Daily Search Forum Recap: December 22, 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.

Google SGE dropped the December 2023 end date. Google says double slashes in URLs can confuse some crawlers. Google said use character encoding when Google gets your special characters wrong. Bing has a local business on Christmas box. Google advertiser program now accepts trade names and DBAs. Bing is on a holiday lock down for new features. The Google Kwanzaa decorations are also live. I posted the weekly SEO video recap. Happy holidays all!

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

Search News Buzz Video Recap: More Google Ranking Volatility, Local Openness Signal Confirmed, Some Indexing Issues, Long Google Ads & More

As we approach the end of the year, it just seems Google is getting more and more volatile with its search results. Google also confirmed that ‘openness’ as a local ranking signal was strengthened…

Google Search Generative Experience December End Date Removed

When Google first launched its Search Generative Experience, it labeled the “end” date of the program as December 2023 for US users and February 2024 for India and other countries. Well, now that end date was removed from the Google Search Labs interface.

Google: Double Slashes In URLs Can Confuse Some Crawlers

Gary Illyes said some search engines can be confused by seeing double slashes in a URL. Previously, Google suggested not to use double slashes in your URLs but here Gary is saying that technically pages load with double slashes but with some search engines may have issues crawling URLs with double slashes.

Google Search On When Special Characters Don’t Work

Gary Illyes from Google explained how Google Search may or may not handle special characters within Google Search. He explained this in the latest Google SEO office hours at the 16:10 mark.

Bing On Holiday Lockdown – Slows Production Releases

Microsoft is currently on a holiday lockdown for Bing, Copilot, formerly known as Bing Chat. Mikhail Parakhin, the CEO, Advertising and Web Services at Microsoft, wrote on X, “Holiday lockdown doesn’t help (we reduce production changes at this period, because so many people are on vacation).”

Bing Local Businesses For Christmas Search Section

Bing is showing a box in its search results for “Local businesses for Christmas.” This box shows Christmas-related stores, such as groceries, bakeries, etc, that are open now.

Google Advertiser Verification Program To Accept DBAs

Google Ads has this advertiser verification program and now advertisers can use their DBAs (“doing business as”) or trade names for that verification. Google said these names are accepted if the legal documents also state the names and in many legal documents, it does ask for DBAs to be listed.

Google Search Kwanzaa Decorations Are Live For 2023

Kwanzaa is coming up next week and Google has launched its Kwanzaa decorations for its search results. Just like Google did with Christmas decorations and Chanukah decorations.

Search for Kwanzaa to see the decorations in Google Search…

Google Cloud Building

Here is a look at the Google Cloud sign on the Google Chicago office. We’ve seen plenty of photos from within the Google Chicago office, but here it is from the outside.