Industry News

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

Microsoft's disclosure of search ads on Bing has not been the greatest, honestly, in many cases, worse than Google's disclosures. Recently, however, Bing has been testing a clearer distinction between its ads and organic free listings.

Here is a new SEO myth I have not heard before... Someone said that using the word "news" in your site's name is bad for SEO and Google ranking. John Mueller from Google said it is not, it is fine to use "news" in your site name.

Microsoft Advertising, the ads you see in Bing, have these "Marketing with Purpose Attributes" ad labels with carbon-neutral labels. Those labels used to be gray, but now Bing has them in a dark green, which makes them way more visible.

Google is now showing these short summaries of reviews by placing a label over the review with one or a few words. So the labels might show "low quality," "compact," "lightweight," "performs well" and so on.

Google has updated the page where you view, reply and report reviews for your Google Business Profile listing. Joy Hawkins spotted the change and she says it seems to be live, personally, I think I still see the old version.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Google has started to enforce the site reputation abuse policy with manual actions...

Google said it began to enforce its new site reputation abuse policy last night. The policy went into effect on Sunday, May 5th, but Google did not announce it would take action until last night. As a reminder, this should target sites doing what some call "Parasite SEO."

I am slow to report on this but figured I'd document it just in case some of you noticed ranking volatility and fluctuations on or around May 3rd and May 4th. This is not a confirmed Google Search ranking update but there are signs of an update that touched down this past Friday.

Google Ads has launched Performance Max for Marketplaces. This is designed to help you sell your goods or services on specific marketplaces using Performance Max.