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.

The Google page experience update for desktop is now fully live but it didn’t seem to impact rankings, as expected. Google said it has ways to verify that the Google Shopping merchant experience scorecard metrics are legit and if they are faked, those merchants will be penalized. Google temporarily paused as from serving in Russia. Google may one day crawl from outside of the US, maybe. Google does not have a demo account for Search Console. Plus, I posted the weekly video recap.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

• Google Page Experience Update For Desktop Done Rolling Out
  
  That is a wrap – the Google page experience update for desktop is now fully rolled out – as of yesterday, March 3rd. If you are counting, that is a 9-day roll out, which began on February 22nd and ended on March 3rd.
• Google: We Mechanisms To Verify Merchant Experience Scorecard Metrics
  
  A couple of weeks ago we reported that Google has a new set of ranking factors specific to the Google Shopping tab named the Shopping experience scorecard program. The concern was that merchants are asked to feed these metrics to Google and that the merchants will only feed positive scores, potentially manipulating the metrics and thus their rankings.





• Google Temporarily Pauses All Ads In Serving In Russia
  
  Last night Google announced it is temporarily pausing Google ads from serving to users located in Russia. This is due to the “ongoing war in Ukraine” according to the Google statement.




• Google: Googlebot May One Day Crawl From Outside The U.S.
  
  The other day I reported again how blocking US based users would require you to also block Googlebot, Google’s crawler. And that would be devastating to a site’s search rankings in Google. But John Mueller of Google said it is not out of the question that Google one day may decide to crawl from outside of the US.




• There Is No Google Search Console Demo Account
  
  Some folks are asking why there isn’t a demo account for Google Search Console like there is for Google Analytics. John Mueller said Daniel Waisberg and the Google Search Console team looked into it but it is “super hard, and requires constant maintenance.” That is why they have not done it yet.




• Search News Buzz Video Recap: Google Page Experience Desktop Update Live, Search Console Errors, IndexNow Growing, Local Map Interactive & Ads Paused In Russia
  
  This week in search, I reported how the Google page experience update for desktop has been fully rolled out. I also posted my monthly Google webmaster recap…




• Anton Shulke In Kyiv Making Bandages Out Of Bedding
  
  Many of you may know the loved Anton Shulke from the SEM industry. Well, he is based in Kyiv, the capital city of Ukraine, and he decided to stick it out during this invasion. He is sharing a number

Other Great Search Threads:

Search Engine Land Stories:

Other Great Search Stories:

Analytics

Industry & Business

Links & Content Marketing

Local & Maps

Mobile & Voice

SEO

PPC

Other Search

Feedback:

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