Industry News

Google Ads is rolling out new brand guidelines for performance max campaigns, which was originally announced back at Google Marketing Live. Google said then, "advertisers can share their font and color guidelines in Performance Max, as well as provide helpful image reference points to generate new asset variations."

Google is testing showing AI Overviews and generative AI results directly in the people also ask section. People also ask generally are featured snippet powered but now Google is testing using AI Overviews instead of featured snippets.

Google Search can show who wrote the review directly in the search results snippet. Google has this "reviewed by" rich result element next to some search results that names the author of the review.

Google's John Mueller was asked about when it makes sense to host images or other content on separate subdomains or domains. John said it makes sense if Google is having trouble crawling as much as it wants to crawl.

Google has mixed its search ads between and throughout the organic (free) search results starting sometime mid-last year. Google calls it dynamic ad placement, and it is an ongoing tests. In fact, Google had to change its definition of top ads to make way for this historically very unGoogle-like move.

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 search is heating up again...

I've been wondering how the majority of sites hit by Google's September 2023 helpful content update are doing. Glenn Gabe is tracking about 400 of them, so he provided an update saying 88 (or 22% of them) have seen a 20% increase since the August 2024 core update. Some had full recoveries but most did not, and most saw no lifts at all.

Microsoft announced its monthly Microsoft Advertising updates and while we covered some of these before, we did not cover the changes to Shopping Audience campaigns. Microsoft made a couple of changes to Shopping Audience campaigns.

Google has been rolling out a new Google Shopping interface, we've covered it numerous times, and I think it is now rolled out. But Google is now promoting the new Google Shopping by placing a "new" label on the Shopping tab link at the top of the Google Search interface.

Google can show a bag icon on some of the sponsored search shopping ads. This can show next to the "Shop now" text, where you can either go to the retailers site to buy or click the bag icon to likely check out with Google (I am guessing).