Stories, page 3
- Google Business Profile has a new Collected info tab
Barry Schwartz says the feature he wrote about two months ago is now officially live.
- 131 SEO experts name relevance and links as top factors
It is expert opinion rather than data from Google, and one SEO says parts of it are nonsense.
- Nearly every "people also ask" answer is now AI
The related questions under Google's results now open into AI written summaries instead of links to sites.
- Product pages may earn 9x more per visit than blog posts
Two SEOs shared client numbers that point the same way, more money sits on the pages that sell.
- Sites that vanished from Google came back nine days later
Glenn Gabe says sites that lost nearly all search visibility around September 4 have fully recovered, and nobody outside Google knows why.
- News sites fell in France after AI answers arrived
Shopping and property sites mostly held up, so the pattern is not the same for every kind of business.
- Google says normal SEO is all you need for AI answers
No bot-written text, no special AI files, no scattered mentions, according to a new Google post.
- Some sites lost nearly all Google traffic in early September
Two well known SEOs report near total traffic losses, and bulk-made pages may be the link.
- Traffic estimates from popular SEO tools may be wrong now
Several well known SEOs say the numbers in Ahrefs and Semrush do not match Google's own click data right now.
- Local news may cover your business and link to your site
One SEO says small town stations are short on stories, and a link from their website is worth chasing.
- Missing June data in Search Console is a Google bug
Two well known SEOs saw the same gap in the same report on the same morning, so it is not your site.
- AI answers are turning up on local searches
Two SEOs posted sightings within days of each other, including one AI answer with a map inside it.
- Delete city pages that only swap the town name
A local SEO checklist says near-duplicate location pages are worth deleting, not fixing.
- Your Google position number may not mean what it used to
Google's John Mueller says the old idea of ranking one to ten is hard to map onto search results now.
- Google results are moving and an update may be underway
Two people who track Google rankings say something is moving, but nobody has confirmed what it is.
- That scary homepage warning in Google was just a bug
Search Console briefly told site owners their homepage was not in Google. It was wrong.
- AI answers may skip brands that plant their own praise
One SEO watched ChatGPT drop his brand from a citation after it spotted a self-recommendation.
- Buying cheap backlinks can quietly sink your site
A new marketplace sells links for pennies, and several well known SEOs say the sites buying them will pay for it later.
- Google's AI search briefly stopped linking to websites
A new Gemini model went live in AI Mode with almost no citations, and Google called it a bug.
- Google is building simple free tools into its answers
A working character counter now appears inside Google's AI answer box, and SEOs say any simple tool site could be next.
- Google puts comparison sites above hotels in Europe
Hotels, airlines and restaurants get pushed below three comparison engines in EU results, and Google says quality drops because of it.
- Google can lose faith in a site for months over bulk pages
Three SEOs are now showing sites that dropped after publishing pages at scale, and Google has put the reason in writing.
- Google is deleting AI-sounding replies to your reviews
Stock phrases like "thrilled to hear" are getting business replies wiped before customers ever see them.
- Two Google reports are stuck, and it is not your site
Barry Schwartz flagged both gaps, and Glenn Gabe says the lag is nothing new.