Industry News

The Google November 2024 Core Update launched two weeks and a day ago, and it should be confirmed as done rolling out any minute now but starting yesterday, we are seeing a spike in Google search ranking volatility. It was unusually calm for the past several days but now Google Search is heating up, in a big way.

Google announced it will be testing more changes for the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in Europe to try to help airlines, hotel operators, and small retailers and not just "large online travel aggregators and comparison sites" the search company said. Google will be testing removing map features from hotel listings as part of this.

Two and a half years ago, Google added a portal-like feature to the Google Search results named "Explore." It showed up after you scrolled through the Google Search results page and then scrolled a bit more. Now, with continuous scroll no longer, even on mobile, it seems the Explore feature went away with it.

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.