Daily Search Forum Recap: November 20, 2023 -

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.

You can send your site to Google if it lost a lot of traffic in Search, Discover and/or News. Google Search Console has a bug with some of its experience reports. Google Search notes are public and crawlable and can thus be found in the Google Search results. Google announced the small business shopping search filter. Bing Chat will offer a read aloud option. Google Ads performance max product segmentation is out. I also posted part two of the vlog with Dave DiGregorio. Oh, and what a wild weekend for OpenAI and Sam Altman (those stories in the industry section below).

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

How To Let Google Know That Your Google Search, Discover & News Traffic Significantly Dropped

On Friday, Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, said you can reply to a thread on X or post a help thread in Google’s forums to let him know about sites that saw a significant drop in Google Search, Google Discover and Google News traffic recently.

Google Investigating Issue With Search Console Experience Report URL Declines

Google is currently investigating a likely issue or bug with the Google Search Console experience reports. The issue is that they seem to be showing a decline in the number of valid reported URLs across the core web vitals, HTTPS, AMP, mobile usability and other page experience reports.

Reminder: Google Search Notes Are Public & Can Show In Google’s Search Results

This is just a reminder that the new Google Search and Discover Notes feature that launched as a Search Labs experiment are crawlable, indexable and visible in Google Search. You can see them both in the Search Labs experiment when looking at notes but also if you search for them outside of the Search Labs experiment.

Bing Chat To Offer Always Read Aloud Option

Microsoft is working on a feature or setting to allow searchers and users to have Bing Chat always read aloud the responses without having to request it manually each time. Mikhail Parakhin from Microsoft said the team is working on such a feature.

Not New: Google Announces Small Business Shopping Filter

Remember when Google announced its new small business attribute, where businesses can self-claim they are small, which would add a “small business” icon to their products in Google Search? Well, Google now announced

Google Ads Performance Max Products With Brand & Custom Labels

Google has added to the Performance Max product campaigns within Google Ads brand and custom labels. This allows advertisers the quick ability to segment your products also by brand and custom labels.

Google Pumpkin Patch At GooglePlex

Here is the annual Google pumpkin patch set up at the GooglePlex. This is at the main Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. I believe Google sets these up annually around Halloween.

Vlog #249: Dave DiGregorio On Local Pack Reductions, Diversifying Traffic, Services & The Community

In part one with Dave DiGregorio we spoke about his journey from working in sports memorabilia to getting into SEO. Then in part two, we talk about some local pack reductions, diversifying your local SEO efforts, the services feature…