Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Google Search ranking volatility remains heated but it spiked more again in the past 24-hours. Google updated its web search spam policies. Google AI Overviews don’t really show up for branded queries, but they may in some rare cases. Google Search has this recently viewed movies activity card. Google Search tests “states in the news” and “backstory” top stories sections in Google Search.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

• 
  Google Search Ranking Movement Heated, Volatility Continues 9/25
  
  
  Google Search still has not calmed its ranking shifts, volatility and movement. The search results remain incredibly volatile with rankings and traffic changing again in a big way over the past day or so. I know I sound like a broken record but even some of the tools are adjusting their volatility thresholds to counter the new higher volatility in the search results.
• 
  Google Updates Web Search Spam Policies
  
  
  Google has refreshed and updated its web search policies documentation. The big change is Google added more language around the site reputation abuse policy, while expanding, simplifying and clarifying other sections of its search policies.
• 
  Google AI Overviews For Branded & Navigational Queries???
  
  
  Google AI Overviews generally do not show up for branded or navigational queries. So if you are searching for a brand or company, generally, Google has not shown an AI Overview.





• 
  Google Recently Viewed Movies Activity Card
  
  
  Google now can show movies you recently viewed as an “activity card.” I am not sure if this is based on a movie you actually went to see in the theatres, watched online or just based on you clicking on movie listings within Google Search.
• 
  Google Search: States In The News
  
  
  Google Search has this newish news or top stories carousel format that Google titled “States in the news.” It shows you news or top stories from news publishers related to the query by U.S. state.
• 
  Google Search Backstory Top Stories Section
  
  
  Google Search has this news or top stories section titled “Backstory.” It comes up from political queries, maybe other news queries.
• 
  Sundar Pichai’s Google Soccer Jersey
  
  
  Here is a photo from that event where Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, was kicking a soccer ball. This photo shows him holding a custom made Google soccer jersey.

Other Great Search Threads:

Search Engine Land Stories:

Other Great Search Stories:

Analytics

Industry & Business

• Early sign-ups to EU’s AI Pact include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI — but Apple and Meta are missing, TechCrunch
• Exclusive: OpenAI to remove non-profit control and give Sam Altman equity, sources say, Reuters
• Google CEO Sundar Pichai Says Antitrust Trials Could Drag On for Many Years, Bloomberg
• Google files Brussels complaint against Microsoft cloud business, Financial Times (Sub)
• OpenAI CTO Mira Murati announces she’s leaving the company, CNBC
• OpenAI’s chief research officer has left, TechCrunch
• The AI platform shift and the opportunity ahead, Google Blog
• Why Mark Zuckerberg thinks AR glasses will replace your phone, The Verge

Links & Content Marketing

Local & Maps

Mobile & Voice

SEO

PPC

Search Features

Other Search

Feedback:

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Google is reportedly working on fixing a bug with not being able to properly respond to a noindex directive on some JavaScript generated pages. This is happening for some React apps using Single Page Applications (SPAs) that have the noindex directive on them but Google is not picking it up and thus indexing pages that should not be indexed.

This issue was spotted by Mark Williams-Cook, the Director at Candour and Founder of AlsoAsked, a popular SEO tool. He posted about the issue on LinkedIn and said, “Here’s a screenshot of over 9,000 “noindex” pages being indexed. Adding ‘noindex’ via JS can be a solution, but it’s absolutely not reliable.”

Here is that screenshot from Google Search Console’s indexing report:

He later shared that Google is now aware of the issue and is working on fixing it. “I spoke to Googlers about this and it is a bug they are working on fixing,” he wrote.

Mark went on to explain that this is an example of a React app that has a meta “noindex” added via JavaScript, but the pages are nevertheless getting indexed.

Martin Splitt from Google did speak in the past about noindex meta and JavaScript pages and sometimes, Google does have a hard to processing them. But these days, Google shouldn’t be challenged by them. I guess in this case, Google was?

Again, I suspect in this case, Google fetched and rendered the page prior to the JavaScript executing the noindex meta data. So Googlebot didn’t see the noindex directive yet. This can happen, it is rare, but this can happen and obviously did happen. Google has warned about this before, including using JavaScript to generate structured data in some cases.

Mark’s solution was to use CloudFlare to serve the noindex directive prior to the JavaScript executing its own meta data (which is served in the HTTP header), but that was only after he found out Google was not picking up on the first solution he had. Mark wrote, “With some Single Page Applications (SPAs), it can be difficult to have control over what is shown before the JS is executed. In this instance, I managed to get the pages to set a “noindex” before JS was rendered by using Cloudflare Transform rules.”

So if you noticed this issue as well, hopefully Google will patch it up and if not, look for an alternative solution – like Mark did.

Forum discussion at LinkedIn.

It seems that Google made a change, intentionally or unintentionally, to the site command within Google Image Search. When you do a basic site command, without appending keywords to the query, then Google will return no image results.

Here is a screenshot:

I spotted this via Kunjal Chawhan on X over the weekend and pined Google about it but I did not hear back as of yet.

I did notice that when you append a query to the end of the site command, it does return results:

I suspect this is a bug but what do I know…

Forum discussion at X.