Industry News

In the Google Merchant Center structured data documentation, it says that you should add structured data to the HTML source and that it "can't be generated after a page has been loaded using JavaScript." This does not mean Google cannot process the structured data on the page if generated using JavaScript, but rather that it makes it harder for Google to do so.

Surprise, surpise... Wikipedia is the number one source of information that comes up when you click on the people also ask feature within the Google Search results. People also ask is just another variation of a form of featured snippets, so this probably makes sense.

A few months ago I posted about a possible bug with Google Maps where map pins were being moved around into one location. I later updated the post to suggest it was more of a spam or hack exploit. Yep, spammers are hijacking the location of businesses on Google Maps by moving their map pins, that results in local ranking declines and possible Google Business Profile suspensions.

Google is testing showing a "latest deals" section in the search results that says "Deals added in the past 24 hours." So Google Search is pulling in fresh new deals that it found within the last day or so for this new search feature.

Google is testing placing both the "Top-quality store" and "shop rating" labels or badges on the same page of the search results, for the same search result snippets. Generally, Google Search would show one or the other and not both, but here Google is testing showing both of them.

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.

Google posted its FAQs on AI Overviews...

Some in the SEO industry have been asking if Google has been showing fewer links in its search results to Reddit over the past several weeks. So Mordy Obserstein pulled some Semrush data that showed a slight downtick in Reddit results in Google's Discussion and Forums section.

Google has posted a new document in its forums named frequently asked questions about AI Overviews. In this document it has a section named "why can't I disable AI Overviews?" The answer is that Google's "goal is to help people find the information they're looking for quickly and reliably."

Google's Gary Illyes posted on LinkedIn with two common examples of when a spike in Googlebot activity, crawling, is a bad thing. The short answer is when Googlebot gets to crawling an infinite section of your site (like calendar pages that goes on forever) and when your site is hacked with a ton of new hacked pages.

Google is testing showing two more people also ask results, by default, which is a total of six people also ask, instead of the typical four people also ask that Google would show in its search results.