“So I view it as very, very early days, but we are committed to putting our experiences, both in terms of new products and experiences, actually bringing direct LLM experiences in Search, making APIs available for developers and enterprises and learn from there and iterate like we’ve always done. So I’m looking forward to it,” he added.
Sundar goes on to add, “In terms of Search too, now that we can integrate more direct LLM type experiences in Search, I think it will help us expand and serve new types of use cases, generative use cases. And so I think I see this as a chance to rethink and re-imagine and drive Search to solve more use cases for our users as well. So again, early days, you will see us be bold, put things out, get feedback and iterate and make things better.”
Here is the event live stream on Wednesday:
Everyone is so ChatGPT crazed!
Forum discussion at Twitter.
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