Industry News

While Microsoft has offered tools to import your Google Ads campaigns into Microsoft Advertising, including PMax import tools - now you can supposedly import from PMax to PMax, with Microsoft fully supporting PMax campaigns these days.

Google's John Mueller said that if your website is www.domain.com and then you decide to canonicalize it to the non-www, so it goes to domain.com from www.domain.com - that change would not have a big impact on your rankings. He wrote on Reddit, "This won't cause problems with search visibility / rankings / indexing: when the canonical URL switches, it just switches."

Google announced some executive changes last night with Liz Reid being named the new head of Google Search. Pandu Nayak stepped down as the lead of search quality and ranking. Cathy Edwards stepped down as the lead Google Apps, Google News, Google Discover and other ecosystem efforts. Finally, Cheenu Venkatachary has stepped up to lead our quality and ranking teams, in place of Pandu Nayak.

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

Google is urging site owners and SEOs to have patience as the Google March 2024 core update continues to roll out over the coming weeks. Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, said on X to wait for the update to complete before deciding on what changes you may want to make.

A month ago we saw Google test a new search filter for "Forums." This would filter the search results just to show results from forums, like Reddit, Quora and maybe some of the forums I cover here. Well, now Google has officially made the switch where Forums replaced Perspectives in the search bar filters (it may still be rolling out).

Google has updated its help document on how to fix suspended or disabled Google Business Profiles to explain that you can now "request an additional review to a denied request." Google actually added a lot more detail to this help document.

We've been covering many of the Google Maps changes, many related to what searchers see in Europe related to the required DMA changes Google has to make. But searchers are complaining about several of these changes in the Google forums.

Both Semrush and SimilarWeb's RankRanger tool are reporting that Google is showing fewer sitelinks within the Google Search results. In fact, it seemed to have dropped over 10 percentage points. The drop started on Thursday, March 14th.

My wife is a therapist, so the story Can AI therapists do better than the real thing? (oh hello, Betteridge’s law of headlines) piqued my interest, since we’ve had lots of conversations about this kind of thing.

The story starts off with some really interesting anecdotes about people forming “relationships” with their therapy chatbots, but it then turns towards some of the concerns and drawbacks, and how one client (not a fan of the use of “patient” in the article) ultimately dealt with...