Industry News

Google seems to be flip-flopping between calling it Google Posts and Google Updates within Google Business Profiles. When a business owner wants to post an announcement of sorts on their Google local listing, they can click "Add update" or now "Posts" with a plus-sign.

Google is testing adding colors to the in stock and out of stock labels or extensions in the search result snippets. So if a product is in stock, the icon will be green and if the product is out of stock, the icon will be red.

Some are starting to see the new asset-level reporting within Google Ads for Performance Max campaigns. I am not sure how widespread the rollout is but some are starting to see these reports in their Google Ads advertiser console.

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

Google's John Mueller responded to a complaint about indexing issues and ranking drops within Google Search, citing that the possible reason is unrelated content on the site. John said in response to the complaint, "One of the things I noticed is that there's a lot of totally unrelated content on the site."

Google has made a small but I assume meaningful change to the search ranking systems document, the section for "Removal-based demotion systems." Google changed the wording from a "high" volume to a "significant" volume throughout that section.

A study from Profound of OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity shows that while ChatGPT mostly sources its information from Wikipedia, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity mostly source their information from Reddit.

Microsoft Advertising posted its June report showing off some new features added to the ad platform. The big item is the new custom report builder, but also PMax updates, import tool updates and Shopify integrations.

Just when you thought the layoffs were over (remember January 2023), Google is offering a buyout program across search and ad units, including knowledge and information and central engineering units as well as marketing, research and communications teams, CNBC has reported.

Google added new markup support for loyalty and membership programs with special pricing. This was supported in Google Merchant Center but now is supported in under Organization structured data combined with loyalty benefits under Product structured data, Google announced.