Industry News

A month ago, we reported Google added a new form to report negative review extortion scams on your Google Business Profiles and local listings. Google also listed some tips on how to handle these extortion attempts. But I am glad to report that some local SEOs are saying this form is working and those extortion reviews are being removed by Google.

Google's John Mueller confirmed that Google is not killing off all forms of schema and structured data support for Google Search. The question came up in a Reddit thread after Google's announcement about more structured data support and search features going away.

There are reports that Google is showing more free product listings from Google Merchant Center in the Google AI Overview responses. I am told there are two variations of this AI Overview response: one where the favicon and price appear as an overlay, and another where the free listings look more like a map pack.

Google Ads is now showing summaries of your budget settings in the budget and bidding optimization setting. This will summarize what your settings are configured for, at a glance.

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.

Late last week, into this weekend...

Microsoft announced on Friday afternoon that Copilot now has its own dedicated search experience. Plus, because Microsoft knows how important publishers are to the ecosystem, it is making citations and links way more prominent and clickable.

There have been a number of threads on LinkedIn over the past week about how poorly Google Ads AI Max is performing compared to other match types. The conversions or conversion value is greatly below other match types, in early tests, despite Google saying it should deliver 14% more.

Google's John Mueller responded with SEO advice on how a company can use two different TLDs for its company. The company wants to use the .co.uk for normal search and web traffic but .digital as a TLD for some of its marketing campaigns.

Last week, Google announced Opal, a Google Labs project, expanded to more regions. Well, it also explained how you can use this tool to create optimized content in a scalable way - consistently and quickly, without much human intervention. Yea, does this seem like something that might be against the Google Search guidelines?

Google seems to have fixed a bug with inviting others to access your Google Ads account. This bug appeared about a week ago and it Google seemed to start to roll out a fix for this bug on Friday.