Industry News

This is a programming note that Thursday and Friday are Sukkot and I will be offline the next two days. I will be offline on Thursday and Friday, October 17th and October 18th.

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.

We are seeing more volatility again from Google Search, surprise, surprise...

Google announced a number of new Google Shopping features including the new home page, the new researched with AI, more personalized results and deal-finding tools like price comparison, price insights and price tracking.

It's been a handful of days since we reported on any Google Search ranking volatility and although I really don't want to say we are seeing more volatility in the Google search results, well, we are, so I am reporting on it again.

Google may have removed or be removing the health insurance fields from Google Business Profiles. So if you are a health related organization, and you want patients to see what insurance you accept before coming, Google would show that, but it seems Google is now removing that option.

Google has added two new verification methods for merchants/retailers within Google Merchant Center next. The new methods are to verify via a business email or verify via an e-commerce/shopping platform.

Google is testing adding a background color, shade, to the featured snippets on mobile search. We saw this in February with normal snippets, also with site names and favicons and also with product results. Now Google is testing it for featured snippets.

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

Google is testing a new search ad format that lets you expand and collapse the sponsored search ads. When you expand the ads, it then shows a carousel of search ads. Google is also testing search refinements under search ads.

The other day I wrote about a Google test named Quick view for recipes that gave the searcher no reason, whatsoever, to click over the the publishers site. But then I was notified that Bing has something just as bad and it is fully live, it is not a test.