In the past month, in Google-land, we have spoken a lot about the March 2024 core update, which ended on April 19th, a week before Google notified us it was done. This core update was painful for many, especially those who were hit by the September helpful content update. But more is to come, we have the site reputation abuse penalty coming in the next few days - are you ready?

Google's John Mueller responded to some questions around why sites hurt by the September 2023 Google helpful content update have not recovered with March 2024 Google core update. He said on X that while recoveries are still possible, "some things take much longer to be reassessed (sometimes months, at the moment), and some bigger effects require another update cycle."

Over the past week or so, I've seen two signals that OpenAI will launch its own search engine of sorts soon. The first is that search.chatgpt.com is showing in the log files for some servers, and also, yesterday, there were more business-oriented rumors of OpenAI launching a search engine on May 9th.

Google Ads will automatically pause low-activity keywords starting in June 2024. That means campaigns with keywords that were created over 13 months ago and have zero impressions over the past 13 months will be paused.

A couple of weeks ago Forbes blocked its coupons directory on its website from being crawled by Google. Now Forbes has completely wiped out all the coupons from its site, serving a 410 status code and removing the coupons link from its navigation.

Google Ads, Shopping Ads, Admob, and other Google Ads products will soon disallow deepfake sexual content, synthetic sexually explicit content, or synthetic content containing nudity services. I mean, this seems like something they should have disallowed before, but now any tool or service that is around these types of content will be disallowed.

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 Ads posted its first feature announcement in over two months...

Google Ads has posted its first new features announcement in its help section in over two months. This was to announce several Performance Max campaigns features, which we will get into below. But like I reported earlier, Google has not posted anything in this section for two months prior to posting this new announcement.

If you search for [flag GIF] on Google, click on the "waiving" refinement, you are taken to images of Nazi flags. I waited a full week to report on this, a full week from when Google acknowledged the issue and it is still an issue.

Fabrice Canel from Microsoft confirmed Microsoft has fixed a bug with Bing Webmaster Tools showing inaccurate and/or irrelevant notifications in the notifications and insights section. Fabrice wrote, "Happy to report that the fix has been implemented and the issue should now be resolved for your site and all sites once data is refreshed."

Google is now labeling or using the title of its SGE, Search Generative Experience, "AI Answer." This replaces the title "AI Overviews" and "Al overviews are experimental." This change happened on Monday, I believe.

Google opened up its feedback form after it announced the Google March 2024 core update was completed and it seems most SEOs did not send Google feedback. Why? Maybe because many don't believe Google will use that feedback to help them? Maybe because SEOs don't want to share specifics with Google?

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