Google will update its Google Ads policy on September 3, 2024, to allow public hair grooming services to be advertised on the Google Ads network, including Display, YouTube, and Search.

Google seems to be encouraging searchers to search more for more types of queries with a new “Explore more with Search” carousel. It shows the searcher other topics, with photos, on what they can search on.

Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads Liaison, said if you put similar keywords in separate ad groups that can essentially make both eligible to be considered for auction selection. It would essentially remove AI-theming (if that is a word) because they are in different ad groups.

Google notified advertisers in Canada they are charging a 2.5% surcharge on top of everything for buying ads on Google. This is on top of many of these advertisers losing the credit card payment option, which was as good as cash for many of them.

A few weeks ago, Google announced it is doing away with how it does credits and disputes for Local Service Ads and is switching to an automated system. It seems like that system is now live, up and running.

Here is the big monthly Google webmaster report, where I catch you up on what changes with Google Search related to Google updates, ranking volatility, SEO, Search Console, UI changes, local and much more. This month we had intense ranking volatility all month, we had autocomplete updates, deepfakes algorithm changes and a big search indexing bug.

This week we covered how Google said the core update isn’t extremely far away. We also reported on super intense Google Search ranking volatility change later this week and then the ongoing volatility with Google Search over the past few weeks…

Google Ads is currently having an outage for many of its reporting interfaces across Report Editor, Dashboards, and Saved Reports in the Google Ads web interface. Plus, The Products, Product Groups and Listing Groups pages are down across the web interface, API, and Google Ads Editor.

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

In May, we reported that Google Search algorithms lowered the rankings of deepfake sites. Now, Google has gone into more detail on how this algorithm works and how you can manually remove deepfakes from Google Search.

Google Search had an incredibly volatile month of July and it ended the month with a huge bang. The volatility in the Google Search results yesterday, July 31st, going into today, August 1st, is heavy. This may be Google testing a new Google search ranking algorithm update, maybe the expected core update, or maybe not…

The folks at Vercel and MERJ put together a super deep dive on how Google Search handles indexing JavaScript. They analyzed over 100,000 Googlebot fetches across various sites to test and validate Google’s SEO capabilities. In short, Google Search handles JavaScript incredibly well, almost as well as normal web pages.

Google is testing a new section on knowledge panels named “videos from.” This section can contain videos from the brand’s social channels. This seems to be a larger extension of Google showing social posts from the brand’s channels, maybe?

Google Merchant Center may have recently added to the product feed report the number of products found by Google, not by way of a feed you provided or manually submitted but automatically found through crawling or other means.