Google has posted a clarification that says it now “Google may use spam report submissions to take manual action against violations.” The update was posted here and added to the report spam page.

Microsoft Advertising will be transitioning from its SOAP to REST API and with that, on January 31, 2027, the SOAP API will be fully retired on January 31, 2027.

A bug has triggered scores of emails from Google saying it is collecting impressions on sites long since verified in Search Console. Do not be alarmed, it is a bug.

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

Google posted an update for the Google Ads and Google Analytics data controls yesterday where changes will be coming to the sources of the data. Google said this is to “simplify data controls and remove redundant settings between Google Analytics and Ads, we are planning to consolidate controls based on where the data is used.”

As part of an article from The Verge taking aim at SEOs, Google says that they are aware of self-serving listicles and work to prevent this abuse from impacting results.

Google has made some changes to the Google Business Profile policy document, specifically the identity change section. It is now much more descriptive than before.

It’s been a while since Google has come out with a new search spam policy and penalty to accompany it with and now we have a new one, “back button hijacking.” Back button hijacking is something many of us were surprised Google didn’t specifically disallow but now, Google said it is on the rise and […]

Google’s John Mueller said on Reddit that Google can handle and deal with having multiple URLs for a single web page, but it is not a good practice. He said it makes it harder for Google and Google will just pick one URL anyway.

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. Catching up on the newsletter…

The NY Times commissioned a study that says AI Overviews have holes in both grounding and accuracy.

Google’s John Mueller reconfirmed that Google Search may simply ignore outbound links from sites that violate its search spam policies. This is not new, Google has been doing this manually and algorithmically for years now but he reiterated this on Bluesky.

Google was asked if it is possible to add a new status to the XML sitemap statuses for “still processing.” John Mueller from Google responded on Blueshy saying, “I’ve chatted with the teams involved about this on & off, I’ve seen that it can be annoying.” But he added he has nothing to announce.

Google announced that on August 20, 2026 it will experiment with an updated set of commonly used ad technology partners. If the experiments go well, Google will switch it “on or after June 5, 2026.”

It looks like Google is testing a new report within Google Search Console named AI contribution. I have no clue what it looks like but I suspect it is a lot like the Bing Webmaster Tools AI performance reports.