Industry News

Google's John Mueller clarified once again that your URLs do not need to be lowercase, they can be uppercase, it really doesn't matter. But he did say, pick either lowercase or uppercase, just be consistent.

Google has turned down some features for the tax specialist vertical in Google Local Service Ads. The big one is that there is no auto-crediting for this vertical. Also, Google removed message leads, booking and all recording for the Tax Specialist vertical in Google LSAs.

Google has announced it has updated its Google Ads political content policy this month for to include a form related to California restrictions. "California residents may use this form to report ads that may violate California Elections Code Division 20, Chapter 7," Google said.

Google is testing adding a share icon to the product detail view within the search results. This comes up at the top of the panel, after you click on a product from the popular products section of the search results. And as you scroll, the share and other icons stick to the top.

Google is testing writing out a 57 words, 364 characters, notice on its home page, about its cookie usage and data usage. It is super weird to see three lines of legal text right below the Google search box on its home page.

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.

Reddit seems like it is not ranking as well as it used to...

It seems like Reddit, the site that ranks well for every single query in Google Search, is starting to see a small but visible ranking drop in Google Search. It seems Reddit is losing Google Search visibility when you look at its ranking reports in Semrush and Sistrix.

We have been hearing Google Ads will provide a feature to manage negative keywords for Performance Max campaigns for a while and now, maybe, the day has come. Joe Shmo on X posted a screenshot of him seeing the feature in his Google Ads account.

Google's John Mueller said that using generative AI to create blog posts and content for the purpose of getting backlinks is "almost certainly against Google's spam policies." He said this in response to a complaint that this was being done on their site, outsourced by their SEO firm to a third-party.

Google Search is testing a darker dark mode. Instead of the grayish dark mode, Google is testing a dark black version of the dark mode. The darker version is #111217 whereas the gray version is #1f1f1f.

Google now lets you add to your restaurant's menu within Google Business Profiles. Previously, I believe you were only able to replace your previous menus, but now you can add to them by uploading the new menus.