Industry News

As you may remember, Mustafa Suleyman became the CEO of AI at Microsoft and then shortly after we heard that Mikhail Parakhin stepped down as the head of Bing Search and Microsoft Advertising. Since then, Mikhail Parakhin has been very quiet on X, but he did post one response this week on Mustafa Suleyman.

Google Business Profiles now lets you select your preferred menu source. You have three options for your restaurant: create or copy a menu, copy from a website, or pick a third-party platform to take the menu from.

When it comes to crawl budget and Google not crawling your site too much or too little, Google takes into account all Googlebot activity across all verticals. So that includes crawling for web search, Merchant Center, ads, and all the various crawling activities.

This is a programming note that I will be completely offline for the Passover holiday. Passover is on Tuesday and Wednesday...

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

Gary Illyes from Google spoke at the SERP Conf on Friday and he said what he said numerous times before, that Google values links a lot less today than it did in the past. He added that Google Search "needs very few links to rank pages."

Google is testing showing answers in the Discussions and Forums section within the search results. Google will show the question and then add a shaded box with one of the selected answers under the question.

Forbes has blocked its coupons section of its web site at forbes.com/coupons using an x-robots-tag: noindex directive prior to Google enforcing the upcoming site reputation abuse policy. As a reminder, Google will enforce that new policy on May 5th both algorithmically and through manual actions.

Google is testing showing a "Post" button in the carousel of buttons in the Google Business Profile local listing panel. So when you view your owned business in Google Search, you may see a "Post" button near the call, directions, share, and save. There is also an "Edit" button there.

It is good to have choices but too many choices might not be good, said some wise man. Well, here is Google giving you 16 choices of bikes in the shopping ad spot at the top of the Google Search results.