Industry News

Google Business Profiles now lets you add products to your business profiles and merchant centers section using a barcode scanner; Google will even mail you a free barcode scanner. This allows you to showcase in-store products on Google Search & Maps in a more efficient way.

We all have been seeing Google Search become more and more e-commerce and shopping-heavy. Well now we are seeing Google testing a specialized menu just for shopping features in the search results.

Google has confirmed it is working on resolving an indexing issue that it says is "affecting a small number of sites." Google said that some "sites may experience slower than usual indexing times." The search company is looking to "identifying the root cause" and hopes to fix the issue soon.

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

Google has a newish section named "Related categories nearby" that shows you various categories of products, when you click on the categories, it then shows you local stores nearby that sell it and other products in the shopping results.

Google is testing showing a "highly rated" label on the Google Local Services Ads (LSAs) listings. These are also named Google Screened, as you can see. I guess this filters LSAs by those that have high ratings by users.

Both Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising revenue were up this past quarter, year over year. Google ad revenue was up 11% and Microsoft Advertising revenue was up 8%. The previous earnings, Google ad revenue was up 9.5% and Microsoft ad revenue was up 10%.

Lily Ray asked Google's John Mueller what does Google do with all the ranking signals from the content syndication partners when Google Search decides which URL should be the canonical. It seems Google will consolidate most, if not all, of those signals to the Google-selected canonical in this case.

Google seems to be testing a new option under the Google Ads "bulk actions" named "solutions." Solutions gives you account summaries, ad performance and account anomaly detection options.

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