This is a programming note that I will be completely offline for the holiday of Shavout/Shavous, from Tuesday night, June 11th, through late Thursday night, June 13th - I return Friday, June 14th...

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

Google once again said you can recover from the damage inflicted on your site by the September 2023 helpful content update with the next core update. Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison said on X, "yes, people who have had impacts with core ranking updates may see changes (if our systems believe they've improved) after the next broad one we have."

Google added deeper insights for those who use merchant listings to see how well their merchant listings are performing within the Google Image Search tab. A new search appearance filter works for the image filter in the performance report in Google Search Console.

Now that Google is encouraging publishers to use proper lastmod dates in their sitemap files, what happens if your lastmod date is incorrect and shows the wrong date. Gary Illyes from Google said either Google trusts your lastmod date or doesn't, there is no in between.

Google seems to be testing categorizing or organizing the search results on the search results page. This is something Google announced it would do at Google I/O and also something Google has tested numerous times over the years.