Industry News

Google paused Google Business Profiles restatements for the locksmith industry but has now resumed those requests and is working through the backlog now. Google paused them early last week and began processing them once again on Friday afternoon, June 7th.

Google is currently working on fixing a bug that prevents the product variant structured data from showing rating stars in the search. This bug was spotted by Jarno van Driel and Ryan Levering from Google confirmed it and said they will work on a fix soon.

Google is once again testing showing five local results, a five-pack, instead of the typical 3 local results, a three-pack, in the search results local results section. Google tested this in 2021 and also had this for the SGE labs results and now it is being tested again.

Hope you are all having a nice relaxing weekend because it seems like the Google Search rankings were super volatile again this past Saturday. I am seeing a spike in SEO chatter and the third-party Google tracking ranking tools are showing significant ranking fluctuations on June 8th.

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

Google had some more intense search ranking volatility this week, both on June 1st and also around June 5th. Google said white-labeled coupon sites would be penalized by its site reputation abuse policy...

Google has placed a notice at the top of the Google Search Console removal tool that says, "Cache updates are no longer available." It added that you "can still request snippet updates."

Google has removed the How-to enhancement report from Google Search Console. When Google stopped showing how-to rich results in the search results, it said it would keep the reports "for the time being," I guess that time has been completed.

In addition to the shop deals top bar we spotted earlier, now we are seeing reports of Google Search testing a shopping search filter bar at the top. This makes a lot more sense as a search filter than the shop deals bar, which just promotes unrelated queries.

Google Image search is testing the ability to pinch to zoom, to expand the details on a specific image within the mobile interface. So instead or in addition to clicking on an image, you can pinch to zoom to see more details on that image.