Industry News

We've been seeing changes to the Google Search results in the European regions related to Digital Markets Act (DMA) comparison sites and hotels, etc. The Google Search team now posted about how the search experiences are changing with new rich results, aggregator units, and refinement chips - most of what we covered already but now it is official.

Google is testing a new top stories feature and label that tells you that there are new top stories available since the last time you searched for that query. There is a new label that reads "new" and says, "There are new results since your last search."

Google has added a section to the use rel=canonical link annotations section of the canonical search documentation to clarify that rel=canonical annotations with certain attributes are not used for canonicalization.

Google Search Console has quietly launched some relatively small user interface changes. It seems like the filters and sorting boxes are now curved and more modern.

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

There seems to be a bug right now with Google Search not showing the local pack results right now. I suspect it will be fixed really soon. Searches that trigger local packs that show business profiles in the search results are not triggering the local pack in Google Search.

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, wrote on X, "Another thing to keep in mind is that some of the sites I've looked into, where someone thinks they have a helpful content issue -- they're fine." Meaning, those sites may have seen competitors see a lift and jump up ahead of them but their traffic is down because of the competition ranking better, not because of any unhelpful content issues.

Google Ads is beta testing a new feature, a new button, in the Google Ads console named "Spacing." This is a feature that is available for individual advertiser accounts and not rolling out as a beta to MCC accounts.

Google has released its new Google Maps and local spam fighting numbers for the 2023 year, citing a big lift in reviews and other local fraud that was blocked. Google credited a new machine learning algorithm and its spam-fighting team for the improvements.

It seems Google has no plans to build a mobile app for Search Console in the near future. John Mueller of Google was asked about the possibility and he responded on LinkedIn, "I don't see this happening again anytime soon."