Study On Removal Of Google Local Reviews
The folks over at GMBapi have put together a large study on the topic of how and why Google removes reviews from Google Business Profiles. It looked at nearly 5 million reviews across 78 countries and over 19,000 locations.
Google Merchant Center Now Lets You Select Your Payment Methods
Google Merchant Center now lets merchants specify which payment methods and options they offer customers. Google would normally handle this in an automated way but now Google is letting you override those payment options, in case Google is getting it …
Daily Search Forum Recap: December 18, 2024
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.
The Google search API leak, now with an end point leak…
Video On Google Exploit With End Points Reveal Interesting Ranking Signals
Mark Williams-Cook gave an unbelievable presentation at SearchNorwich named Improving your SEO with conceptual models. Lucky for you and me, this presentation was posted on YouTube for us all to enjoy. It covers how Mark found an exploit in Google’s e…
Forbes Fires Freelancers Over Google’s Site Reputation Abuse Policy
Forbes has reportedly fired some of its freelancers for some stories over its ongoing issue with Google’s site reputation abuse policy, aka parasite SEO. The Verge wrote, “Forbes will stop using freelancers for some types of stories indefinitely ‘” and…
Google Search Tests Rich Things To Do Image Carousel
Google is testing a much richer experience for things to do style queries. Instead of showing a calendar box, text format with image boxes, Google is testing showing this rich image carousel of events that slides by itself from right to left.
Google Search Shadow On Hover Of Search Results
Google is testing another search result snippet interface change, this one is when you hover your mouse over the snippet, it adds a shadow effect to the snippet.
Google Ads Tests Double Serving Ads From Same Advertiser On Same Page
Google has confirmed it is testing allowing showing the same ad, from the same advertiser, on the same search results page. Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison said, “We’re conducting a small experiment testing different ad configurations” in regards…
Google Site Reputation Abuse: Treating Some Sites Within A Site
Jonathan Jones attended the Google Search Central Live event in Zurich last week and posted excellent and detailed notes about the event, including a bit more on the more often core updates. But he also covered how Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liai…
Google: Disavowing Toxic Links Is A Billable Waste Of Time
Google’s John Mueller reiterated in a big way that SEOs and site owners should not spend time disavowing “toxic” links. He said it is a “billable waste of time” to disavow toxic links, as provided in some of these SEO toolsets.
Google Adds Faceted Navigation To Help Documentation
Google has repurposed its 2014 blog post on faceted navigation best practices (which we covered a decade ago) and created a new help document page named Managing crawling of faceted navigation URLs.
New Google Merchant Center Promotion For First Order Discount
Google Merchant Center added a new field in the “Promotion conditions” section for “first order” discount. This seems to be for shopping ads set up in Merchant Center.
OpenAI Opens ChatGPT Search To All Logged In Users
When OpenAI launched ChatGPT Search several weeks ago, it was just available to paid users. Now, anyone who logs into ChatGPT should have access to the Search the Web button on ChatGPT.com.
Daily Search Forum Recap: December 16, 2024
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.
The Google December 2024 core update landed hard over the weekend…
Google: Search Console API Does Not Support New 24-Hour View
Google’s Daniel Waisberg confirmed that the new 24-hour date filter that is in the Google Search Console web interface is not yet supported by the Google Search Console API. Of course, you can query the API for any date range and it will bring back dat…
Google Search Tests New Favicon Design With Backgrounds
Google is testing yet another design for favicons in the search result snippets. This one has these backgrounds, grayish backgrounds added behind the favicons in the search results.
Google Search Research More Articles Section
Google is testing a “Research more” section in its search results that shows articles on the topic you queried. This looks like the list articles section we covered in October, but renamed to research more…
Google Business Profile Emails Asking To Add Social Profiles
Google is sending out emails asking business owners to add their social profiles to their Google Business Profiles. The email says, “Link your social profiles so customers can see your posts from Instagram, X, Facebook, and more when they search for y…
Google Search Tests Attach File To Ask About A File
Google Search is testing adding a paper clip icon to the search bar, next to the voice search icon, next to the lens icon and the search button. This seems to also you to search a file you upload and says, “ask anything about a file.”
Google December 2024 Core Update Landed & It’s Big
As you know, the December 2024 core update was announced on December 12, 2024 at around 10:46 am ET and Google said it would take about two weeks to complete. Well, this update seemed to have touched down, landed, over this weekend. There is a lot of …