Industry News

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

Google may have hit Fortune Recommends with a search penalty, downgrading its Google search rankings. This may be related to the site reputation abuse policy, like it may have done previously to Forbes Advisor a few weeks ago and some other large publications.

Google's John Mueller said he understands why some in our industry look to optimize for metrics within various SEO tool platforms, but he said there are not shortcuts in SEO and optimizing for those metrics won't directly lead to Google search ranking or SEO gains.

Google is testing new Audience Insights or audience analytics within the Google Merchant Center interface. This can show you your audience's regions, ages, gender, age group and more.

One of the complains with Google Search showing Reddit or other online forums all the time is that for medical questions, the answers can be dangerous and harmful. But at the same time, they can also provide help for people going through a rough time, to hear from others going through it.

Google now has the ability to expand sections of knowledge panels on the desktop search interface. So when you search for Elon Musk and want to see his children, Google needs to have a down arrow to show more that expands on desktop to show more.

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

Robin Sloan often seems to speak the words that are in my soul, and this time he really got to me. He bought a cassette tape of the new album by the band OOF and then wrote about the experience of albums vs. playlists:

I bought the cassette tape to play in my car and I’m glad, because it prompted me to listen to the album straight through, which, if I’m being honest, I might never have done on my laptop.

What happened (and this always presages a good experience with art) was that...

Google announced that it is adding new features for travel search ads through integration with travel feeds. This will allow ads to show hotels, prices, dates, ratings and images in hotel ads. Plus, Google is testing things to do, car rentals and events formats.

Google is deprecating the ten-year-old Sitelinks Search Box. It is going to start to disappear from the search result snippets starting on November 21, 2024. This does not impact the normal sitelinks, just the search box.