Industry News

Google announced a number of new Google Ads enhancements or updates to Performance Max campaigns, some we already covered and some are less search specific. The search ads news that are new are sharable ad previews, asset experiments for Performance Max with product feeds and test adding assets and using Final URL expansion.

Google Search is testing replacing the spelling notification for "search instead for..." with "revert." I mean, it is a weird one being that I am not sure "revert" is the right word for this but hey, Google loves to test things.

Google has this carousel that can pull in top products based on customer reviews in the Google Shopping graph. It is titled "Top products from customer reviews" and shows up in the search results for select queries.

Gareth Hoyle posted about this new game he and his company, along with others have spent about a year putting together. It is named SEO The Board Game and is a strategic game for 2 to 4 players where you play an SEO expert, purchase and optimize websites, build your digital empire, and compete for the title of top SEO kingpin.

This is a programming note that Thursday and Friday are Simchat Torah and I will be offline the next two days. I will be offline on Thursday and Friday, October 24th and October 25th...

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

Google may have hit Fortune Recommends with a search penalty, downgrading its Google search rankings. This may be related to the site reputation abuse policy, like it may have done previously to Forbes Advisor a few weeks ago and some other large publications.

Google's John Mueller said he understands why some in our industry look to optimize for metrics within various SEO tool platforms, but he said there are not shortcuts in SEO and optimizing for those metrics won't directly lead to Google search ranking or SEO gains.

Google is testing new Audience Insights or audience analytics within the Google Merchant Center interface. This can show you your audience's regions, ages, gender, age group and more.

One of the complains with Google Search showing Reddit or other online forums all the time is that for medical questions, the answers can be dangerous and harmful. But at the same time, they can also provide help for people going through a rough time, to hear from others going through it.