SEARCHENGINES
Local Study Says Review Recency Impacts Local Rankings in Google Search
Another small study done by Joy Hawkins says that the recency of reviews does impact the rankings of those local business listings in Google Search and Google Maps. Like the previous studies, this was not really statistically significant but it is nice to see a case study looking at these in isolation.
One of her clients paused asking for reviews and noticed that their local rankings started to go down. So they had the client ask for reviews again, thus getting more recent reviews and with that, rankings in the Google local results, began to pick up. Joy showed the progress in rankings with this graph:
She said “I have also seen this pattern with other clients of ours. We recently had a client who got filtered back in the summer for keywords they had historically ranked very well for. When I dug into possible reasons why I noticed he hadn’t had a new review in over 3 years. While these are obviously just 2 examples, I have seen this same pattern over and over.”
Her previous study said 10 reviews get you a boost and keywords in reviews don’t matter.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Source: www.seroundtable.com
SEARCHENGINES
Daily Search Forum Recap: September 9, 2024
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 Ads will sunset enhanced CPC in March 2025. Google Business Profiles sends out broken appointment link notifications. Bing doesn’t yet use ProductGroup markup, but may use it soon. Bing treats 308 redirects like 301 redirects. Bing is testing a button for shopping results named “see details.”
Search Engine Roundtable Stories:
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Google Ads Saying Goodbye To Enhanced CPC In March 2025
Google Ads emailed advertisers using Enhanced cost-per-click (eCPC) to let them know that in March 2025, Enhanced CPC will be sunset and any campaigns using Enhanced CPC will be migrated to Manual CPC bidding. -
Google Business Profile Appointment Link Broken Notifications
Google is emailing some businesses when it detects that their Google Business Profile appointment link is not working. Google’s email says, “Fix your business Google link.” -
Bing Treats 308 Redirects Same As 301 Redirects
Fabrice Canel from Microsoft said that Bing Search treats 308 redirects the same as they treat 301 redirects. This is the same as what Google said back in 2021, although Google has been a bit wishy-washy on redirects over the years. -
Bing May Use ProductGroup Markup In The Future
Microsoft Bing may use ProductGroup markup in the future for its “captions” in the Bing Search results. Fabrice Canel from Microsoft said while they do not support it yet, “it’s on our radar” and “the team is closely monitoring its adoption.” -
Bing Product Search Results With See Details Button
Bing is testing a big blue “see details” button for some of the product listings in its search results. Normally when you hover your mouse cursor over the products, they expand a little but now they are also showing a blue button to “see details.” -
Google European France Fence
Here is the fence in front of the Google office in Paris, France, I believe. It is one of those European castle-like fences, but the polls are in the Google red, blue, green, and yellow colors.
Other Great Search Threads:
Search Engine Land Stories:
Other Great Search Stories:
Analytics
Industry & Business
- Bill Gates Talks to CNET About AI, Misinformation and Climate Change, CNET
- Google second antitrust trial advertising model, CNBC
- How to fix Google search, Financial Times (Sub)
- Remedies to Google’s Search Monopoly Will Be Decided by August 2025, Judge Says, New York Times
- DOJ May Seek To End or Change Google’s AI Overviews, Hall Analysis
- Google’s $20bn ad tech business to play for at next antitrust showdown, Financial Times (Sub)
- Google’s case in the Department of Justice ad tech lawsuit, Google Blog
- Kremlin claims $235m from Google, Telegraph
- Google’s Ad Technology to Be Challenged in Second Antitrust Trial, New York Times
- Trawling The Google Trial Exhibits For Privacy-Related Tidbits, AdExchanger
Links & Content Marketing
Local & Maps
Mobile & Voice
SEO
PPC
Feedback:
Have feedback on this daily recap; let me know on Twitter @rustybrick or @seroundtable, on Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky and you can follow us on Facebook and on Google News and make sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or just contact us the old fashion way.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Search Volatility Still Heated After August Core Update Rollout
It is like the Google August 2024 core update didn’t finish rolling out, or maybe something else is going on, because I am still seeing a lot of signals of intense search ranking volatility in the Google Search results. The tools are all still heated and the chatter within the SEO community is still pretty lively.
I mean, Google may have announced the August core update is done rolling out, but maybe this is the remnants of the end of the rollout? It can also be a totally different update that Google did not confirm? It is hard to say but what we do know is that many site owners and SEOs are still seeing a lot of volatility and movement in the Google Search results.
It seemed to have started or continued the day Google announced the rollout was complete. The movement continued from September 3rd through today, September 6th.
Google Tracking Tools
Just look at these tools, you’d expect them to calm down a bit after September 3rd, but most have not:
SEO Chatter
The chatter across WebmasterWorld, social and here did not die down at all. Here are some quotes:
G analytics is broken or this update killed my main site. Has anyone else noticed this huge drop today?
GA4 has practically been unusable for us. Even with just the basics. Traffic way down for us as well today.
Big drop yesterday and today looks terrible as well.
Someone could think that the end of the update was the update, cause just in time traffic got worse again, sales are non existent from google traffic. google user engagement is near to ZERO.
Traffic is ridiculously high since the return from Labor Day holiday for me. Search traffic is up 60% today at 1pm. Yesterday search was up 30% overall. Will be nice if that keeps up, but…
There’s been a lot of volatility here all day since yesterday. Moments of high traffic, followed by huge drops. Old pages receiving a lot of traffic, then disappearing… The update is definitely still active…
Something is going on for sure. The SEMrush Sensors still on a high range.
Like I commented earlier… Something happened on the 3rd of September.
Just when some of us thought we had a boost or was safe from the core update, Googlers hit the “Nuke!” button and now more sites got obliterated.
There is still something running. The traffic and serps are all over the show again. Many of our keywords are out of the top 100 again. Started 2 days ago.
Same here. 2 days ago I had many sales, which was very unusual. Now again nothing
I wrote earlier that there is still something moving around. We can look at 3rd September as the start point of this movement. The movement in and out of serps again.
100% agree. Something is going on for sure.
This type of chatter just goes on and on.
Again, I am not sure if this is the tail end of the completed core update or of this is something new. But something is still brewing.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
SEARCHENGINES
Google August Core Update Done, Google Interview, Google Ads & Merchant Center News & The YouTube Algorithm SEO
This week, the Google August 2024 core update finished rolling out, a bit earlier than expected. There is still search volatility, a lot of it, days after the core update completed. I also posted a huge interview with Google’s Danny Sullivan on the core update. I posted the big Google Webmaster Report for September 2024. Google updated its canonical doc to say do not specify fragments in your canonicals. Google Search finally supports AVIF images. Google is testing a new forum display for its search results. Google is testing a new shopping search design. Bing Knowledge panels has this table of contents that is interactive. Google Business Profile may be dropping the Q&A feature in some regions. Google is testing new map pin shapes. Google Trends email subscriptions are going away. Google will automatically link Google Ads and Google Merchant Center accounts. Google Ads now has a merchant products tab for images. Google Ads will opt out new accounts from serving ads on parked domains. Google Ads product category level insights is live. Microsoft Advertising announced a bunch of new features. Google Analytics 4 has new benchmarking data. I posted a bunch of videos from YouTube algorithm and SEO questions and answers. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.
Sponsor: BruceClay one of the founding fathers of the SEO space, doing search marketing optimization since 1996. Bruce Clay is big into SEO training, check out seotraining.com to learn more and check them out at bruceclay.com. Also, check out their new product, Prewriter.ai – this tool empowers writers to write better and more efficiently, so check it out.
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