Industry News

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...

For the past 20 years, probably even longer, the debate about Google giving preferential treatment to large sites over small sites has been a huge topic in the SEO world and that has not changed in 2024 from 2004. Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, recently said on X, "yes, we should be rewarding the best content, regardless of site size."

Google is pushing some businesses to sign up for a free Google Ads consult with a Google representative through their Gmail accounts. This is in the form of a pop up in the Gmail interface, it is not a normal spammy email solicitation but rather a pop up.

Google Ads has an issue with some sitelink assets where it shows the sitelinks are eligible but "limited" and the reason says "unknown." Google's Ads Liaison said, "the team is aware of this issue and currently on it."

The other day, Gartner, a respected research firm, predicted that "traditional search engine volume will drop 25%, with search marketing losing market share to AI chatbots and other virtual agents." So I asked SEOs what they think and only 20% of SEOs think search volume won't change by 2026.

The popular Google app, the Google Search app, now has a toggle at the top to quickly switch between Google Search and Gemini (formerly Google Bard). It shows up at the top and is defaulted to Google Search with the super G logo but you can see the Gemini logo that you can tap on to switch to Gemini.

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

John Mueller from Google once again addressed the topic of sites using the Google Indexing API when Google does not officially support those use cases. He said it is not supported first, and he added that these sites are often spammy and low quality - but he stated, "it's great to see passionate people try to do more with it."

Google will change how it estimates its delivery times through Google Merchant Center. Starting on April 9, Google will look at minimum [min_handling_time]and maximum [max_handling_time] attributes for processing time in your product data for Shopping ads and free listings.

Google has posted a new policy for Google Merchant Center around using AI-generated images. In short, you need to make sure those images have meta data that labels the image as generated by using AI.