Over the past few days, while I was offline, the SEO chatter around the Google search ranking volatility continued to be super heated. The Google tracking tools seemed to calm down a bit, but the chatter is still very heated. This is all while the Google March 2024 core update is still rolling out 51 days later.

Ed Zitron wrote a piece named The Man Who Killed Google Search. It goes through in detail how Prabhakar Raghavan, Google's former head of ads - led a coup so that he could run Google Search, and how an email chain from 2019 began a cascade of events that would lead to him running it into the ground, he said.

Google has updated its favicon documentation for Google Search to add definitions for each supported rel attribute value in the Google Search favicon documentation.

Google released version 16.1 of the Google Ads API yesterday. The update includes query assets for Demand Gen, more location service details, more support warnings, Target ROAS bid simulation and more.

Want to scare an SEO? Just tell them they need to manage a site migration. Want to make an SEO faint? Tell them they need to manage to split a site into two or more sites while merging content on those sites. John Mueller from Google said it takes Google longer to process site splits and merges than normal site migrations.

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...