April 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 notified advertisers that some ad customizers will stop working soon. Google discontinued the limited use video carousel markup. Google Maps has new directions and travel…

Fabrice Canel from Microsoft announced that BingBot now fully supports Brotli compression and will soon be testing zstd Zstandard compression, a lossless data compression, for its crawler. Fabrice Canel wrote on X, “Bingbot now supports Brotli compression for all URLs after a successful ramp-up to 100%!” Microsoft began testing support for BingBot Brotli compression a…

The topic of using hyphens in domain names is one of the oldest SEO topics we have in this space. Heck, in 2004, SEOs said there was a specific Google ranking algorithm that filtered out domains with hyphens in them (Google did not by the way) – SEOs called it the hyphen filter. More recently,…

Gary Illyes from Google said in the recent Google SEO office hours the Google Indexing API may work for unsupported content formats, but that you shouldn’t be “surprised if suddenly it stopped working for unsupported verticals overnight.” He said this at the 10:15 mark into the video: Question: I would like to know if I…

Google was asked if having two websites and Google finding out about them would cause the websites to drop in rankings. John Mueller from Google said that is “not likely,” adding that many people have several websites and that is fine. This question came up in the April Google SEO office hours at the 32…

Google is testing another ad format, another card like format, for its search ads. We previously saw the vertical Google Ad cards, then the carousel horizontal ad cards format and now here are just plain horizontal ad cards. This was spotted by Azeem who posted the following screenshot on X: Just so you have it,…

For the original iTunes version, click here. The Google March 2024 core update is still rolling out, almost 6 weeks now, and we saw two shifts of ranking volatility, both mid-week and the weekend before. Google’s Danny Sullivan went on the defensive on search quality and forum listings in the search results. Google’s site…

Have you ever been in a situation where not everyone was on the same page? It happens often in the workplace and usually is caused by different expectations among stakeholders. Here are some ways to set and manage expectations for PPC clients and agency teams. Outline expectations during the sales process Setting expectations at the…