Industry News

In the last Search Off The Record podcast, Gary Illyes from the Google Search team said that sometimes issues can arise within the Google Search results due to two experiments that conflict with each other. He said at the 19:41 mark, "Very often there are experiments that need to be rolled back because two experiments might interact very badly with each other."

Google Business Profiles websites, which stopped loading websites and began redirecting to the Google Business Profiles listing on Google Maps now completely 404 - as expected. It was supposed to stop working completely this past Sunday, but it did not stop working until later this week.

Google may be testing a new call extension and location extension ad format. This format shows up as a carousel of links or buttons that you can scroll through below the ad snippet in the search results.

Did you know that SEO bloggers, like myself, are the reason you see fewer and less nuanced responses from Google Search reps? John Mueller from Google said so on Reddit, where he wrote, "Love the SEO news/bloggers, but it also means I can't reply to things with nuance publicly."

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

Google posted a notice that it fixed an issue where Google Analytics, GA4, would sometimes not credit the proper conversion attribution to the paid search campaign. Google said it will update the "attribution models in GA4 over the next two weeks to improve the accuracy of conversion credit for paid search campaigns."

Google is testing a larger font size for the main search result title link, followed by smaller fonts for that same snippet's sitelinks. This was spotted a few days ago by both Umair Khan on X and Lily Ray on X.

Google posted a public service announcement saying you should disallow Googlebot from crawling your action URLs. Gary Illyes from Google posted on LinkedIn, "You should really disallow crawling of your action URLs. Crawlers will not buy that organic non-GMO scented candle, nor do they care for a wishlist."

Microsoft is testing using black-colored review stars in its Bing Search results. This is instead of the yellow or orange review stars. I am not sure why they are testing it in black, but they are.

Google seems to be testing adding labels and descriptions on the photos within the local business profile listings. These are on both the carousel of images and on the detailed business profile page.