Google Product Reviews Volatility, Local Search Ranking Update, New Search Features, MUM & BERT Expands and Search Console News

This was a busy week and I drove out to visit Greg Finn and friends in Buffalo, I helped co-host the Marketing O’Clock show and record some vlogs for the channel – so check out Marketing O’Clock on YouTube and your favorite podcast player. We are finally seeing ranking volatility in the search results related to the product reviews update after not seeing much early on. Google also released a local search ranking update that supposedly corrected the Vicinity update from December. Google launched a new highly cited top stories label and improved the about this result with a come back later warning in search. Google said it now uses MUM for detecting personal crisis searchers and expanded BERT to handle the detection of unexpected shocking content. Google Data Studio can now bring in Google News and Google Discover data from Search Console. Google Search Console’s structured data error report is more descriptive now. Google is killing off the URL parameter tool on April 26th. Google launched trusted store badges for merchants that score well in the Google experience scorecard. Google’s visual stories are now ranking well for competitive keyword phrases. Google’s John Mueller said nofollow is not a dampening factor, which many SEOs for some reason do not believe. John Mueller also said do not keep redirected URLs in your sitemap for over 3 months. John Mueller of Google was giving advice on how to improve your DA, no this was not an April Fools joke. Google rolled out a new visual design format for some queries. Google continues to test the expanded tab search snippet feature. Google is also testing displaying the image previews on the right side of the image pack. Google is testing an audio feature for some knowledge panels. Bing has round category icons to explore more images. Bing also has this massive Wikipedia box at the top of its search results. Google AdSense anchor ads for AMP sites are now working for auto ads. 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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