Industry News

Google looks like it will discontinue the direct ordering option with the Order with Google button by the end of June 2024. This will impact third-party food delivery sites, such as DoorDash, GrubHub and Uber Eats. I assume Google will instead link to third parties and not directly integrate with them in the search interface.

Google has added two new Googlebots, Google crawlers, to its crawler list. They include GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video, which are part of the GoogleOther category of bots and are used for crawling of binary data for research and development reasons.

For the past few months we have covered the vocal and visual complaints around Google Search not showing image thumbnails for recipe search results and other search results that generally have image thumbnails attached to the search result snippet. Google has responded to the large Google Webmaster Help thread in the forums by saying we know, we are still investigating, follow our guidelines and then locked the thread down.

Mikhail Parakhin, the former head of Bing Search and Microsoft Advertising at Microsoft, has announced he is now on the advisory board for Perplexity. Perplexity is a new AI search start up, which technically would be in competition with Microsoft's Bing Search and Copilot.

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

I have been continuing to update the May 9th Google ranking volatility story, but it is super unusual to see such heated volatility for such a long period within the Google Search rankings. This continued Google search ranking update of sorts kicked off with May 3rd but then spiked with May 9th and has really not let up much since.

Google is testing a new button for the Local Service Ads to "message multiple businesses" instead of just messaging one business at a time. We saw something like this before, but it only showed up after you messaged the first business.

Google's John Mueller was asked when can a site expect to recover from the September 2023 helpful content update, assuming the site took all measures to "fix" their site. John Mueller said you can assume "bigger changes would be visible when the next core updates happen."

A bunch of local SEOs are buzzing about a possible new local SEO Google ranking factor and are looking to confirm it. Darren Shaw posted on X that while setting the service area historically had no influence on your Google local rankings, that may now have changed.

Google AdSense planned on changing the minimum reporting thresholds for Custom Channels and Search Styles to 100 clicks per day on May 15th. But Google sent an email to AdSense publishers that it will not make those changes.