After almost a month delay with the page indexing report within Google Search Console, the report is now back to its normal timeframe. This morning it was reading that the last updated date was November 21st. Now, it is reading December 14th, which is a normal delay for this report.

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

Microsoft is testing the ability to upload an image directly within the Bing search bar. You click on a plus sign and Bing shows you “search with an image” and “make an image.” I get the search with an image feature but why add generative AI features, like make an image, in this search bar?

Google has updated its Manage customer reviews help documentation to expand and clarify the “Understand what happens to your replies” section. It now specifies why a business reply to a review may be hold, how long it takes and more.

Google is testing extremely long and expandable search result snippet descriptions in the search results. These are also AI-generated snippets, which we’ve seen before, but not this long. This goes on for eight lines of text.

Google Discover is testing and maybe rolling out an option to “Tailor your feed.” This allows you to tailor the feed with “Say in your own words what you want to see,” and Google will try to figure it out.

If you submitted a review appeal within Google Business Profiles it will likely take longer than normal to hear back. Google’s review appeals are delayed and Google cannot provide a specific response timeframe for pending cases.

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…

After several months of testing, Google seems to be rolling out the “Read more” links at the end of some of the search results listings. We saw Google test variations of this back in July and it now seems to be live.

Earlier this month, we documented that the average position sharply increased for many sites when Google made that num 100 change blocking a lot of automated queries. Well, for some sites, that number is dropping again, which may mean that there is a workaround for the blocking of those bots and automated queries.

Google Search Console’s performance report seems to finally be all caught up and up-to-date as of last night and this morning. I am seeing the normal two-hour or so delay, which has always fluctuated from an hour to five hours on a normal day.

Google can not show ads in AI Overviews with the exact match type. This is a change from back in May, where Google said otherwise. Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, wrote on X, “We have since updated this.”

Google updated its JavaScript SEO documentation to warn against using a noindex tag in the original page code on JavaScript pages. Google wrote, “if you do want the page indexed, don’t use a noindex tag in the original page code.”

Nick Fox is the SVP of Knowledge and Information at Google was interviewed again on the AI Inside channel by Jason Howel and Jeff Jarvin. He said a lot of interesting things but said no, Google won’t be offering standarized licensing deals for all publishers. He also said that optimizing for AI Search is the […]