SEARCHENGINES
Daily Search Forum Recap: May 4, 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.
If you use Google Ads Scripts, the Google Ads or AdWords API, you may have some data issues – there was a data glitch the other day. Google added new travel search features, some are pretty useful. Microsoft Advertising announced a slew of new features and extended the RSA deadline. Did removing support for the URL parameter tool cause some crawl spikes? Finally, Google contiunues with its user interface tests. May the 4th (Schwartz) be with you 🌌🔫.
Search Engine Roundtable Stories:
- Google Reporting Issue With Google Ads, AdWords API & Google Ads Scripts
Google has confirmed that between April 25th 5:32PM ET and April 26th 3:24 PM ET there was a data reporting issue with those who pulled in data from the Google Ads and AdWords API or Google Ads Scripts. - Microsoft Advertising RSAs Deadline Extended, Auto-Generated Remarketing Lists & More Updates
Microsoft Advertising posted its May 2022 update showing what is new and changing with the ad network. What is new is that the deadline for Responsive Search Ads was extended, auto-generated remarketing lists, you can manage images for your Audience Ads within the Editor tool, DSAs expanded and more. - Was There Crawl Spikes From Google After URL Parameter Tool Went Offline?
As you know, last week, on April 26th, Google disabled the URL parameter tool within Google Search Console and stopped respecting any of the rules added to that tool. Some are asking if the recent crawl spikes they saw with Googlebot was related to this change. - New Google Travel Search Features
Google announced a bunch of new travel search features the other day across flights, hotels, destinations of interest and more. These new features aim at helping you “get inspired and research your options so you can book with ease when the time is right,” Google wrote. - Google Search UI Tests Continue With Full Width Videos & Grid Formatted Results
Google is continuing its mobile search user interfaces with more variations of its grid search results format and full width video search result snippets. - Facebook Meta North Face Swag
We post mostly Google photos, swag, etc but here is a new Facebook Meta branded North Face jacket. I kind of like it but I doubt I would wear it – who knows what type of trackers are on it…
Other Great Search Threads:
- Apparently you can now use categories in the business name, Local Search Forum
- Here’s another variation of grid formatted search results test I spotted last week. The difference with this test is that it leads users directly to the site vs just sending them to G images (yay!). https://t.co/h8Otc, Brian Freiesleben on Twitter
- I wonder how my new website got 200+ unique visitors without ever advertising it, Reddit
- I wouldn’t worry about the difference, but I am curious to read more about what you found out in terms of chatbots, so I’d love to see a link when you’re done 🙂, John Mueller on Twitter
- Some Tweets are for everyone & others are just for people you’ve picked. We’re now testing Twitter Circle, which lets you add up to 150 people who can see your Tweets when you want to share with a smaller crowd. Some o, Twitter Safety on Twitter
- The API uses the same data as the UI, and Search Console generally doesn’t filter bot traffic., John Mueller on Twitter
Search Engine Land Stories:
Other Great Search Stories:
Analytics
Industry & Business
Links & Content Marketing
- Hub & Spoke Content Marketing: What Is It, Conductor
- Influencer Marketing Experts Pick Their Favorite Tools To Manage Their Programs, Content Marketing Institute
- Can NLG tools be useful for copywriting?, Builtvisible
- 7 Blog Title Formulas That Get Clicks (With Examples), Ahrefs
- Account-Based Link Building: Why Relationships Trump Outreach Tactics, Semrush
- B2B Content Marketing Metrics: Tracking What Matters, KoMarketing
- Product-Led Content: What It Is, Why Use It, and How to Get Started, Ahrefs
- We Paid Over $5000 For Link Building – What Happened?, Search Engine Journal
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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