Industry News

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

Google is now saying it has ranking systems that "aim to understand if a section of a site is independent or starkly different from the main content of the site. This helps us surface the most useful information from a range of sites." This is the reason that sites like Fortune Recommends, Forbes Advisor and other sections of sites saw declines in Google Search rankings over the past several weeks.

Google Ads will be sunsetting call ads sometime next year and will be migrating those to responsive search ads. Google wrote, "Call ads are being upgraded to responsive search ads to enable new features and simplify asset creation and management."

Google Search Console's performance report seems to have a bug where it is showing almost zero data for today. I can replicate this across numerous Search Console properties, so maybe something is stuck with Search Console right now.

Google is now testing showing reviews within the photos carousel within a Google Business Profile listing. So when you scroll through the photos for a business, Google can also show review snippets.

Google is testing showing a carousel named mentioned products, that can be displayed under a search result snippet that shows the products mentioned in that search result. This came up for Reddit results, in the Discussions and forums section in Google Search.

Google has added a new search document on Google Trends while also making some small updates to the URL structure, best practices documentation, and favicons documentation. Google has been doing a lot of videos around Google Trends, so the new documentation around that topic is not a surprise.

Google Business Profiles may now ask you to verify your information about your store inventory within the Products section of your profile. Google will ask "Do you sell these products in-store?"

While I was offline, it seems we had two bouts of Google Search ranking volatility, one starting around Wednesday, October 23rd and 24th, and then again in the past 24 hours, starting on October 26th and 27th. I mean, this is a lot of the same as my previous Google Search ranking algorithm update coverage.

This is another amazing AHP essay, this time about the critiques of Gen Z employees:

I’ve long argued that the critique of younger generations is a sublimated critique of a generation’s own parenting and child-rearing practices: no one wants to admit that the decisions they made (or tacitly endorsed) are responsible for the type of worker they find objectionable. But that sort of introspection requires, well, work.

It’s well worth reading the whole thing, but I also wanted to...