Google’s John Mueller said that he discourages large sites from force indexing its pages to Google Search. He said on a comment on LinkedIn, “I strongly recommend not relying on trying to force indexing.”

For the original iTunes version, click here. This week…

Google may be testing a new ad unit named Sponsored Places. I think this is new, I mean, have any of you seen this before in the search results? Instead of it saying “Sponsored results” or a local pack with sponsored listings.

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

Google is rolling out an update for Google Ads advertisers to certify for some cryptocurrency and complex speculative financial products. This is “incrementally to all advertisers over a period of time and not all advertisers and certification applications will be affected immediately,” Google wrote.

The other day, Google released the Google Search Console AI-powered configuration tool and we continued to wonder when the other features, like branded queries and the social channels would go live. Well, Google’s John Mueller confirmed Google is still testing those two features before they are more fully rolled out to more users.

There has been an uptick in complaints from businesses around Google local reviews disappearing or being removed. We had something similar last October and it was fixed in December and now I am seeing more complaints about reviews going missing.

Google has added 53 new languages to AI Mode, which means the AI Mode works in just under 100 languages. This was announced by Nick Fox from Google on X yesterday.

Google’s John Mueller responded to a concern about having bad title tags and how that might impact your site in Google Search. He said on Bluesky “I don’t think our systems have a “we don’t like this one guy’s titles” filter.”

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

Google is losing one of its main sources of information for its Knowledge Graph, the CIA World Factbook. This was a reference resource produced by the Central Intelligence Agency between 1962 and 2026 with almanac-style information about the countries of the world.

There is a bug impacting a number of Google AdSense publishers where the anchor and vignette ads won’t close for users. This has been an issue since February 13th and Google is reportedly working on a fix for the issue.

Google Ads is now showing in the “When and where ads showed” report, the ability to see PMax, Performance Max, reporting. So you can see the placement, type, network and impressions you are getting from your PMax campaigns.