Industry News

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.

Google seems to be testing showing search ads that you can click to watch a video. We saw something like this back in 2018, but this shopping ad has a video play icon on it, and when you look at it, it then changes to a "watch" icon.

There are reportedly at least five bugs within the Bing Webmaster Tools API and the corresponding documentation. The bugs range from setting country and regions to site move requests, plus bugs with the overall API documentation.

Google Ads has changed how Performance Max and regular Shopping campaigns work within the same account. In short, Performance Max won't take priority over Standard Shopping campaigns when they are both in the same ads account.

Microsoft is adding new AI features to Bing Search named AI-enhanced summaries. These can show up in the knowledge panel section, and say the "summary was generated by Al from multiple online sources. Find the source links used for this summary under "Based on sources."

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

Nope, Google won't let up with its Google Search ranking volatility. We are seeing sites that are showing better rankings one day, only to see those rankings jump back up the next day and continue to see this pattern over and over again. It is like Google cannot make up its mind and it is beyond unusual to see this happening for this long of a period of time.