Google Helpful Content Update Hits, New Bard Features, Bing Webmaster Tools Updates & Quality In Search

Google’s helpful content update is still rolling out, and the SEO chatter is super heated this week, with tons of sites reporting huge drops. But the Google tracking tools are not showing heated weather, in fact, they are super calm. Google clarified that the helpful content update does not yet demote hosted third-party content. Google Bard added a bunch of features, including the ability for Google Search to double-check the answers. Google said quality affects every system in search and then dug into quality of old large sites. Google’s John Mueller said a compilation of ChatGPT output is not unique content. Google had some more issues with site names, this time in the Google News tab. Bing announced big updates to the Bing Webmaster Tools performance report, but Bing did not break out Bing Chat data there. Bing Webmaster Tools sitemap index coverage report is fully live. Bing is dropping the disavow link tool. Bing Chat is rolling out personalized answers, what we’ve been calling memory. Bing Search shows recent Bing Chat topics at the top of some searches. Google raised its ad prices to reach revenue goals. Google expanded its access to its AI tools. Google Ads has a new indicator for limited by bid strategy. Google Ads caused confusion during a migration of mapping data from UA3 to GA4. Google Maps updated its fake engagement and personal information user-contributed policy. Google is testing blue highlighted texts in normal snippets. Google is testing EU energy label icons for products. Bing is testing a new lock icon on secure websites. Google AdSense has updated its verifications. And congrats to Yusuf Mehdi and Mikhail Parakhin of Microsoft Bing on their promotions. 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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