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

We may be seeing more Google search ranking volatility start to get heated starting this weekend, through January 20th and 21st (and maybe today). Some of the Google tracking tools are having issues tracking these changes but some are not. But I do see a lot of chatter spike in the past couple of days.

Google has updated not just its site reputation abuse policy for clarification purposes, Google also updated the manual actions section for site reputation abuse. Again, these are just clarification changes, and as Google put it, "it include guidance from our blog post's FAQ on site reputation abuse."

For the past month or so, Google has been showing map pins on Service Area Businesses within Google. Previously, Google did not show pins on businesses without a public address but now they are, in some views.

John Mueller of Google said that sometimes doing SEO can cause sites more problems with search and search rankings. Sometimes not doing SEO, might be better, John implies.

Google is testing an expandable brand store knowledge panel. So if you search for a brand like New Balance, Google will show a knowledge panel on the right with products, descriptions and so on but then if you click on the arrow button, it will expand and show you even more.

Google Business Profiles started to allow chat through texting and WhatsApp for businesses in international regions. Now, this feature seems to be rolling out to businesses based in the United States.

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

Recently we saw Microsoft tricking searchers to thinking they were searching in Google and not on Bing.

In the Google Ads Performance Max search category, Google is now displaying "private search term." Private queries are terms that have been searched for by fewer than 50 unique users over the past 90 days, Google explained.

Google is testing AI Overviews that offer a toggle to turn on and off translations and/or just show the translations by default.

Google's John Mueller replied to a bunch of screenshots of SEO tools showing word counts for the same page that tailed the word counts differently. John said, "This is also why word-count itself makes so little sense."

Microsoft is testing a new search setting named Adaptive Zoom. I am not exactly sure what it does, I tried to toggle it on and off and see how clicking on results or links or pagination changes but I don't see any changes. So I am missing something here.