Google has been placing images and product images in the search results for a while and been testing on and off showing them in the desktop results. But over the past few days, more and more are seeing product images in the desktop search result snippets in Google Search.

Google announced that Customer Match is now “widely available” and also a new preview tool to help you figure out errors or issues with using the tool. Google is opening Customer Match to “all policy compliant advertisers” with more than $50,000 lifetime spend.

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

Google has updated its Google Merchant Center policies to allow the sale and listing of medical tests kits in both the paid and free Google Shopping search results. This includes at-home results or lab results and over-the-counter test kits.

Friday evening, Google Ads had a bug of some sorts that caused the cost per click (CPC) prices to skyrocket on many Shopping Ad campaigns. Google confirmed the issue on Saturday afternoon and resolved it going forward. The company promised to reach out to those impacted.

Sites hosted on SiteGround last week found themselves not being crawled by Googlebot, Google’s crawler. The issue seemed to have been an DNS issue between the provider’s partners (AWS) and Google according to the hosting company. The DNS issue was resolved after a few days but with DNS, things take time to update and now sites are starting to be crawled again.

Google’s John Mueller confirmed again that bolding words and “important points on a paragraph” does help with SEO and rankings. But it is all relative, if you bold everything on the page, then it doesn’t help, John explained.

Ever see a chart in your page experience report or core web vitals reports that shows core web vitals data and then doesn’t and then does again? If you do, you are not alone, it means you are “teetering on the edge of having enough field data for evaluating the CWV properly,” John Mueller of Google said.

In part one, Bryan Cush, the co-founder of Tidal Health Group, and I spoke about how to use health data for content and search marketing and in part two we dug into using medical databases, local search and E-A-T & YMYL…

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

It took about eight days for Google to rollout the November spam update. This update targeted content spam efforts that went against Google’s webmaster guidelines. It seemed to have a more significant update than the previous spam updates.

I start off announcing the winner(s) of the Squid Game contest I had last week. Google finished the rollout for the November spam update after 8 days. That Google November spam update seems to be big, at least…

Google added to the help documentation for the logo schema/structured data that you can now use ImageObject type to specify an organization logo. This is in addition to just the URL type.

Here is a fun podcast from Googlers John Mueller, Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt on the future of SEO. The group spoke about HTML, JavaScript, web app, structured data, crawling and machine generated content and learning. In short, it didn’t sound like much will change in SEO in the near future but maybe there are opportunities for change.

Google now has the scroll-to-text feature for sitelinks in the Google Search results. Google launched these with featured snippets in 2020 but has been testing it since 2018, and it seems to now work for some sitelinks.