SEARCHENGINES
Google Removes Search Features Bug Confirmation But Replaces It With Google Discover Search Console Reporting Error

Google has done something unusual, it has removed one of the confirmed data anomalies notes about a search features bug, and added a new note confirming a bug with Google Discover logging resulting in a data drop in the Search Console Discover performance reports on October 23rd.
As a reminder, Google posted on October 28th that there was a bug in Google Search with some search features including but not limited to Top Stories. I captured the message and linked to it above but if you don’t believe me, here it is in the Wayback Machine. Here is what Google wrote “Google released a fix to a bug that primarily affected some search features, such as Top Stories, and that became most noticeable around October 18-19. The bug fix will take about a week to fully rollout.” So I assume it was fixed but why remove this note? Why not annotate the note?
And then, Google added a new note, dated October 23rd, impacting Google Discover. The issue was with a logging error that caused a drop with the Google Discover performance report on October 23rd. This was not a bug with Google Search results, it was just a reporting glitch and the search results were not impacted.
Here is what the page looked like before:
Here is what it looks like now:
So if you notice a drop in Google Discover on October 23rd in your Search Console reports, that was a bug with the report. Regarding October 18th through 28th, I am really not sure…
As a note, I did ask Google for more details on the October 28th note, which I never got.
Update: John Mueller said on Mastodon it was removed because Google doesn’t document search bugs on that page, he said “The complication is basically that we don’t have a great place to put things like this, but we’ll figure it out. The “text” there is still relevant, we just don’t have a good place to put it.”
Forum discussion at Mastodon.
Update 2: Later this afternoon, Google added the notice back, with some changes, here is a screenshot:
Source: www.seroundtable.com
SEARCHENGINES
Google Mars Space Office Design At Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Did you know that the Google office in Belo Horizonte, Brazil has a room that looks to me designed to look like planet Mars? I could be wrong but look at the volcanic rock-like carpets and bubble thing hanging from the ceiling.
This was posted by Google’s Daniel Waisberg from the Search Central Live Belo Horizonte on Twitter. The full size image is on Twitter, by the way.
This post is part of our daily Search Photo of the Day column, where we find fun and interesting photos related to the search industry and share them with our readers.
SEARCHENGINES
Microsoft Advertising Target Shoppers By Browsing Categories With Keyword Boosters

The Microsoft Advertising team announced its PromoteIQ launched a new way to target your ads, by targeting shoppers based on the categories they browse with the ability to also use keywords as a booster for campaign bids.
Nicole Farley explained on Search Engine Land, “this latest development in category-based targeting with keyword leveraging is supposed to maximize revenue and sales for both retailers and advertisers, while also delivering an exceptional experience for shoppers. Interested advertisers should test the new.”
Unlike traditional keyword targeting, “which requires advertisers to research and build an exhaustive list of keywords per campaign,” Microsoft said. With this new targeting shoppers by what they browse, “advertisers only need to test and retain a few high-performing keywords,” Microsoft added.
Microsoft said that in their tests, “campaigns that boost bids by keyword whilst targeting by category exhibit 320% higher click-through-rate (CTR) than the campaigns without boosting bids by keyword.” “Meanwhile, retailers saw benefits from this solution by achieving 8x higher revenue per thousand impressions (RPM),” Microsoft added.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Search Console Shows If embedURL Page Uses indexifembedded

Google Search Console’s URL Inspection tool can now report if the embedURL page for a video uses the newish indexifembedded robots tag. The indexifembedded tells Google if Google is allowed to index the content of a page if it’s embedded in another page through iframes or similar HTML tags, in spite of a noindex rule.
This was spotted by Jon Henshaw and posted on LinkedIn. He explained that he requested that Google add to the URL Inspection Tool to show if “indexifembedded” is being used, “and through the stars and moons aligning and perhaps other miracles, they told me they added it today,” he said.
Here is his screenshot:
You can see in the “indexing allowed” section it says “No: ‘noindex’ detected in ‘robots’ meta tag, ‘indexifembdedded’ detected in ‘robots’ meta tag.”
Jon explained what this means:
If you use YouTube and make your video Unlisted, and then embed the video on your site, Google won’t index it. Why? Because they add a “noindex” directive to the page that serves the video on your page. Bummer!
However, if you use Vimeo, make your video Unlisted, and then embed it on your site, Google can still index it! Why? Because unlike YouTube, Vimeo adds “noindex” *and* a special directive created by Google called “indexifembedded.” That tells Google to index the video on any page that has an iframe embedded video.
Coupled with Vimeo automatically generating and inserting VideoObject Schema structured data for all embedded videos (including Unlisted videos), businesses now have the best chance they’ve ever had to get their pages to rank for videos instead of competing with their video hosting provider.
Jon knows this because well, he is the Senior Director, SEO at Vimeo, and Vimeo is a massive video site.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
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