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 says indexing systems and algorithm update systems are independent and don’t impact each other. Google clarified its structured data carousel beta to add feature availability and where the markup goes. Google says ranking well in product results, images, etc does not impact how well you rank in web search. Google is testing mentioned in section within the knowledge panels. Google Maps updated its suggest an edit workflow. We have a recap of the Google Search Central Live event in Romania from Mihai. And I posted the weekly SEO video recap.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

• 
  Google: Indexing & Algorithm Updates Are Independent
  
  
  Google once again said that its indexing systems are completely independent of its ranking updates, like the core update. Gary Illyes from Google said indexing, canonicalization, and those types of “systems are independent” of core updates.
• 
  Google Structured Data Carousels Beta Docs Clarifies Feature Availability & Markup Location
  
  
  Google has made some changes to its new Structured data carousels (beta) documentation to list the feature availability of this carousel and also to clarify where to place the markup. Google wrote the “markup must be on the summary page, and you don’t need to add markup to the detail pages in order to be eligible for this feature.”
• 
  Google: Ranking In Shopping, Images & Other Verticals Doesn’t Hurt Your Web Rankings
  
  
  John Mueller from Google said that ranking well in the Google Shopping or Google Image vertical boxes does not impact your ranking in the core web results. He said, “I can’t imagine that they’d be connected” when asked about how ranking well in the Merchant Center results can impact the web results.
• 
  Google Knowledge Panels – Mentioned People
  
  
  Google is testing a “mentioned” button that shows other people mentioned in the knowledge panels in the Google Search results. We saw variations of “mentioned by” in Google Discover and Explore but now we are seeing something similar in knowledge panels.
• 
  Google Maps Suggest An Edit Flow Updated
  
  
  Google has updated the Suggest an edit feature within Google Maps business listings. Google said the new flow is “easier” and should help make updates to the Google Maps data.





• 
  Recap of Google’s Search Central Live Romania 2024
  
  
  Last week marked the first-ever official Google SEO-focused event in Romania ‘” Search Central Live Romania ‘” on a sunny 4th of April in Bucharest. As a Search Central Product Expert who lives in Bucharest, the event made for an exciting occasion for people from my local SEO community to listen to and interact directly with Googlers…





• 
  Google Bowling Alley Is Still There
  
  
  Google has had its very own bowling alley at the GooglePlex, the main Google headquarters in Mountain View, California for well over a decade now and guess what, it is still there. Here is a recent photo I found on Instagram of some Googlers bowling at that alley.
• 
  Search News Buzz Video Recap: Google Core Update Volatility, Helpful Content Update Gone, Dangerous Google Search Results & Google Ads Confusion
  
  
  This week, we covered that the Google March 2024 core update is still rolling out 38 days later, but we saw more volatility this week. Just a reminder that the Google helpful content update no longer exists. Gary Illyes from…

Other Great Search Threads:

Search Engine Land Stories:

Other Great Search Stories:

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Industry & Business

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Local & Maps

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SEO

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Over the past few weeks, Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, has been replying to complaints about some examples of search results being not just low-quality but also potentially harmful and dangerous. The sad part to me is that a couple of years ago, this was not the case with the Google search results (for the most part).

When I interviewed Hyung-Jin Kim, the Vice President of Google Search, at SMX a couple of years back, he told a touching story about this topic. He explained that a family member of his was going through a medical issue and that he went to Google Search to find answers. As a VP of Google Search, his goal was to make sure that the Google Search results never led anyone to information that can end up hurting that searcher. That is where EEAT came from, partially, to ensure the search results did no harm and were not dangerous.

Now, we have way too many complaints about the Google search results offering up dangerous and harmful results. Google has responded to some of those saying they are taking in the feedback and will do better in the future. A lot of it stems from Google showing more Reddit results because they say searchers seek it out. But as Steve Jobs use to say, “Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do.”

Danny Sullivan wrote, “Appreciate the feedback. Aware of these concerns. Have passed them on. Have been talking with the team about them.”

Here are some examples, some we shared before, of Google responding to some of these examples:

That unit appears automatically if the systems think it might be relevant and useful. I’s not like someone said “put it first for that particular query” — which I know you understand, but others reading this might not. That said, I can appreciate the concern and issue, and I’ve…

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 3, 2024

I did understand that point and concern. I didn’t say “because users all seem to like something, we show it regardless of relevancy.” But let me take a swing at some of those points again:

1) We want to ensure that *any* content we show in results — including forum content –…

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 3, 2024

I sort of thought this:

“As with any change to our ranking systems, nothing is perfect. There will be issues that come up, as I talked about in the past: https://t.co/urIBxL3gcQ… So our goal will be to keep improving things forward, and constructive feedback like this is…

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 4, 2024

That’s not what I said. I said we show forum content *at times* because users can find forum content to be useful, which is a fairly reasonable thing. People do find forum content useful.

That doesn’t mean it’s always useful, which is also why we don’t always show forum content.…

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— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 4, 2024

Great to know that Reddit, Quora, and a 3-year-old Avvo thread are “better” results for this legal query than the American Bar Association 🤦‍♀️

Makes it even better that the top answer on one of the Reddit threads is from someone with an 18+ profile with some answers so gross I… pic.twitter.com/5x4DR5T4CZ

— Joy Hawkins (@JoyanneHawkins) April 8, 2024

Appreciate the feedback. Aware of these concerns. Have passed them on. Have been talking with the team about them. Here’s some of what I’ve shared on this:https://t.co/9DpdWyDp4Ahttps://t.co/SRGGWu5dXxhttps://t.co/FUJen9R6Oahttps://t.co/Fsd4XP8ti5

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 9, 2024

Yeah, why is this affecting *so* many university sites? Any hackers/spammers care to chime in here? 😅 https://t.co/4UKmoFM5qz

— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) April 10, 2024

Example of unhelpful results pic.twitter.com/uiycU8xIPh

— AI Digital Marketing (@AiDigitalMktg) April 8, 2024

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I really don’t think the forum results are what anyone wants.

The 1st result I get is this nonsense (see image)

Aside from the fact that most ppl will see this and ask “why the hell is the 1st thing I see – this is crap” it’s dangerous.

Kids with eating disorders should not… pic.twitter.com/nn6Mmf4uVa

— Mordy Oberstein *Mistakes Happen* (@MordyOberstein) April 7, 2024

It is actually something we spoke about a bit on our daily recap video (a new series) yesterday.

Maybe Google needs to show this warning more often these days when Reddit shows up as Higman points out:

While Google continues to say search quality is better and unhelpful content will be reduced by 40% or so, while also promising quality improvements time and time again – most SEOs don’t expect much change.

I analysed the top-ranking sites for 1,000 health symptom keywords — many covering serious concerns.

The most prominent domain Google ranks is Mayoclinic.

The second most prominent is Quora, where it’s easy to find spammed, copied or AI-generated medical advice.

For instance,… pic.twitter.com/SbFaG6gEud

— Glen Allsopp 👾 (@ViperChill) April 11, 2024

I didn’t embed a ton of examples but I do expect Google to work on this issue and for this to be a thing of the past at some point… I hope…

Forum discussion at X.

As the Google March 2024 core update hits the 36th day of its rollout, we are seeing more ranking fluctuations and volatility being reported both by the Google tracking tools and within the SEO community through a spike in chatter. Maybe this is the last wave of the update before it is done?

This is a weird update with lots of ranking systems within the overall Google core ranking system is being updated. So we are/were expecting numerous big ranking volatility throughout the rollout. We were also expecting the update to take 3-4 weeks to roll out but now we are into week 5!

SEO Chatter

That being said, here is some of the chatter around the new volatility spotted over the past 24-hours or so from WebmasterWorld, social media and the comments on this site:

The update is still in progress. There are still small and medium-sized sites left to disappear or replace with expert forums

Similar here. It seems that tracking tools out there are still seeing instability going on though, so….. :

german serps are now flooded with Kleinanzeigen ( former ebay Kleinanzeigen), Aliexpress, marketplaces from big companies, shops i would never ever buy from.

Very high volatility on all my sites. Local and global websites, in several languages. End of the march core update?

Looks like USA and UK traffic are clamped down hard again this morning…-54% and -30% at 9:30am. Traffic to my home page is -76%! Let’s see if it suddenly shoots upward toward the latter part of the day as has been the trend. These ‘updates’ are killing off my business for weeks at a time…

Yesterday,Tuesday 9th April, my global site had three very unusual occurences. It is very rare that it has a one hour period of zero traffic whatsoever, yes it has occurred in the past especially on Xmas Day however yesterday three times in 24 hours it had zero traffic at 00.00 – 01.00, 11.00 – 12.00 and 22.00 – 23.00.

Furthermore its traffic looked very similar to the mess it was a few months ago i.e. mostly single page views. USA / Canada traffic was way down and looked very spammy whereas most of the other traffic looked normal.

So far today it’s looking messy as well plus US trafic is almost non-existant, hmmm…In-depth logs here I come.

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we are seeing this lack of traffic too. But not this long time periods. More 10 to 15 min.
And we see a traffic pattern that has not been seen for some month now: a short rush on a single item. Like 10 to 15 visitors in one second. In most cases it is safari browsers

I’m noticing the same too. Mass visits on a single post for a few weeks now. However, the traffic is very unstable even today, one hour is good or higher than last week, while the next hour the traffic is much lower than the previous week. The AI Disaster Continues

Ditto here. The roll on continues.

I see the same thing here. In addition, the pattern is currently emerging that traffic generally drops from 2 p.m. and suddenly rises very sharply from 6 p.m. onwards.

What is unfortunately also noticeable is that the number of posts in Discover that are pure advertising is increasing significantly. Especially about strange medical products

Google is definitely cooking something new. It’s not your regular shuffling. They haven’t rolled it out yet as I can see that version of the SERPs maybe once every 15 times I search but in the past, when that happened, that version became the real thing after a few days. Hard to explain it but I am bracing for another hit

this is for my other site that wasn’t hit. I checked it and for the main keywords, it was on the bottom of 2nd page. Again, if I check the sites normally on Chrome or Firefox that is the latest version, I see no changes. But a very old Firefox shows the change every few times I search, like something that is propagating but not rolled out completely yet.

.@rustybrick I’m guessing the March Core Update is still going? Seeing some pretty big fluctuations over the last 24-hours or so.

— Taylor Kurtz (@RealTaylorKurtz) April 10, 2024

Google Tracking Tools

The Google tracking tools show some levels of volatility over the past day or so but it does not seem as extreme as the level of chatter within the SEO industry. Here is what the tools are showing now:

SimilarWeb:

Semrush:

Advanced Web Rankings:

Mozcast:

SERPmetrics:

Accuranker:

Mangools:

Wincher:

SERPstat:

Algoroo:

Cognitive SEO:

More Google Update Stories

Here are our previous stories on these updates:

Maybe this is the last wave of this core update?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.