Industry News

I love the Murderbot books, and this interview with author Martha Wells is a delight:

Of all her characters, Wells has said, Murderbot is the one she’s put the most of herself into. It’s a surprising claim, until it’s not. It’s obvious that Wells feels a distance from other humans, even as she’s spent a life trying to relate to them, to understand them.

This is a really interesting rebuttal of some modern parenting methods by Marilyn Simon:

The job of the parent is not to prevent any potential “trauma”, it is to love the child even when they are bad, and to punish them, and most importantly to forgive them. A child can’t understand the lightness of forgiveness without understanding first that one needs it.

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

Google Ads updated its abusing the ad network policy to say it will disapprove ads can take "actions on ads relating that might violate Spam Policies for Google Web Search." Specifically, if an ad's destination points to a page removed from Google Search through a Google Search manual action, the ad will be disapproved.

Google Ads seems to be rolling out new asset-level conversion data in Performance Max reporting and campaigns. You can use the conversions and conversion value columns to get an overview of asset performance.

Google has officially rolled out AI organized results for restaurants related queries. We've launched a new way to get dining recs on Search. If you're looking for something like 'restaurants with a view Chicago,' you'll get a results page organized with AI," Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google announced on X.

Google Ads is making a change to new Performance Max campaigns that are created in the Google Ads web interface. Starting on January 20, 2025, these campaigns will have brand guidelines enabled and require business name and logo brand assets to be linked at the campaign level rather than the asset group level.

Google has posted a new help section for Google Merchant Center, a Merchant Center Next Glossary. This glossary defines key Merchant Center terms and links you to related articles with more detail about each term.

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

On Thursday, December 19th at 12 pm ET, Google began its release of the Google December 2024 spam update. It seems like that update kicked into gear the day or so after it was released, but honestly, it is hard to tell if the damage is from the spam update or the tail end of the completed Google December 2024 core update.