Daily Search Forum Recap: June 5, 2020

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.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

Google Search Shuffles; SEMRush Guest Posts Controversy, Bing Webmaster Tools Updates & More
It was a busy week in search; I posted my monthly Google webmaster report, which sums up the past month in SEO. I also noticed Google search ranking changes earlier in the week. SEMRush ran into a bit of a scandal...
Google Rich Results Now Showing For Home Pages - Is It A Bug?
Brodie Clark posted screen shots of Google showing rich results, i.e. stars and FAQ schema, for a couple of site's home pages in the Google search results. Google has said it generally does not show rich results for home pages, both John Mueller and Gary Illyes said this in the years past.
New: Site Scan In Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing launched a new feature in the new version of Bing Webmaster Tools - Site Scan. Site Scan is basically a tool that you can run to see common SEO issues with your site. This is run in real time, so you press start scan, and then wait for Bing to send you back the report.
Prabhakar Raghavan New Lead Of Google Search; Replaced Ben Gomes
Prabhakar Raghavan, who has been running the Ads and Commerce teams since 2018, is replaced Ben Gomes as the head of Google Search and Assistant. Ben Gomes is still with Google, he is just moving to Google Education. Ben took over as head of Google Search in 2008 when he replaced John Giannandrea, who replaced Amit Singhal.
Google Wont Add Featured Snippet Highlight Tracking To Search Console
When Google launched featured snippets anchor and highlight feature, it came with added tracking parameters to the URL you click on from Google. Google adds on #:~:text= to the URL you click on from Google.
Google Keyword Planner Adds Refine Keywords
Google added the ability to refine keywords directly in the Google Keyword Planner tool. Google wrote this is to help "make it easier for you to find keyword ideas that fit with your new and existing campaigns, you can now refine keywords in Keyword Planner."
New Google Ads Explanations Show Changes In Account Performance
Google Ads introduced a new feature that has been in beta since late last year named Google Ads Explanations. Explanations give you insights into large changes in your Google Ads account performance. These explanations help you quickly find out why it happened with the performance of your campaigns.
Google Austin Library - Video
Google's Austin office is nice, well, if we could go there. But here is a photo of the library at the Google Austin office. Plus, embedded below is a video of it that I found on Instagram.

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

Google Facing $5 Billion U.S. Lawsuit Over User Tracking, WebmasterWorld
If you want to block something from being crawled, you should block it from being crawled :), John Mueller on Twitter
or maybe it's a sign that you could be doing more in other languages yourself, that there's room for you to expand? And, if it's just automated translation spam, pro, John Mueller on Twitter

Daily Search Forum Recap: June 5, 2020

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

Search Engine Land Stories:

Other Great Search Stories:

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

Most Recent Articles

Google: Ignore Link Spam Especially To 404 Pages

Google: We Have Taken Action On Some Parasite SEO In Recent Update

Mikhail Parakhin Breaks Silence On Mustafa Suleyman Of Microsoft (Kinda...)

Google Business Profiles Gains Select Preferred Menu Source

Google: Crawl Budget Goes Across All Googlebot Crawling, Not Just Web Search

Programming Note: Offline For Passover