Industry News

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

Google updated its service areas business guidelines help document to add "Do not add countries or states as a service area." Google also updated numerous parts of the document.

Google seems to be expanding the feature where they turn off the ability for some local listings, Google Business Profiles, to allow posting reviews. We covered this before during the UK and limited release, where you would get a notice that says "Posting reviews is turned off for this place." But now it seems to be expanding to more regions and businesses.

I am not sure if this is new, to be honest, we saw something super similar in the normal local review summaries about fives years ago with "X people mention [keyword]." Now in the Local Service Ads, they have it where it has this people icon with "Reviews often mention [keyword]."

Google will be ending the ability for hotels to manage their hotel rates by themselves, instead they will need to partner with a central reservation system, Internet booking engine or other partner to manage those rates on Google Search.

Microsoft is testing placing a floating Copilot search box within the Bing Search results page. The aim is to encourage searchers to ask follow-up questions, not in Bing Search, but in Microsoft Copilot.

Google updated the directions interface within Google Search. Now the drive (car icon), trains (train icon) and buses (bus icon) are in expandable menus, as opposed to tabs at the top of the "Get there" search results section.

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 says URL extensions don't matter for SEO...

Google's John Mueller several years after posting a video named "Will removing '.html' from my URLs help my site?" still says URL extensions do not matter for SEO. He said it doesn't matter if you go with a .htm or a .html or go with no extension at all.

Google is testing a new feature to replace all those copy-and-paste emoji websites. You know, when you want to know what an emoji is for a specific emotion and you go to Google and it brings up websites that have the emojis and you can click copy to your clipboard... Well, Google is doing that right in search.