Industry News

A couple of years ago, I reported that Google has changed how your feeds work in Merchant Center for countries by removing the need to list a primary country and additional countries and replacing them with target countries. Now Google is emailing advertisers letting them know that if you are currently using Country of Sale it will migrate to the feed label functionality.

Last month we reported that Google Ads began to allow some ads for opioid painkillers, like to discuss awareness and abuse. Well, Google decided to "indefinitely pausing this policy update" and not allow search ads for opioid painkillers.

Bing is testing adding nutritional details to images in its search results. It includes labeling food products with "high calcium," "lean protein," "anti-inflammatory," and other labels.

Google Search now supports a new IPTC digital source type for images which seems to be about reading if an image was made in help with AI. Google added compositeWithTrainedAlgorithmicMedia to the IPTC photo metadata documentation this morning.

Google may be testing showing which country the site operates in with a country label attached to the search result snippet. In the example below, Google is showing a "South African" label with the country flag and the country written out at the top of the snippet next to the site name.

Google Search is currently having yet another indexing bug, similar to what Google Search experienced just about two weeks ago on June 20th. Google is not indexing new content that was recently published in the past hour or so.

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.

I'm seeing more Google Search weekend volatility - something is up (or down)...

I don't cover YouTube SEO here much but I found a post from the YouTube Liaison talking about how traffic sources are impacted. In short, the YouTube home page recommendations are affected by viewers watching videos from the home page and not affected by external views, people watching your videos on an external site.

There are numerous reports of Google sending out email notifications about there being new owners added to your Search Console profiles. The new owner notification emails have been going out since Friday of last week or so and seem to be part of some bug.

Google has updated its URL structure best practices for Google Search help documentation to tell us again to not use URL fragments to change the content on that page. Google added this line, "Don't use fragments to change the content of a page, as Google generally doesn't support fragment URLs. If you're using JavaScript to change content, use the History API instead."