Industry News

A few months ago, Google Search Console added the ability to control your Google Merchant Center and product shipping and return policies. Well, it seems like Google will be removing that feature from Search Console and tell those looking for it to go to Google Merchant Center.

Google is testing showing Local Service Ads directly in the Google local pack. They are labeled as sponsored, but they can now show at the top of bottom of the local pack.

In August, Google introduced Google Search Console recommendations but it slowly rolled it out to more and more users over time. Now, Google has fully rolled it out and if Google has Search Console recommendations for your sites, then Google will show it on the home page of the dashboard.

Google has confirmed there are latency and slowness issues with the Google Ads console. The issues started a couple of hours ago and are continuing throughout now.

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

Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, has finally explained why it has made it harder to find the results count when doing a Google Search. He said it can be a distraction and is something that researchers are focused on, when in reality, Google Trends provides better data for those researchers.

There are a number of cases where sites hit by the expanded Google site reputation abuse policy, where Google issued a number of immediate manual actions, are moving the directories that were hit to a new location on the domain name. It would be a mistake to do that in the long run and can lead to more penalties and potentially the whole site being penalized.

Google is updating its Google Ads Misrepresentation - Misleading Ad Design policy to have stronger and clearer enforcement over ads that use buttons that are deceptive and unclear. Google wrote, "ads that make it difficult for the user to understand they are interacting with an ad by using standalone buttons in image ads that lack clear context explaining their function, or whose prominence relative to the surrounding ad content is disproportionate, are restricted."

Google is testing yet another format for its AI Overviews. This one looks like Google is grouping answers for a more generic query into multiple categories of responses. Google is placing them into these card blocks, that can either show you a new AI Overview or more search results, it seems.

Google Analytics added Merchant Center recommendations directly to the recommendations section within Google Analytics. Google said these recommendations will "alert you to issues preventing your products from being approved in Google Merchant Center."