Industry News

Google updated a help document within the Google Merchant Center help area to document that Google Merchant Center for Agencies can now link to up to 1,000 Merchant Center accounts. Previously, that number was not there, and now we know - up to 1,000 accounts can be linked to a single agency account.

As we know, Google has often declared that its crawlers, Googlebot, etc, come from Mountain View, California. But the truth is, that is where they self-declare the bots are coming from. Google has data centers all over the world, and even though Google may be declaring the crawler is coming from a specific location, it might be coming from a different location.

Google has a new reporting option for reviews in Google Business Profiles and Google Local. This one is called "Report owner response." It lets you tell Google if an owner response to a review is off-topic, contains profanity, is harassing, discriminatory, hateful, or includes personal information.

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

We saw a spike in volatility yesterday amongst the Google Search results rankings. There was a spike in ranking movement outside the day-to-day norm that seemed to start yesterday and maybe into today. The chatter is somewhat cool, but the tools showed a spike in the Google rank volatility.

Google has dropped the minimum number of followers needed to be approved for a Search Profile on Google. Previously, it was 100,000 subscribers across YouTube, Instagram, X and Tiktok. Now it is 35,000 subscribers across YouTube, Instagram, and X but still 100,000 on TikTok.

OpenAI is testing or rolling out a change to how you can click to see the sources from the ChatGPT responses. It used to be a button named "Sources" in the footer of the response, but now sometimes it is showing up within the three-dot "More actions" menu, requiring you to click more to find those sources - which very few will do.

This is just a random tip, make sure not to misconfigure Cloudflare, your content delivery network and/or your hosting server. I see way too many cases of this popping up and causing such a pain for SEOs to fix. All of a sudden, you might notice your rankings drop off a cliff on Google Search and your pages begin to drop out of the Google index. It is likely because you are blocking Google from crawling your site.

When you use the Google Search Console URL inspection tool, Google will show you what it calls the "Google-selected canonical." Sometimes that URL will look off, weird and even scary, because sometimes it might be a URL for a spammy site.

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. Google has amended its lawsuit against SerpApi...