Industry News

Every year I like to cover how I spot Googlers, like John Mueller, but yes others, working and communicating with the SEO community on Christmas Eve and Christmas day. This year is no different, with John Mueller, Martin Splitt and even Gary Illyes responding to the SEO community during the holidays.

There may be a bug impacting some Google Ads advertiser accounts that will quietly switch your campaigns to have broad match turned on, even when that campaign may have used phrase or exact match. This can happen when you switch from non-conversion based bidding to a conversion based bidding strategy.

In Code shufflin’ Robin Rendle writes about why he, as a designer, still messes around with coding projects. I think this is why I continue to obsess over my side project as well—and proactively reach out to indie devs who use the Cloudflare platform to see if I can help.

I’d forgotten what it feels like not to ask permission for changes and instead make pull requests and break things. There’s a momentum to this sort of work that I crave deep down in my bones because it doesn’t rely on...

I love the Murderbot books, and this interview with author Martha Wells is a delight:

Of all her characters, Wells has said, Murderbot is the one she’s put the most of herself into. It’s a surprising claim, until it’s not. It’s obvious that Wells feels a distance from other humans, even as she’s spent a life trying to relate to them, to understand them.

This is a really interesting rebuttal of some modern parenting methods by Marilyn Simon:

The job of the parent is not to prevent any potential “trauma”, it is to love the child even when they are bad, and to punish them, and most importantly to forgive them. A child can’t understand the lightness of forgiveness without understanding first that one needs it.

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

Google Ads updated its abusing the ad network policy to say it will disapprove ads can take "actions on ads relating that might violate Spam Policies for Google Web Search." Specifically, if an ad's destination points to a page removed from Google Search through a Google Search manual action, the ad will be disapproved.

Google Ads seems to be rolling out new asset-level conversion data in Performance Max reporting and campaigns. You can use the conversions and conversion value columns to get an overview of asset performance.

Google has officially rolled out AI organized results for restaurants related queries. We've launched a new way to get dining recs on Search. If you're looking for something like 'restaurants with a view Chicago,' you'll get a results page organized with AI," Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google announced on X.

Google Ads is making a change to new Performance Max campaigns that are created in the Google Ads web interface. Starting on January 20, 2025, these campaigns will have brand guidelines enabled and require business name and logo brand assets to be linked at the campaign level rather than the asset group level.

Google has posted a new help section for Google Merchant Center, a Merchant Center Next Glossary. This glossary defines key Merchant Center terms and links you to related articles with more detail about each term.