Industry News

Google is testing a button in the search results under the top stories news results to see "more news topics." I personally cannot replicate this, which makes me think this is new.

Google Ads now limits the number of country-level exclusions you can add to your ads to 120 countries. This is a new limit but Google confirmed that location exclusions aren't going away.

Remember People Cards? Probably not. It launched in Google Search in India in 2020 a way for "business professional, performer, or anyone looking to build up your own online presence, you might have a website, social profiles, and other information spread across many sites," Google said. Well, it is being discontinued as of April 7, 2024.

Google has updated its Google Business Profile help documentation to add a line saying that Google may show your social media posts in Search if you have associated your social media links via your Google Business Profile.

Google Business Profiles has outages for some of its business management tools. The outages started yesterday, March 7th, at about 5 pm ET or earlier. It impacts the ability to manage reviews, appeals and also to check your verification status.

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

Google has unleashed tons of manual actions, search ranking penalties you can see within Google Search Console, after it released its search spam policy updates on Tuesday. The manual actions seemed to mostly have been distributed yesterday, Wednesday, March 6th, a day after Google announced the new spam policy changes.

I ran a poll asking my X/Twitter followers if they think the new Google March core and spam updates will reduce unhelpful content from showing up in the search results by 40%? About 80% of the 1,XXX votes said no, they don't think it will reduce the low-quality, unhelpful content from showing up in the Google search results.

Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, was asked does Google currently validate/verify if information or data within content, is accurate, correct, true or even "commonly accepted". In which Sullivan replied it isn't a simple yes/no response, Google Search wants to rank content people like, and people like content that has reliable information.

Google is no longer showing the number of views a review gets on Google Maps. You will be able to see the older reviews view-counts for now but the new reviews are not showing those counts.