Industry News

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

We reported on Saturday that the Google March 2024 core update seemed to have touched down on land, and we saw a lot of sites start to report major ranking drops, and the third-party tracking tools noticed big volatility. That all calmed on Sunday through today but we also had reports of reversals.

Google is testing adding the hotel's website link directly to the Google Search hotel listings on the main search results screen. This is instead of making you go through the Google hotel results interface to learn more.

In September, Microsoft told us they would add Copilot to Microsoft Advertising to help advertisers create and optimize their ads. Now some advertisers are seeing the Copilot button within the Microsoft Advertising console.

Google Business Profiles now shows services with bookable buttons. I know Google had booking buttons on local panels since 2017 and we covered it numerous times since then but now they are on the Google Business Profiles services section.

Google has a section under some of its top stories in search results named "more context." This will summarize the headlines for your keyword search based on the top stories in the carousel. Google has a disclaimer under the "more context" section that says "generative AI is experimental."

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

Currently, Bing Webmaster Tools will give you up to six months of data, but Microsoft may extend that up to 24 months. Fabrice Canel from Microsoft said on X, "We will consider extending to 2 years."

Imagine you pay for an advertisement, someone then clicks on that ad and is then able to see local competitors. Is that ad worth buying? Well, Google Local Service Ads that bring up your Google Business Profile can show nearby competitors in your Business Profile listing.

The updated Google Search Quality Raters guidelines last week and added an example of that it considers the "lowest quality pages." In section 4.7 it states the only mention of using AI and writes, "The website terms of use states that "some articles" are generated by artificial intelligence and may have errors or be out of date; there is no indication to which pages this statement applies. The information in this article is not trustworthy and is Lowest E-E-A-T."