Industry News

Google Search is testing custom filters and pre-define search filter templates. It appears you can save your custom filters and reuse those filters for future searches. This is showing up for a limited number of searchers.

Google AdSense has removed reference to your privacy policy as a place to withdraw consent. AdSense now has clarified that the revocation link at the bottom of the page should say "Privacy and cookie settings".

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

In the past month, in Google-land, we have spoken a lot about the March 2024 core update, which ended on April 19th, a week before Google notified us it was done. This core update was painful for many, especially those who were hit by the September helpful content update. But more is to come, we have the site reputation abuse penalty coming in the next few days - are you ready?

Google's John Mueller responded to some questions around why sites hurt by the September 2023 Google helpful content update have not recovered with March 2024 Google core update. He said on X that while recoveries are still possible, "some things take much longer to be reassessed (sometimes months, at the moment), and some bigger effects require another update cycle."

Over the past week or so, I've seen two signals that OpenAI will launch its own search engine of sorts soon. The first is that search.chatgpt.com is showing in the log files for some servers, and also, yesterday, there were more business-oriented rumors of OpenAI launching a search engine on May 9th.

Google Ads will automatically pause low-activity keywords starting in June 2024. That means campaigns with keywords that were created over 13 months ago and have zero impressions over the past 13 months will be paused.

A couple of weeks ago Forbes blocked its coupons directory on its website from being crawled by Google. Now Forbes has completely wiped out all the coupons from its site, serving a 410 status code and removing the coupons link from its navigation.

Google Ads, Shopping Ads, Admob, and other Google Ads products will soon disallow deepfake sexual content, synthetic sexually explicit content, or synthetic content containing nudity services. I mean, this seems like something they should have disallowed before, but now any tool or service that is around these types of content will be disallowed.

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 posted its first feature announcement in over two months...