Industry News

Google Ads announced a number of updates yesterday, across new reporting, shopping tools and more ad features, including, of course, AI ad features. "To help retailers maximize success and stay nimble in this year's shorter holiday shopping season, today at our annual Think Retail event we shared some new updates to Google tools," Google wrote.

Tons of Google Ads advertisers are noticing a new button available in the Google Ads advertiser interface named "internal tools." There is a lock icon for the internal tools button and when you click on it, it has the headline "audience builder."

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.

Amazon Web Services blocked Googlebot from my images...

Back in mid-June, I noticed that Google was not showing many of my images in Google Search and Discover and also some readers were pointing it out to me. So I used the handy Google Search Console URL Inspection tool to find out those S3 URLs I was using to host my images were blocking Googlebot from crawling.

Google is now testing a new user experience for maps in the Google Search local panel section. Normally when you click on the map in the local knowledge panel, you are taken into Google Maps. Now, Google is testing expanding the maps while you stay on the Google Search results page.

Google has updated the first paragraph of its Organization structured data search developer documentation. Google said the update is to clarify "that some properties can influence which logo is shown, while others are used behind the scenes."

John Mueller from Google in the latest SEO office hours said that Google, Googlebot, does not generally try variations of URLs to see if they work. So if you have a URL like domain.com/pagegoeshere1/, Google won't try domain.com/pagegoeshere2/ to just try it out of curiosity.

For many sites that have customer or client portals, including SaaS companies, the login page is the primary destination for a lot of searchers. It will help your customers bypass your homepage and go right to the login area. The question asked of Google is how do you ensure that login page shows up as a Sitelink in your Google Search results snippet.

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...

This Google August 2024 core update has been shaking things up since it began to rollout. We saw some early signs of some sites hit by the September 2023 helpful content see some signs of life. Then some saw reversals of sorts, but maybe that was the search ranking bug that got fixed a few days later. Here are some charts a week or so after the August core update was released.