SEARCHENGINES
Daily Search Forum Recap: September 2, 2021

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 may have pushed an algorithm update on September 1st, we have a story showing the SEO chatter and tracking tools picking up on the update. Google added shipping and return annotations to both paid and free shopping and search results. Chrome beta can really push your competitors when your customers are visiting your website. Google added new documentation on how to optimize your feed for the Chrome follow feature. John Mueller of Google said he uses Bing to debug Google. I posted the big Google webmaster report for September – go check it out.
Search Engine Roundtable Stories:
- Was There A Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update On September 1st?
There are some signs of the start of a Google search ranking algorithm update that kicked off on September 1, 2021. The truth is, it seemed like an update touched down for a short period of time and then slowed down. There are not a huge number of complaints, but the tools are picking up on the fluctuations in the Google search results. - September 2021 Google Webmaster Report
Well, I got to say, the last month was an interesting one for webmasters, marketers and SEOs in the Google organic space. We finished off the prolonger link spam update, safe browsing was removed from the page experience update, which should have been fully rolled out by now but Google did not confirm. Oh and that update might be bigger than just a tiebreaker but it is still pretty small. - John Mueller Often Debugs Google Using Bing
John Mueller, a Google search advocate, who we all know so well if you read this site. He said he will use Bing to debug Google issues. He said on Twitter “I often use Bing when debugging.” - Google Adds Shipping / Return Annotations To Shopping & Search Results
Google announced it has added new shipping and return annotations in Google Search and Shopping results. This works across both the free and paid listings. - Google Adds Documentation On Chrome Follow Beta Feature
Google had added a new section to the Google Discover help documents around markup you can use to define your RSS feed for Chrome to use for the “follow” feature. In May, Google Chrome announced an RSS reader like feature for Chrome named Follow. - Chrome Beta Can Display Competitors When Customers Are On Your Site
Part of the latest version of the Chrome beta, not out to the masses yet, is a feature named “continuous search.” Continuous search basically will show you search results along the top of the page when you are browsing web sites. Essentially, it can show your competitors sites when people are looking at your site. - SEO Perfume
Here is a bottle of perfume designed for SEOs. It was shared by Malte Landwehr on Twitter where the bottle says “sexist SEO alive” with the label Bluebox, Eau De Parfum on the bottom.
Other Great Search Threads:
- A birthday #GoogleDoodle for Polish doctor, immunologist & microbe hunter Rudolf Weigl 🔬 Through research of bacteria carried by body lice, he developed the first effective vaccine against epidemic typhus & helped save, Google Doodles on Twitter
- Did you catch the recent update to Google’s Featured Snippet results? It related to bolding of content in the snippet, allowing users to locate important text and answers faster. The same update actually applies to some PAA, Brodie Clark on Twitter
- Hreflang just swaps out URLs, there’s no mechanism to block URLs from being shown only in certain locations (regions, countries, states). Maybe you can do something with GMB entries (I don’t know)? Normal web, John Mueller on Twitter
- I’m part of a test where the borders on Top Stories are removed. Neat. cc @rustybrick https://t.co/vvP6i6Lzuj, Shalom Goodman on Twitter
- Occasional server errors are not a problem, they’re pretty common across the web. Search is pretty good at dealing with that., John Mueller on Twitter
- robots.txt is a long standing way to prevent crawling. People absolutely make mistakes with it, as I’m sure you know. But to be crawled or not is a, Danny Sullivan on Twitter
- September 2021 AdSense Earnings and Observations, WebmasterWorld
- Web search is so ingrained in our daily behavior that some may argue it’s a solved problem with little room for innovation. I disagree — learn more about how our @Microsoft #Bing team is making search more modern, intuitive, Jordi Ribas on Twitter
SEO
- SEO Split-Testing [Case Study] “Replacing “You’ll Love in 2021” with “Online” in the Title Tag for Category Pages“, Semrush
- Tested: Is Joomla Good For SEO In 2021?, Seobility Blog
- YouTube SEO: How to Optimize Videos for YouTube Search, Jeff Bullas
- “If your page isn’t indexed, other things don’t matter” – Interview with Renata Gwizdak, Onely Blog
- Google E-A-T: Authority of Content, Its Author, and The Website Where It Lives, Wellspring Digital
- Multilingual Image SEO: Reflecting your audience for maximum success, Hallam
- Word Count Content Study 2021, Embryo
Feedback:
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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.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Algorithm Update, Yandex Search Factors Leaked, ChatGPT Craze (Bing/Google), Bing Lastmod & More Yahoo Search

In this week’s recap, I covered the unconfirmed Google update that seemed to impact product review sites but maybe more on January 26th. Yandex had a huge leak, and SEOs and marketers dug through the search engine’s source code. Google’s answer to ChatGPT might be Apprentice Bard using LAMDA Sundar Pichai of Google basically confirmed this. Google’s John Mueller blasted some links sellers. Google Search Console updated the video indexing report. Google said to try to nofollow site credit links in your footer. Google said spammy links from porn sites should not be a priority. Google said if you redesign your site, the rankings make go “nuts.” Google Search Console verification does not impact your rankings. Google said firewalls and CDNs are the biggest reason for why your site is blocking crawling. Google updated its canonicalization docs in a big way. Google said don’t use relative paths in your canonicals. I posted the big Google webmaster report for Friday. Microsoft Bing said the lastmod field in your sitemap file is critical. The new BingBot might go 100% today. Google Ads announcements and news seemed to have slowed since late last year. Google reported earnings that showed their ad revenue was down 3.6% year over year. Yahoo Search is really going to be making a comeback, I have more evidence. And if you want to help sponsor those vlogs, go to patreon.com/barryschwartz. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.
Sponsored by BruceClay, who has been doing search marketing optimization since 1996 and also has an amazing SEO training platform.
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