Industry News

Google Merchant Center seems to be testing a whole slew of new analytics for the Merchant Center console. The data itself is not new but the UX is, and I am told the analytics is presented in a more user-friendly and easy-to-navigate manner.

Microsoft sent emails to some Microsoft Advertising advertisers to let them know that if they have run an import from Google Ads to their Microsoft Advertising account, going forward, Microsoft will continue to automatically import your Google Ads conversion data to your Microsoft Advertising campaigns.

Google Ads has released a major version release for the Google Ads API, version 17. Version 17 includes preparation for resource usage policy changes, page size changes, batch reporting changes, more PMax and match type reporting, plus much more.

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

I am seeing signs of yet another intense Google search ranking update and intense ranking volatility yesterday and into today, June 4th and 5th. Many of the tools are showing very heated volatility and there has been a spike in chatter within the SEO community.

New data from BrightEdge shows that Google is showing far fewer AI Overviews than it did when it first launched them as a beta under the Search Generative Experience. Google went from showing AI Overviews for 84% of queries to showing them for less than 15% of queries.

Microsoft, in its monthly update, announced that it will be moving (or "upgrading" as they call it) smart shopping campaigns to Performance Max within the next couple of months. Microsoft said they sent out notices to advertisers via emails earlier.

Google has fixed an issue with site names not appearing for some internal pages, this has been an issue since December 2023. I checked some examples, and they are indeed fixed - although Google said some fixes are still rolling out and those pages need to be reprocessed to be fixed.

Google News seems to be testing placing a header above news sources in the Google News follow interface, that says "how these stories are ranked." I personally cannot replicate it, but some are able to see it.

Google has updated its discussion forum structured data help documentation to clarify that SocialMediaPosting markup is also supported. Google did say that SocialMediaPosting should be used for sites that are more of a "generic social media platform," versus a discussion forum.

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 fixed the Search Console link report this morning...