Industry News

Here is a new interview published yesterday by The Economic Times Podcasts with Elizabeth Reid, VP of Google Search. She spoke about Google's progression of AI in Search, content quality, SEO, blue links, traffic, the ecosystem, agentic features and more.

In June, Google began testing showing a new answer box for emoji related queries. So when you search for a specific type of emoji, Google will give you the emoji options that you can copy directly from the search results page instead of going to a third-party publisher site. Well, that seems fully live as of today.

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...

As a reminder, Google dropped its unofficial support of showing 100 search results per page, which caused issues for third party tracking tools and even Search Console itself. The theory with Search Console is that the scrapers were injecting artificial data into Google and thus the reporting. But is the same happening with Google Ads reporting?

OpenAI announced Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, allowing you to make purchases directly in ChatGPT. This is powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol that is built with Stripe.

Google is testing not underlining the search result snippets when you hover your mouse cursor over the snippet. Generally, Google will add an underline to the title of the link (sometimes the whole snippet) when you hover over it. But here, Google is testing not doing that.

Google is testing a blue progress bar under the Shopping Ads carousel in the search results. As you scroll the carousel to see more products, the blue progress bar will indicate how much of the carousel is remaining to be seen.

Google added a new report to the Google AdSense reporting named traffic source breakdown. This report helps you understand the origins of your page traffic. It also categorizes traffic based on whether it arrived directly to your page, or from popular and classified platforms.

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

We covered the topic of taking over an old domain name from someone else and how that can sometimes be problematic in the Google SEO world. But here is a more recent comment from John Mueller of Google that is more encouraging on the topic.