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We got another official Google ranking update, the September 2023 helpful content update. This week, we had our first post-Google core update tremors and fluctuations. After saying they would a month ago, Google also finally dropped the FAQ-rich results snippets. Google also surprised us by saying How-to rich results are not going away just for mobile but also for desktop search. Google Search Console has new helpful Merchant Center reports. Google also said the site names issues have massively dropped. Google said fixing your INP issues won’t improve your rankings. Google said to avoid low-quality content blurbs on your e-commerce category pages. Google said there is no way to prevent search traffic loss on website revamps and you won’t be “back to the same” either. Google said meta descriptions do not matter for search rankings. Google said very few robots.txt files are over 500KB. Google has a new process for Google Business Profile reinstatements. Google Local is testing and showing third-party reviews again. Google is forcing some suspended advertisers to become verified. An advertiser said they lost thousands of dollars due to a Google Ads experiment. Google also promotes its new Search Generative Experience in the traditional search results. Bing Search is testing playable video snippets. Bing Chat is working on custom instructions feature And if you want to help sponsor those vlogs, go to patreon.com/barryschwartz. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.
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