Daily Search Forum Recap: May 24, 2022

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.

The past week or so have been a rough ride with the Google search ranking tremors and instability – some are convinced Google pushed out a core update but didn’t announce it. Google updated its video best practices to disclose the thumbnail transparency guidelines. Google is testing explore outfits and shop similar items. Google AdSense now shows screenshots for some policy violations. Bing is testing a branded sidebar navigation for some sitelinks. Oh, today was Google Marketing Live – a lot of news is coming out, which I will cover some highlights tomorrow.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

Google Search Algorithm Update Tremors & Instability Continues…
So last Monday, we reported about a Google search ranking algorithm update that touched down on May 16th – the 6 month or so anniversary of the last confirmed Google core update. Well, that unconfirmed Google update continued on throughout the rest of the week through today, I updated that story a bit to reflect that.

Google Updates Video Best Practices For Thumbnail Transparency Guidelines
Google has added one line to its video best practices document explaining that you should have at least 80% of your thumbnail pixels have little or no transparency to enable video indexing.

Google Search Explore Outfits & Shop Similar
Google’s search results keep getting more and more visual and with this newish Explore Outfits and Shop Similar box, we now see super large images that slide into other images. Here is a GIF of it in action, I personally was not able to replicate this but Khushal Bherwani posted this on Twitter.

Screenshots Now In The Google AdSense Policy Center
Google AdSense said it can now show you screenshots of your issues in the AdSense policy center. “To make it easier to determine what to fix when you have a policy issue, we’re introducing screenshots to the Policy center,” Google wrote.

Bing Tests Branded Sidebar Navigation Tool
Microsoft Bing is testing a branded side bar explorer bar on the left side for some branded queries. I was able to replicate it in Safari on Mac but not on Chrome yet. Basically if you search for brands, some will show a sidebar that replicates the sitelinks it shows in the search results.

Google Pittsburgh Welcome Back Balloons In Lobby
As the Google offices open up, they try to make Googlers feel excited to come back to the office. We’ve seen bands and events and more. Here is a smaller Google office, the Google Pittsburgh office, w

Other Great Search Threads:

Affiliate links are just a form of monetization, there’s nothing inherently bad about them., John Mueller on Twitter
Both XML sitemaps and RSS feeds can be helpful for crawling a site (the combination sitemap + RSS feed doesn’t make much sense though). I’d check out https://t.co/xc9rkqjYrN if you’re curious., John Mueller on Twitter
Looking at the first screenshot, those aren’t sponsored posts as far as I can tell. They’re monetized, but that doesn’t make them bad., John Mueller on Twitter
Building @Neeva search index means crawling and parsing billions of web pages 🤯 Any system that operates at the scale of billions of pages breaks all the time. Building a reliable large-scale system over unreliable behavior, Neeva on Twitter

Search Engine Land Stories:

Is Google Search showing fewer sitelinks Google News new design being tested How privacy changes affect B2B paid search marketing

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