Industry News

A couple of weeks ago, Google announced the new features for travel search ads through integration with travel feeds. These may now be out in the wild, as we are seeing pricing and other rich markup showing up for hotel ads in Google Search.

Google Search has been rolling out this new expandable section in the search results titled "current sales." I guess Google is able to figure out what is a sale and what is not, maybe from structured data or Merchant Center and then have a section in the search results for that...

Google is showing both seller ratings and product ratings on a single Google Shopping Ad unit. It is a bit weird to see both ratings, and it can potentially be confusing to see different ratings for the same retailer but one is for the rating of the specific product and one is for the rating of the company selling that product, i.e the seller.

Google is testing placing a second link directly under the main ad headline link, some call the title link, that pull from your Google Ads assets or extensions. It is unusual to see these links right next to each other, sometimes you'd see them as sitelinks under the ad description but not directly under the main headline link.

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.

I posted the November 2024 Google webmaster report a bit late this month...

While Google has yet to confirm a Google search ranking update, we have seen tremendous volatility in the Google Search results this month. Google did however confirm it can downgrade sections of content that is starkly different from the main content. We also posted an update on the helpful content update. Finally, Google did say a new Google update is coming soon.

Google is testing showing real blue anchor text based hyperlinks in the AI Overviews, instead of showing that paperclip icon. This may encourage searchers to click on the links within the AI Overviews more - or maybe not - we have no data to validate this because Google won't give it to us.

Google has lifted its pause on US election and political ads today, Monday, November 11, 2024. The pause of US based election ads was temporarily instituted after the US election polls closed on Tuesday, November 5, 2024. Google has now lifted the temporary pause and you can begin those ads again, if you so want to.

Google has released version 2.8 of the Google Ads Editor. This new update brings a number of new features including AI-generatged images, export to Google Sheets, brand guidelines, image cropping, strict age and gender targeting, a new help center and more.

Google is testing removing the favicons and site name from the mobile search results. As you may remember, Google first launched these in the mobile search results back in October 2022 and yes, Google has had its trouble with these favicons and site names over the years.