Industry News

Google has updated its Misrepresentation policy for both Shopping ads and free listings within Google Merchant Center. Google said the "update provides additional examples of what the policy covers, more guidance on how to be compliant, and more information about our appeals process."

Google is testing a new optimization insights layer or recommendation interface for Google Ads. This has three columns named (1) build a foundation, (2) drive performance and (3) expand and grow.

Google is looking to hire a software engineer with the responsibility of improving the quality of User Generated Content (UGC) contents in Google Discover.

Google has officially launched the new grouped sponsored label in the search results. This is where Google groups multiple ads under one larger sponsored label, and then places a "hide" button at the end of the sponsored results.

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 local results without the call button...

This is a programming note that Tuesday and Wednesday are Simchat Torah and I will be offline the next two days. I will be offline on Tuesday and Wednesday, October 14th and October 15th.

Over the past few days, the local SEO community is pretty upset that Google appears to be testing removing the call button from the local results. I am not sure if this is a bug or part of the design of the new Web Guide interface that more people are seeing. Either way, I do think this must be an oversight and the call button should be added back, I would hope.

Lenny Rachitsky interviewed Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google, who we cited here numerous times over the past couple of years. The interview covers how AI is not replacing search, search is not dead, how AI Mode will be incorporated within Google Search, how to do AEO or SEO for AI answers, how AI Mode came to market and more.

Have you heard of the Google Goldmine Scoring System? It supposedly looks at your page, your content, and Google gives it a goldminePageScore, title tag factor, body factor, anchor factor, heading factor and more.

A couple of weeks ago, Google added a new help page titled Discover feed source overview. This page discusses those cards in the Google Discover feed and when Google gets the source name wrong, like for those entity Discover pages.