Google Bard, AI Powered Bing Search, Google On AI Content, Two Google Algorithm Updates & More

What an insane week between the AI announcements, algorithm updates, content, and so much more. I start off talking about Google’s Bard announcement and a bit about the Paris announcement two days later.

But Microsoft Bing stole the show with their demo of how Bing incorporates ChatGPT into Bing Search – it’s impressive. In fact, Yusuf Mehdi from Microsoft said Bing saw the largest relevancy boost in two decades, and that aligned with a Bing algorithm update story we wrote on January 18th. Bing even updated its webmaster guidelines to fit the new version of Bing Search. We also saw how the search ads get integrated.

It is shocking, maybe, how searchers don’t get how important this new AI-powered search will be. Google also had not just one but two unconfirmed Google search ranking updates, one on the 4th and one on the 8th/9th. Google’s Danny Sullivan reiterated more about how AI content is fine for search if it is helpful and then gave us a lot more advice. Google said JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa are all fine for structured data.

Google confirmed the GoogleProducer and GoogleProber user agents. Google is reprocessing a bunch of local reviews that were legit but were removed by accident. Google Business Profiles is removing emojis and characters from business names. Google Merchant Center has a snapshot view in search.

Google is testing gray snippet boxes in search. Google Podcasts carousel is going away in search. Microsoft Bing is tucking away its logo on the mobile search results page. And there was a poll asking SEOs how important the Yandex leak is for SEO. 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.

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