Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web. Google says sites hit by the old helpful content update can recover and even grow...

Google's John Mueller said again this morning that sites hit by the old September helpful content update or even new core updates can recovery. He said on X and on LinkedIn that it is possible to recover but it is not a simple change you can tweak on your website, but rather it takes a lot of effort, over time, to recover.

Over the past week, many have been windblown by Statcounter reporting that Google lost significant market share in the US and worldwide from March to April 2024. It turns out it was some sort of reporting bug and Statcounter has updated the data over the weekend.

Google's John Mueller said on X that he believes Google will remove the disavow link tool "at some point" in the future. Bing dropped the disavow links tool from Bing Webmaster Tools in September 2023 and I suspect Google will also drop it from Google Search Console.

Google Search seems to be testing showing only local listings from Google Business Profiles for many "near me" types of queries. So when you search for [dentist near me] or [indian food near me] and so on, you only get local listings and no web search results.

A year ago, Google Gemini (formerly known as Bard) began linking to sources as citations and we rejoiced. Well, it looks like in most cases, Gemini has stopped linking to sources. I believe this started about a week or so ago but I am not sure on the timing.