This turned out to be a pretty busy week in the search space. We had a possible, unconfirmed, but yet really heating up, Google search ranking update. Google posted advice on what site owners can do if their sites fall after a core update. Google confirmed that the Google Discover feed is impacted by these core updates. Google also said they do smaller core updates more frequently and do not confirm those to the community. Google also confirmed they launched back in late February a featured snippets update to show fresher results when relevant. Google Ads expanded its broad and phrase match to include keyword close variants. Bing is looking to update its webmaster guidelines and wants to know what you think they should penalize. Bing said negative SEO really doesn’t seem to work. Dan Shure posted his audio notes from a private dinner he had with Gary Illyes of Google and other SEOs from two years ago. Bing said removing spam is not suppressing free speech. Google suggested clips is now using a modal. Google removed references to PageRank and the 200 ranking signals from a help document. Google said there is no such thing as LSI keywords. Google local knowledge panels are letting some people edit the people also search for feature. Google is testing dropping the breadcrumbs from the search results snippets in mobile. Google hotel reviews are supplementing the TrustYou data. Google’s quality raters guidelines went missing, then was redirected to a new location. RankRanger added tracking for FAQ and how to rich results. Google Ads Editor 1.1 launched and Google Keyword Planner tool expanded more keywords. Finally, make sure to check out the two new vlogs, one was part two with Rand Fishkin of SparkToro and the other was with Tanu Javeri of IBM – and do not forget to subscribe! That was this past week in search at the Search Engine Roundtable.
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