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 said they communicate more often about algorithmic updates, not less. Google is testing snippets that expand to show more local intent information. Google product grid results are organic, not ads. Google is testing shaded background colors for shopping ads. Would you hire an SEO who doesn’t know the difference between crawling, indexing, rendering or ranking?

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

• Google: We Are Communicating About More Algorithm Updates
  
  Another point from the Google NYC SEO Meetup the other night was that Danny Sullivan at Google said Google has been more active about communicating about algorithm updates now than ever before. Danny said Google communicates more often about algorithm updates, which is why it feels that there are so many more updates now than previously.
• Google Tests Expandable Local Related Carousels Within Snippets
  
  Google is testing a search result snippet that shows a expandable drop down menus under the snippet that contains weather, hotels, restaurants, visual stories, events and more. When you click on these expandable menus, you get carousels of search results for those types of search features.




• Should All SEOs Know The Difference Between Crawling, Indexing, Rendering & Rankings?
  
  At the Google NYC SEO Meetup Lily Ray mentioned that when it comes to interviewing new employees for the Amsive Digital SEO team, she asks a question you must get right or you are immediate dismissed. The question is, what is the difference between crawling, indexing, rendering and rankings.




• Google Product Grid Results Are Organic & Are Huge
  
  We’ve been seeing a lot of grid-like formats with products and shopping results. We know some are ads and some are organic. John Mueller of Google just added official Google representative confirmation that many of these are organic – if you don’t trust that there is no ad label on them as evidence enough.




• Google Shopping Ads Carousel With Shaded Backgrounds
  
  Google is using a gray shaded background color for some of the results within the Google Shopping Ads carousel. I was able to replicate this, where for some images, Google thinks a light gray background works better than a white background. This is not tiled, where every other result is shaded, it is based on some other algorithm, maybe the color of the photo of the product?




• GooglePlex Outdoor Play & Games
  
  Here is a photo from a spot at the GooglePlex where Google has set up a nice and comfortable outdoor play area with outdoor games. This was shared on Instagram who posted “fun times at work.”

Other Great Search Threads:

• Brave Search Goggles, WebmasterWorld
• GA4 is a massive change from the status quo we know as Universal Analytics. To help, here’s the Ultimate Thread to learn: • Guide to get GA4 up & running • 10 reasons to implement GA4 today • How to build a Landing, Krista Seiden on Twitter
• Google ignores the changefreq setting in sitemaps, so you don’t need to do this at all., John Mueller on Twitter
• If you need something removed from the search results quickly, I’d just use the URL removal tool. If you want something to drop out, using noindex is fine. It doesn’t m, John Mueller on Twitter
• IT’S FINE! I WAS WRONG! If the server response with *ANYTHING* except 429/5xx then it CRAWLS AWAY but if it hits a 429/5xx it’ll use last successful robots.txt so just GET IT RIGHT *hahaha*, Judith Lewis on Twitter
• Work in journalism? Have opinions about Google products? We want to hear them. Take this survey, and help improve the Google News Initiative’s trainings on Google products. https://t.co/hbnVPFn9wH https://t.co/TomK, Google News Initiative on Twitter
• Don’t neglect technical SEO: Ever noticed that some URLs have ‘/’ at the end while others don’t? But any given URL ending with or without ‘/’ is the same, right? Well, yes. But not for Google. It treats them as dup, Kristina Azarenko on Twitter

Search Engine Land Stories:

Other Great Search Stories:

Analytics

Industry & Business

Links & Content Marketing

Local & Maps

Mobile & Voice

SEO

PPC

Search Features

Feedback:

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