Your Week in Search and Social: 23 to 28 August 2026
Google confirmed it is routing search clicks through its own redirect links, bot protection knocked the IRS out of Google entirely, and…
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Category: SEO
The IRS Vanished From Google This Week: Search and Social Update, 28 August 2026
The IRS dropped out of Google search this week because its own bot protection blocked Googlebot, and Cloudflare's new defaults on 15…
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Google Is Now Sending Your Clicks Through Its Own Links: Search and Social Update, 27 August 2026
Google is routing search clicks through its own redirect links at close to full rollout, which will make rank tracking harder and…
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Google Will Charge You for Missed Calls: Your 26 August Brief
From 1 October, Google Local Services Ads will charge you for calls nobody answered, and for the follow up call as well.…
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Tuesday Brief: That Search Console Security Email Was a Google Fault
Search Console emailed thousands of site owners on Monday claiming a new owner had been added, and it was a bug. Google…
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Monday Brief: Google Quietly Repaired Two of Its Own Faults Over the Weekend
Google confirmed on Sunday that the search favicon bug is fully fixed, and repaired the Search Console crawl stats gap over the…
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Sunday Brief: Google Has Stopped Fixing Your Broken Schema Code
Google has stopped tidying up badly escaped structured data, so rich results can disappear without a single warning. Reddit lost 86% of…
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Your Week in Search and Social: 16 to 21 August 2026
A 41 day experiment found Googlebot reaching only 2 percent of pages linked by JavaScript, and the AI crawlers found almost none.…
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Friday Brief: Google’s Video Carousel Has Halved Since 12 August
Google's video carousel now shows on under 20% of searches, down from just over 30%, and on tracked brand names it fell…
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Thursday Brief: Googlebot Found Just 2% of a Site’s JavaScript Links
A 41 day experiment split one site's internal links between plain HTML and JavaScript. Googlebot found 2% of the JavaScript pages and…
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Wednesday Brief: Google Is Running a Spam Update Right Now
Google started the August 2026 spam update on Monday and it is still rolling out worldwide. WordPress 7.1 ships today, Instagram will…
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Tuesday Brief: Google Says Your Search Console Collapse Never Happened
Your Search Console AI impressions collapsed on 13 August and Google has confirmed none of it was real. Plus a paused AI…
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