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

Gary Illyes from Google said on stage at the SERP conference last week that there is no way that Google would change how the 301 redirect signal works for SEO or search rankings. Gary added that it's a very reliable signal.

Google may be testing a new design for the Google Image search results. This design looks like a tablet-like interface that is more boxes, and, honestly, it seems like it is from a UX from 10 years ago.

Google's John Mueller said the link best practices SEO documentation on its website are still "good guidelines" for both SEO and overall "accessibility & UX reasons." The guidelines are only about 14 months old, so they are recent.

Google is testing placing the year the company was established on Google Ads. The ads have "established in" next to the ad description, so these seem to be ad extensions on the ads.

Microsoft is testing moving the lock icon in the Bing Search results snippets from the left of the URL to the right of the URL. Well, most of the time you don't even see a lock but when Bing is testing it, Bing has been testing different lock locations.

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

I am not sure how many times Google has said that you do not need to disavow spammy links, that you can ignore link spam attacks and that links pointing to pages that 404/410 are links that do not count - but John Mueller from Google said it again.

Gary Illyes from Google said on stage at the SERP conference last week that Google has taken steps to combat what some of us call parasite SEO in the most recent Google algorithm update. He was quoted as saying, "We have already done stuff against Parasite SEO; the recent update is the proof."

As you may remember, Mustafa Suleyman became the CEO of AI at Microsoft and then shortly after we heard that Mikhail Parakhin stepped down as the head of Bing Search and Microsoft Advertising. Since then, Mikhail Parakhin has been very quiet on X, but he did post one response this week on Mustafa Suleyman.

Google Business Profiles now lets you select your preferred menu source. You have three options for your restaurant: create or copy a menu, copy from a website, or pick a third-party platform to take the menu from.

When it comes to crawl budget and Google not crawling your site too much or too little, Google takes into account all Googlebot activity across all verticals. So that includes crawling for web search, Merchant Center, ads, and all the various crawling activities.