The Featured Snippet is the official SEO newsletter of Performics, dedicated to keeping you up to date with the latest SEO industry news, trends, and events. See below for the latest version of The Featured Snippet:
In the July 2023 issue of The Featured Snippet:
Bard, Googleās AI chatbot, has expanded its availability to over 40 languages and new regions, including Brazil and Europe. The update introduces features such as listening to responses, customizing response tones, pinning and renaming conversations, exporting code to Replit and Google Colab, sharing chat responses, and using images in prompts to boost user productivity and creativity. This expansion aligns with Bard’s responsible AI approach, engaging experts and regulators while incorporating user feedback and privacy protection measures.
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Google Analytics 4 has replaced Universal Analytics as the next-gen measurement solution. Starting July 1, 2023, standard Universal Analytics properties ceased processing new data, necessitating a switch to Google Analytics 4 properties to maintain website measurement. The migration timeline involves automatic creation of Google Analytics 4 properties and a gradual shutdown of Universal Analytics processing, culminating in the loss of Universal Analytics access on July 1, 2024 and prompting users to switch to Google Analytics 4.
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Microsoft has expanded its Bing AI chatbot and AI-powered search copilot features from Microsoft Edge and the Bing app to select users on Google Chrome. This expansion enables users to access Bing AI chat and AI-powered search results on desktop browsers, although there are limitations compared to using these features in Edge.
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Google has confirmed an indexing bug affecting Google News, causing decreased traffic for news publishers. The bug has caused concerns among publishers, with some reporting significant drops in traffic from Google News. Google fixed the issue on July 12th and confirmed its completion on July 14th, ensuring that the indexing problem is resolved.
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Google is exploring alternative methods or supplemental approaches for controlling web crawling and indexing beyond the traditional robots.txt protocol, particularly in response to emerging technologies like generative AI. Google aims to engage with the web and AI communities through public discussions to develop machine-readable means for web publisher choice and control, involving diverse voices from various fields.
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Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, shared SEO guidance for content syndication partners in response to concerns about potential traffic loss due to syndicated content. The advice reiterates Google’s recommendation to use the “noindex” directive for syndicated content that partners publish, preventing it from being indexed by search engines. This approach aligns with the goal of clarifying ownership of original content, particularly for syndication arrangements.
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Bing Chat now supports Visual Search, which means users are now able to upload a photo or take a picture and have Bing Chat respond with answers around those visuals. Visual Search is available for consumers on Bing desktop and the mobile app.
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Google has released updates to the site names feature in Google Search. In these updates, support is now available for subdomains in English, French, German, and Japanese. Google also provided updated guidance on how to get your desired site name communicated to Google. The best way to do so is to make sure you have your desired site name in the WebSite structured data. Google also listed ways to fix a site name when your preferred one isn’t properly shown.
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Google has updated its product rating policies on artificial intelligence and automated content. The update now states that reviews that are generated by artificial intelligence arenāt allowed and should be marked as spam. Other policies prevent sharing personal and confidential information, phone numbers, email addresses, or URLs in the review content and much more.
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Screaming Frogās 19.0 update is live and contains a handful of updates, features, and more. Some new things included with version 19.0 are a new design, which has been refreshed overall, and the crawl behavior function has been moved to the main navigation to be more accessible. There have also been a handful of filters and issues added to allow you to better filter data or communicate issues that are found. You can now filter to show URLs that have Google Analytics tracking parameters, images that are missing size attributes, and more.Ā
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