Industry News

I know we just reported on more volatility this Monday, possibly related to the Google March 2024 core update, but we are seeing even more volatility over the past 24 hours related to this update. This volatility shows deepening movement for those who were hit, which is incredibly sad in many cases.

Google Maps will soon stop supporting drafting reviews for local business listings and Google Business Profiles. Google said that starting July 16, 2024, review drafts will no longer be supported.

Google Search Console has a new security feature under user and permission management to help you manage your unused ownership tokens. Basically, it helps you manage who has permissions to your Search Console profiles and who should not, maybe some legacy verifications.

Google Ads announced that Demand Gen campaigns are getting generative AI tools to create image assets. This is rolling out to advertisers around the world in English with more languages to come later this year, Google said.

Google Search is testing horizontal lines under the sitelinks and the people also ask elements in the search results. This is a long horizontal line that goes across the while search result snippet.

Martin Splitt from Google posted a one-line question asking, "Should we do something to explain the crawl stats report in GSC?" This was posted on Mastodon, which has a small audience, but the responses were pretty good.

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

Google's new spam algorithm update also introduced new spam policies including the upcoming site reputation abuse policy that won't go into effect until May 2024. Google has confirmed it will fight site reputation abuse spam using both manual actions (humans) and algorithms (machines).

Google launched the style recommendations with thumbs up and down buttons not long ago after testing it in January. Now Google is showing this thumbs up and down buttons in the product grid search results, so Google can see what you like or dislike and then show you more products that you do like.

Google has a similar products section and carousel for Google Ads sponsored listings. We have seen similar products and similar shopping related results from the organic / free listings but now I am seeing examples of a search ad carousel for "similar products."