Billions of Google redirects to stop working next year
Google announced its URL shortener service will stop working completely on August 25, 2025.
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.
In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.
Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.
Google announced its URL shortener service will stop working completely on August 25, 2025.
Barry Schwartz | Jul 19, 2024 at 8:08 am ETGoogle launched Notes in Search 8 months ago as a labs experiment - that experiment ends today.
Barry Schwartz | Jul 16, 2024 at 12:52 pm ETThe last core update was the March 2024 core update, and many sites are still waiting since September 2023 to see helpful content recoveries.
Barry Schwartz | Jul 16, 2024 at 11:41 am ETThis is just a reminder that Google has discontinued Google Business Profile chat yesterday and call history is going away.
Barry Schwartz | Jul 16, 2024 at 11:26 am ETSearch Console shipping and return settings take precedence over other methods, like structured data.
Barry Schwartz | Jul 11, 2024 at 9:31 am ETThe reports within Search Console are now delayed by over 52 hours.
Barry Schwartz | Jul 2, 2024 at 8:07 am ETThe addition of content to your webpages that attempts to perform prompt injection is against Bing's guidelines.
Barry Schwartz | Jul 1, 2024 at 7:27 am ETGoogle has not specifically confirmed this but a new local SEO report says these may be newly discovered local ranking signals.
Barry Schwartz | Jun 28, 2024 at 10:38 am ETThis spam update took 7 days to fully roll out and is now complete.
Barry Schwartz | Jun 27, 2024 at 12:26 pm ETThis makes clicking to publishers and content creators way more likely than the current version of AI Overviews.
Barry Schwartz | Jun 26, 2024 at 1:07 pm ETSearchers with this Chrome Action enabled can quickly call, get directions and read reviews from the Chrome search bar.
Barry Schwartz | Jun 26, 2024 at 1:00 pm ETContinuous scroll launched in Google mobile search in October 2021 and on desktop in December 2022.
Barry Schwartz | Jun 25, 2024 at 9:00 am ETThe issue affected indexing in Google Search and impacted new content published across both large and small publishers.
Barry Schwartz | Jun 20, 2024 at 9:48 pm ETThis update will take about a week to roll out.
Barry Schwartz | Jun 20, 2024 at 11:21 am ETA year ago, Google added support for return policy structured data support for merchant listing and now Google is expanding that support to the organization level.
Barry Schwartz | Jun 11, 2024 at 8:16 am ETGoogle now will show the merchant listing performance within the Google Search Image tab in Search Console data.
Barry Schwartz | Jun 10, 2024 at 9:30 am ETThis has been an issue since last December but Google said it still needs to reprocess your page for the issue to be resolved.
Barry Schwartz | Jun 4, 2024 at 3:47 pm ETLast week there was a bug with the Google Search Console report.
Barry Schwartz | Jun 4, 2024 at 7:46 am ETif your website is not accessible using a mobile device, then Google will no longer index it and rank it.
Barry Schwartz | Jun 3, 2024 at 11:44 am ETGoogle identified and fixed its technical difficulties with serving, but it may have impacted news publisher traffic.
Barry Schwartz | May 31, 2024 at 9:05 am ETGoogle said only one in every 7 million unique queries resulted in a Google policy violation.
Barry Schwartz | May 30, 2024 at 8:40 pm ETMany are noticing huge declines in the number of links reported in the link report within the Google tool.
Barry Schwartz | May 30, 2024 at 9:31 am ETYou may have noticed a spike in impressions and clicks between May 15 to May 27 - it was a bug.
Barry Schwartz | May 29, 2024 at 4:18 pm ETGoogle won't comment on the specific elements in the document, in order to keep its ranking system safe and secure.
Barry Schwartz | May 29, 2024 at 3:59 pm ETJuly 31, 2024 Google will shut down call history and chat - you can download your history now.
Barry Schwartz | May 28, 2024 at 1:52 pm ETThese are really big and visible buttons that may encourage a higher click-through rate from the search results.
Barry Schwartz | May 24, 2024 at 4:10 pm ETPreviously, GA4 only showed this metric over the past 30 minutes.
Barry Schwartz | May 23, 2024 at 12:57 pm ETThird-party search services that use Bing are also offline, including DuckDuckGo, ChatGPT Search, Copilot and more.
Barry Schwartz | May 23, 2024 at 6:12 am ETThis will very likely lead to even more traffic sent by Google Search to Reddit.
Barry Schwartz | May 22, 2024 at 11:18 am ETGoogle and Bing both encourage sites to include accurate lastmod dates within sitemap files.
Barry Schwartz | May 21, 2024 at 2:28 pm ETNot only are the search results more graphical, they have richer information for these more interactive ways of searching.
Barry Schwartz | May 21, 2024 at 8:13 am ETGoogle said these new crawlers are to "better support crawling of binary data that may be used for research and development."
Barry Schwartz | May 16, 2024 at 3:32 pm ETGoogle said the filter appears on the top of the results page alongside other filters.
Barry Schwartz | May 14, 2024 at 4:19 pm ETNew features include AI Overviews, multistep reasoning capabilities, planning capabilities, AI-organized search results, and a new Google Lens ask with video feature.
Barry Schwartz | May 14, 2024 at 1:55 pm ETAI Overview link cards get a higher click through rate than normal web search results but Google won't break out click data in Search Consoles for content creators.
Barry Schwartz | May 14, 2024 at 1:54 pm ETIs the results count one step closer to fully going away?
Barry Schwartz | May 7, 2024 at 8:14 am ETSites like CNN, USA Today, LA Times and others are seeing their rented subdomains and subfolders dropping in rankings after they were hit by manual actions.
Barry Schwartz | May 6, 2024 at 8:15 pm ETJohn Mueller said, "At some point, I'm sure we'll remove it," referring to the disavow link tool in Google Search Console.
Barry Schwartz | May 6, 2024 at 10:12 am ETThe first core update of 2024 finished rolling out on April 19 - this was a pretty big one but it overlapped with other big changes leading to a 45% reduction in unhelpful content.
Barry Schwartz | Apr 26, 2024 at 4:10 pm ETInstead, Google will automatically add eligible publishers and will eventually remove those publishers not eligible.
Barry Schwartz | Apr 25, 2024 at 4:08 pm ET