John Mueller, Search Advocate at Google, basically calls negative SEO a meme these days

Gary Illyes, another Google’s representative, has made similar statements: [I’ve] looked at hundreds of supposed cases of negative SEO, but none have actually been the real reason a website was hurt

here’s what we think:Negative SEO can still work, but it’s much less of a problem than it used to be.

I don't think the meme of negative SEO will ever go away. It's tempting to assume someone else is causing issues, and, yes, sometimes people have a lot of money, time, bad ideas. Time will tell, and I'm pretty confident it'll be fine.

Mueller next reassured the publisher (as he has many other times) that the disavow tool doesn’t need to be used for random links that are discovered.

this particular case, where you’re saying you submitted a disavow file and then the ranking dropped or the visibility dropped, especially a few days later, I would assume that that is not related.

this is a process that happens incrementally over a period of time where I would expect it would have an effect over the course of… I don’t know… maybe three, four, five, six months …kind of step by step going in that direction.

The personas (luxury shopper, digital nomads, empowered activists and self-care enthusiasts) were identified via Microsoft’s first-party data and analytics over the last 18 months.

Luxury shoppers “value quality and seek ways to make everyday items more luxurious,

“Their preference for luxury extends into expecting the same seamless, personalized shopping experience in online service as they would receive in-store.” They’re also thorough, conducting extensive research and using multiple queries to find brands that meet their standards.

Google Business Profile will be the new name going forward for Google My Business. Google said the reason for the new name is to “keep things simple” and sometime in 2022, Google will retire the Google My Business app completely.

before that it was named Google My Business, before that, Google Places, and before that it was Google+ Local, before that it was also Google Places and then prior to that I think it was just Google Local

Google lets businesses manage their individual listings directly in the search results or directly in Google Maps, now Google is saying it prefers businesses with single listings manage their businesses in Search or Maps and not in the old Google My Business console.

Here Google is providing direct and clear advice that if you want your videos to perform better in Google Search, then give that video its own dedicated landing page, with prominent placement on that page. It probably also makes sense to add the video title, description and even the transcript of the video on that page.

Google said “it’s fine to include the same video on both a dedicated page and its original page alongside other information, like a news article or a product detail page.” But you should also look for a way to place this video on its own dedicated page.

For the last four months, Google has been miscounting the mobile page experience data in the Google Search Console reports. This impacted both the performance report and the page experience report in Google Search Console. The issue persisted from June 29th through November 1st

In almost all cases, Google is able to recognize that the two sets of structured data relate to the same product. They will simply use the most correct and complete version of the product in their data analysis and ignore the others.

It doesn’t help that Google is very vague with structured data and how it works.

if a set of structured data has an error Google will flat out ignore that entire set of data for this process

if you have three sets of duplicated Product data but two have errors, only that error-free set will be used. Even if those other two are more complete

Is the penguin penalty still relevant at all or are less relevant/spammy/toxic backlinks more or less ignored by the ranking algorithm these days?"John replied saying that in most cases, Google will just ignore the links but in some cases, where there is a clear pattern of spammy and manipulative links by the site, Penguin may decide to simply distrust the whole site.John said "I'd say it's a mix of both" when he answered that question. Meaning, Google Penguin can both ignore links and demote sites, if necessary. John said "if our systems recognize that they can't isolate and ignore these links across a website." John added that if Google can see a "very strong pattern there" the Google "algorithms" can lose "trust with this website" and you may see a "drop in the visibility there."

In general, the number of leads from Google My Business has increased substantially over the last few years

The good news is that although the number will be off, the general trend according to GMB insights should match the trend in reality. 

Google is working to expand its notions of YMYL content to include various identities, socioeconomic conditions, and more

added a large number of “detailed, trustworthy, positive” reviews can be evidence of a good reputation whereas before, Google only mentioned the number of positive reviews

for individual authors and content creators, biographical information articles can be a good source of reputation information

Unfortunately, there is little you can do to directly change Google’s title links, but embracing a more holistic view of the issue can help you craft more informative titles and avoid bad rewrites from Google.

the Index Coverage report data is refreshed at a different (and slower) rate than the URL Inspection. The results shown in URL Inspection are more recent, and should be taken as authoritative when they conflict with the Index Coverage report.