Industry News

Google has updated its Google Business Profiles guidelines to say that businesses associated with products or services that require the customer to be a certain minimum age are not permitted as service-area businesses without a storefront.

Google's John Mueller said he was generally in favor to the idea of giving prior notice to receiving a manual action, but he said "it's challenging." John then explains that Google's search algorithm try to reward sites, while also negating any benefit any spam may have - but not demote. But that may have dodged the specific question provided.

Bing Webmaster Tools shows search data for Bing Search and Yahoo Search but not OpenAI's ChatGPT search feature. I actually forgot that Bing Webmaster Tools has Yahoo Search data but that was the deal when Yahoo closed Site Explorer in 2011 and I guess that deal still lives on.

Google is testing displaying a button in Google Search to load more ads. The button reads, "More sponsored results" and when clicked, it can load more ads, if Google has more to serve.

Today is Thanksgiving in the United States, so I was planning on not posting anything - since most of you just want to enjoy your time with your family. But I felt I needed to (1) showcase the Thanksgiving Doodle that (2) resembles the volatility of the Google Search results with the Google November 2024 core update still not being complete before Thanksgiving and likely Black Friday.

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

There is some speculation within the SEO and search community that Google's search results have recently become more personalized and tailored. This is based on people comparing the search results to being logged into Google and signed out of Google.

Google Ads has a new column named "conversation started" for message assets, like WhatsApp messaging, through Google Ads. Clicking on a WhatApp button in Google Ads will trigger the "conversation started" metric in Google Ads.

A couple of weeks ago, we spotted Google testing large thin fonts for the search results. Now I am seeing Google testing large thick and chunk fonts for its search results.

Two years ago, we saw Google playing videos, mostly YouTube videos, in an overlay that really gave almost zero incentive for the searcher to click over to the YouTube page. The issue is that you don't get the subscribe or like buttons, or even the ability to comment, on the Google Search video overlays - you do get views and ads in the videos but not the other engagement signals.