Google is testing showing only one star in the local pack in the search results. This is instead of showing five stars with some of those stars filled in with yellow. I am not seeing the single star partially filled up, but all those businesses may have 5-star reviews and not 3 out of 5 stars.

This was spotted by Jason Parks over the weekend who posted this screenshot on Twitter:

This is what I see, in comparison, to the screenshot above:

This has to be a test and I doubt it will stick, but it is cool to catch these tests.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Google’s John Mueller said that keyword stuffing alone would not make a page be deemed unhelpful. John added that Google is good at ignoring tactics like keyword stuffing, so that alone likely won’t be the reason for ranking issues in Google Search.

This conversation came up on Mastodon when someone pointed to a specific page that as ranking well even though they think the page has keyword stuffing on it. John replied saying, “we tend not to evaluate the quality of other people’s pages — it’s not really that useful, if you can’t change something there.”

But the SEO responded, “they are not other people. That’s my client. We are trying to figure out if there is any chance Google bot identified unhelpful content on our website. Because we were hit by helpful content update. My theory is since we are adding too much content on one page, it may appear as unhelpful content. Any inputs from your end will be appreciated.”

So John replied again saying, “I don’t think keyword stuffing alone would necessarily make a page unhelpful. Usually keyword stuffing is easy for search engines to ignore, it was one of the first things that people did to manipulate the results back in the 90’s.”

“I’d recommend going through the questions in our blog post, and ideally with someone who’s not associated with your site,” John added.

In 2018, John Mueller said something similar, saying that keyword stuffing alone wouldn’t result in a penalty and then last year saying keyword stuffed URLs doesn’t lead to a penalty either.

Forum discussion at Mastodon.

If you do some queries in Bing Search, you may get the Bing Chat box and a brief answer from Bing Chat at the top. We knew this was coming, Mikhail Parakhin, the CEO of Microsoft Bing said it would a week or so ago and now it seems to be here.

This shows up in all browsers, but when you try to navigate to the Bing Chat interface, it tells you that you need to be in the beta and use Microsoft Edge. If you are in the beta and using Edge, then it lets you continue your voyage.

I spotted this via David Iwanow on Twitter, he shared some screenshots there but here is a screenshot of what I see for the query [standing desk vs sitting desk]:

Here is a video of it in action:

Previously we saw Bing testing summarized from sources and thought maybe that was a hint of Bing Chat in Bing Search but no, this is different.

Glenn Gabe noted there is a setting for this as well:

Here is the difference between Bing AI chat featured snippets (just released) versus the traditional answers (w/out Bing Chat). Again, clicking any of the prompts or entering a follow-up question takes you to Bing Chat proper.

Oh, and Go Princeton (it’s where I’m located!) 🙂 pic.twitter.com/v1olmgrlsc

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 20, 2023

Forum discussion at Twitter.