SEARCHENGINES
Daily Search Forum Recap: March 16, 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.
Was there some sort of Google search update on March 11th – we had some chatter like patterns but the tracking tools are pretty calm. Google rolled out refine this search and broaden this search and is testing things to know/consider, currently none of it uses MUM. Google image search is testing Lens with search, text and translate. Google Business Profiles can now manage the managers in web search. Google search settings are not sticking for some searchers.
Search Engine Roundtable Stories:
- Google Search Ranking Update Weirdness On March 11th
For the past few days I have been debating if I should cover what may have been a Google search ranking update that ticked off on Friday March 11th. There was super unusual update like chatter in the WebmasterWorld forums but the automated tracking tools showed nothing – nada. - Refine This Search & Broaden This Search Now Live In Google Search
After the announcement in September at Search On and months and months of testing, the Refine This Search and Broaden This Search features are fully live in US English Google Search results. This is not to mean the Things To Know and Things To Consider feature is live yet, it is just being tested. - Google Search Settings Not Sticking; Dark Mode Sees The Light
There are numerous complaints in the Google Search Community Forums that the Google Search settings are not sticking. The most obvious example is when you have the dark theme set and Google toggles you to the light theme. But other settings are not sticking for some searchers as well, such as the region setting. - Google Adds Business Profiles Managers Controls In Web Search
Google continues to move more and more business editing features and controls to the web search results and outside of the Google Business Profile Manager (formerly Google My Business manager). Now you can also manage the managers and those who have access to edit your business profile in the web search results. - Google Image Search Lens Tests Search, Text & Translate Options
In 2018, Google added a lens button to the mobile search image results. That eventually came to desktop as Google more tightly integrated Lens into Image Search. Now we are seeing Google test options for search, text and translate using Google Lens in Google Image Search. - Doogler Playing At The Google Arcade
Here is a photo of a doogler, a Google dog, in the Google game area at the Google Dublin office, playing near an arcade game. What a life…
Other Great Search Threads:
- Want to bring back a domain that hasn’t been used in years (& the content was deleted)? Via @johnmu: Google will probably need to relearn the site (i.e. starting over fresh). Don’t expect much based on the past content. You’ll, Glenn Gabe on Twitter
- Audience signals are used for optimization to help jumpstart the machine learning. Without them (or effective ones), ramp up will take longer. More here from the #PPCchat audio session: h, AdsLiaison on Twitter
- Hi Josh, 1. To clarify, Editor never automatically applies recommendations 2. The solid light bulb with circle indicates a user has manually applied or made an edit that’s in line w/ a rec, but then Get Rece, AdsLiaison on Twitter
- How does Google Search use keyword meta tags? Do they matter for SEO? Watch our latest episode of #AskGooglebot where @JohnMu answers these questions, Google Search Central on Twitter
- It helps to not frame SEO as some kind of voodoo, to explain clearly what you’re doing and why, and to back up your analysis & recommendations with official references & data. Just like you’d do even witho, John Mueller on Twitter
- My hot take is that there is room – and a necessity – for diverse people in SEO. If a site focuses on just one magic bullet, it’s going to struggle. Most won’t realize even after it’s too late. The web will c, 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 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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