What a week, we had the launch of the September 2022 core update that started off strong and fast. Google confirmed the helpful content update is done rolling out but I bet most of you didn’t notice anything. Google even possibly had a local search ranking update, or it might be some ranking bug. Google also may be showing fewer featured snippets, maybe. Google Maps review guidelines now disallow incentivizing customers to remove or replace negative reviews. Google said word count is not a thing and even dropped the article too short Search Console error. Google expanded Merchant listings, added new structured data properties and added two new Search Console reports for products. Google also added a new HTTPS report in Search Console. The URL Inspection tool screenshot render feature now seems twice as long. Google is testing highlighted featured snippets, in yellow and blue. Google said crawl spikes aren’t global but rather on a per site basis. Google consolidated its A/B testing help content into a new document in the help section. Google Ads renamed ad extensions to assets and added new streamlined tools. Google Ads has a new page to see all automatically applied recommendations in one bundled place. Google Ads scripts now supports Performance Max campaigns. That was this past week in search at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Sponsored by Wix, check out their new Wix SERP's Up Podcast, I was a recent guest.

Search Topics of Discussion: