Industry News

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 held that Web Creator summit yesterday at the GooglePlex, where Google told victims of previous search ranking updates including the September 2023 helpful content update, that a new search ranking update is coming fairly or very soon, but if they were hit by the helpful content update, they should not expect to recover and they likely should move on to new things.

Google / Alphabet reported its Q3 2024 earnings last night, where its ad revenue hit $65.85 billion, up 10% from last year's quarter of $59.65 billion. Google's revenue was up 15% with $88.3 billion and its profit was up 33% to $26.3B. Search revenue specifically was up 12% to $49.39 billion.

Google Ads has a new asset type with enhancement features named business links. Google posted a new help document that says, "Business links is a new asset type with enhancement features that allow you to target customized and varied user intents all in a single Search ad."

Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, has confirmed that a Google ad representative, a Google employee, has made unauthorized changes to a Google ad account. Marvin wrote that following up after an investigation on the matter, "we did not properly follow our processes for ensuring approvals are granted before making changes."

You thought Google was sneaky with their ad or sponsored labels. Microsoft has a history of being super sneaky with their ad labels in Bing Search. Here is a new example of Bing hiding the small ad label right after the domain name, normally it shows up in the front section of the ad, which is also hard to see, but not as hard as this.

Google is testing a search ad product carousel format that has these sub-categories that scroll as you swipe through the carousel of products. This format looks familiar but I cannot find any coverage of this new look, so I am covering it now.

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 AI Overviews are now rolling out to over 100 countries...

Google announced it is rolling out AI Overviews in Google Search to over 100 more countries, making it available to over one billion users and in all supported languages. This is the biggest expansion of AI Overviews yet, which was previously available in seven countries by default (without opting into it).

Google's John Mueller said it again, he said on LinkedIn, "We've been pretty clear that Core Web Vitals are not giant factors in ranking, and I doubt you'd see a big drop just because of that." Google has been saying Core Web Vitals are important in general but when it comes to search rankings, they have never been that important.