SEARCHENGINES
Daily Search Forum Recap: March 11, 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 explained how they understand content in a video in a podcast with a bunch of Googlers. Google continues to test “things to know” in the search results. Google launched vehicle ads to all US based advertisers. I spotted search ads that say “no products found” – how is that for an ad. Google can show the Buddhist calendar in the news results, if that is your default for your calendar. And I posted the weekly search video recap.
Search Engine Roundtable Stories:
- Google’s Danielle Marshak On How Google Understands Videos
In the latests Search Off the Record, Gary Illyes and Lizzi Sassman from the Google Search Central team had Danielle Marshak, a Google Search Product Manager for Videos, as a guest on the podcast. Danielle Marshak, who created a couple new SEO video help resources recently, spoke about how Google understands the content in videos. - Google Tests Things To Know In Search Results More Often
Google seems to be testing displaying the Things To Know section in the Google search results more often. We first heard about Things To Know back in September at the Search On Google event and then a few weeks later we saw it being tested in the mobile results. Now more and more are seeing it in the desktop search results. - Google: Vehicle Ads Now Available To All US Advertisers
Google announced that the vehicle ads are now available to all US advertisers. Vehicle ads are a performance-focused, lower funnel ad format which allows auto advertisers to promote their entire inventory of vehicles to interested customers shopping for vehicles on Google. - Google Search Ads: No Products Found
Here is a weird Google issue where Google is showing a Google Ad slot in the search results that ends up leading to an error that reads “no products found.” It shows a person looking under a curtain for something, which is weird. - Google Shows Buddhist Calendar Year For News Stories
Here is a screenshot of Google News on mobile showing a date that is not the Gregorian date but rather the Buddhist calendar date and year. I assume this is being pulled from some sort of setting override on the phone or in Google Search settings. - Search News Buzz Video Recap: Google Search Turbulence, SafeSearch Classification Is Faster, Plus More SEO & PPC Topics
On March 4th we had more Google search turbulence, a possible Google search ranking update around then. Google’s John Mueller said they sped up the SafeSearch filter classification process. The translated indexing issue we spoke about last week was from the Google Cloud team… - Google Spirole Umbrella Office Design
Back when Google was accepting pitches for the new Charleston campus in Mountain View, California, one pitch was for a Spirole building. This would have been a building in the form of three kinetic u
Other Great Search Threads:
- If you have the other section verified too, it’ll work as well. Similarly if you submit with robots.txt (where you show you control the whole host). The idea is a sitemap wouldn’t use URLs that are ou, John Mueller on Twitter
- If you mean a site removal, that would include everything under the part you’re submitting. Also, it just hides it in search, it doesn’t remove it from the index, so it’s quick & easy to cancel a reque, John Mueller on Twitter
- With that, I think also comes a shift with consultants (SEOs!): Some will focus more on platforms, some more on self-hosting. “Self-hosting-consulting” will be by far more complex,, John Mueller on Twitter
- Just because something’s associated with links doesn’t mean it has anything to do with SEO :-). “rel=noopener” and “rel=noreferrer” are used, like you mentioned, purely for no, John Mueller on Twitter
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.
SEARCHENGINES
Google’s Answer To OpenAI’s ChatGPT?

CNBC reported the other day that Google is working on its own AI chatbot named Apprentice Bard. Apprentice Bard is reportedly built on Google’s AI LaMDA language model stack and while Google is being more cautious with this rollout, Google is working on testing an AI bot in search.
CNBC wrote, “As a result of ChatGPT, the LaMDA team has been asked to prioritize working on a response to ChatGPT,” read one internal memo viewed by CNBC. “In the short term, it takes precedence over other projects,” the email continued, warning that some employees stop attending certain unrelated meetings.
“Apprentice Bard looks similar to ChatGPT: Employees can enter a question in a dialog box and get a text answer, then give feedback on the response. Based on several responses viewed by CNBC, Apprentice Bard’s answers can include recent events, a feature ChatGPT doesn’t have yet,” CNBC said. This makes sense, as Google can crawl the web in almost real-time and process that information faster than any other company.
The examples given by CNBC show that Google even picked up on the Google layoff news and was able to respond to questions about this. Whereas ChatGPT only has content from 2021 or earlier.
Also, CNBC said Google is working on designing an alternative search interface to support this chat feature. CNBC said, “One view showed the home search page offering five different prompts for potential questions placed directly under the main search bar, replacing the current “I’m feeling lucky” bar. It also showed a small chat logo inside the far right end of the search bar.” “When a question is entered, the search results show a grey bubble directly under the search bar, offering more human-like responses than typical search results. Directly beneath that, the page suggests several follow-up questions related to the first one. Under that, it shows typical search results, including links and headlines.”
Super interesting stuff and I suspect that if Google does release something, it will be a lot better than what we’ve been seeing so far, if that is even imaginable…
More: “One view showed the search page offering 5 different prompts for potential questions placed directly under the main search bar. It also showed a small chat logo inside the far right end of the search bar. The page suggests several follow-up questions related to the first.” pic.twitter.com/JOFWxlMTho
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) February 1, 2023
Forum discussion at Twitter.
SEARCHENGINES
A New Googlebot Crawler From Google Named GoogleProducer

Google may be crawling the web with a new crawler, a new Googlebot, named GoogleProducer. This useragent is not listed on the official Google crawlers page but maybe it is too new to be listed yet?
Hernán Marsili spotted this and asked Google about this on Twitter. He said, “we are seeing a lot of traffic to publisher’s sites with a new user-agent ‘GoogleProducer; (+http://goo.gl/7y4SX) ‘. Our WAF is currently blocking it, but it’s origin is actually Google Proxy hosts. Is this legit traffic?”
That link goes to this page that 404s within the Google News Producer section.
As an FYI, Google Producer is part of Google News and Google Currents, I believe. This help document from Google says, “You will use Google Currents producer to manage your issues (e.g., pricing, description, etc.) for Google Play Magazines. If you’re participating in Google Currents, Producer will look familiar to you. You can manage both your edition(s) for Google Currents and your issues for Google Play Magazines through Producer. See our article on publisher account setup for the steps you need to take to fully set up your publisher account and magazines for Play. If you have any questions about using Producer for Google Currents, please see the Currents Producer Help Center.” Note, the Currents Producer Help Center redirects to the Google Publisher Center help center.
John Mueller of Google said he will look into it:
I’ll check – thanks for pinging.
— John Mueller is watching out for Google+ 🐀 (@JohnMu) February 1, 2023
I guess we will see what he says but until then, I do suspect this is a legit Googlebot crawler.
Update: This is old, an older one:
2011 on this thread?https://t.co/NTqpOhQYSl
— Pedro Dias (@pedrodias) February 2, 2023
Forum discussion at Twitter.
SEARCHENGINES
Microsoft Bing Says The lastmod Tag In XML Sitemap File Is Critical

Microsoft Bing posted a new blog post saying “for XML sitemaps, one of the most critical tags you can include in your sitemap is the “lastmod” tag.” And it will become even more critical as Bing is reworking its crawl scheduling stack to rely more on this lastmod field.
Yes, by June, the way Bing decides what to crawl will be more dependent on the lastmod tag. Fabrice Canel from Microsoft wrote, “we are revamping our crawl scheduling stack to better utilize the information provided by the “lastmod” tag in sitemaps.” This is being done so it can “enhance” the “crawl efficiency by reducing unnecessary crawling of unchanged content and prioritizing recently updated content.”
“We have already begun implementing these changes on a limited scale and plan to fully roll them out by June,” he added.
So making sure your lastmod date is accurate is now even more important. It should be the last time you modified the URL, not the time the URL was first published and not the time the XML sitemap file was generated. In fact, that is the biggest issue Bing found with the field, that it often just shows the date the XML sitemap file was generated and not the date the page of the URL was last modified.
Here are some data points Bing put together on XML sitemaps:
- 58% of hosts have at least one XML sitemap.
- 84% of these sitemaps have a lastmod attribute set.
- 79% have lastmod values correct.
- 18% have lastmod values not correctly set.
- 3% has lastmod values for only some of the URLs.
- 16% of these sitemaps don’t have a lastmod attribute set.
- 42% of hosts don’t have one XML sitemap
Oh, Bing still wants you to use the IndexNow protocol for the most efficient crawl solution but if you don’t – make sure your lastmod date is accurate.
In terms of Google, in 2015 Google said they don’t really use the lastmod date but then changed that in 2020 they said they do. The current Google documentation says, “Google uses the lastmod value if it’s consistently and verifiably (for example by comparing to the last modification of the page) accurate.”
Forum discussion at Twitter.
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