Industry News

Google is reportedly working on fixing a bug with not being able to properly respond to a noindex directive on some JavaScript generated pages. This is happening for some React apps using Single Page Applications (SPAs) that have the noindex directive on them but Google is not picking it up and thus indexing pages that should not be indexed.

Google now places a notice or warning on some Google Business Profile listings within Google Maps when it thinks some of the reviews may be fake or fraudulent. We covered this notice when Google updated its reviews restrictions documentation but I wanted to highlight the notice more.

Google is now testing adding labels to the product detail side panel when you click on a product in the Google Search popular products grid. The labels spotted include a "most popular" and "best price" label in a blue background.

This morning we covered these unusual "preferred source" labels in the search results. And now we are seeing "For you" labels in the search results. Maybe they are the same and just using different names or maybe they are different.

Google may be testing a new search label named "preferred source" on the search results snippets. This is shown on organic search results, not search ads, and honestly, this seems off to me but I am not sure.

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.

It took 9 months...

Google has now totally disabled the Google Cache from completely working. Earlier this year, Google removed the cache link from the search result snippets. Then a couple of weeks ago, added links to the Wayback Machine. Now, the direct link to see the Google Cache has been fully disabled.

A couple of weeks ago, we reported a bug with the Google Search Console search performance report and rich results report when you filtered by the "product snippets" search appearance option. Google finally posted an update that the report has been fixed.

It seems that Google made a change, intentionally or unintentionally, to the site command within Google Image Search. When you do a basic site command, without appending keywords to the query, then Google will return no image results.

Google has updated its Google Merchant Listings help documentation to add priceType property and then also give new sale pricing examples. Google said they did this to "make it easier for merchants to specify sale pricing through structured data and bring parity with price features in Merchant Center."