I start off announcing the winner(s) of the Squid Game contest I had last week. Google finished the rollout for the November spam update after 8 days. That Google November spam update seems to be big, at least, it has some legs.  Some suggest that this update also target cloaked spam content with injected links. Google said do expect more algorithm updates, more core updates, more spam update and more of all the good updates. Google said it may begin testing the IndexNow protocol for sustainability efforts. Google has confirmed that the desktop page experience update will also look at intrusive interstitials. Google said there is no need for separate guidelines or requirements for interstitials that are for legal or consent reasons. Also John Mueller, Gary Illyes and Martin Split spoke about the future of SEO on a recent podcast. Google listed out all of the IP addresses Googlebot uses. Google sitelinks can now do scroll-to-text and highlight. Google said again one day machine learning developed content won’t be against its guidelines. Google Ads accounts can be suspended over Google webmaster guideline violations. Google said embedding videos on your pages can slow your site down but if you use other methods, Google may not notice there is a video there to index. Google said you should not create links to your site, well, kind of. Google Ads Editor version 1.8 is now available. Google’s keyword planner tool added year over year data. Bing Shopping added departments, stores, editors picks, deals, pricing trends and Amazon integration. Google local has updated its inventory design, ship to store and a new offline sales feed for Google Ads. Google has an easter egg for the no results found page, it shows a fishing game. Google posts a big EU antitrust deal over shopping but won an even bigger legal case in the UK over iOS tracking. And we all mourn the sudden and unexpected loss of John Carcutt. That was this past week in search at the Search Engine Roundtable.

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