Google’s Pascal Birchler, Developer Relations Engineer, posted a nice video on how to get started with Web Stories. The video goes through what Web Stories are, how to create Web Stories, and how to rank well and get traffic using your Web Stories.

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

Google posted a list of changes or updates rolling out now and in the upcoming months for the Merchant Center product data specifications. Google said “this year’s updates focus on improving the quality of product information across free listings and Shopping ads.”

A site owner on Reddit asked if there is a way to remove his site from Google Search in a specific country, specifically Indonesia. John Mueller of Google said there really is not way of doing that, he said “you can’t reduce your rankings in one country in Google.”

The other day Google posted a blog post named the latest local shopping trends; local is now digital. In this blog post, Google shared a lot of trends the company tracked with local searches in 2020 due to COVID-19.

Google has posted a new content policy within its Google Posts help documents that specifically disallows businesses to add phone numbers in the content of their Google Posts. Google Posts show up on your local knowledge panel in Google Search and you can share messages with customers that way.

Google is now able to show in the “people also search for” query refinement feature local business listings and map results. Valentin Pletzer noticed this and posted a screenshot on Twitter which you can see here.

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

The DIY Musician’s Guide to NFTs NFTs will save the music industry! They’ ll restore music’s value! Artists can better merchandise themselves with NFTs! These are just some of the claims I’ve been hearing about NFTs, which are all the rage in the music press and… on Clubhouse. Every music biz discussion is filled with chatter about NFTs these days. Every business magazine is talking up NFTs like it’s some Gold Rush. Silicon Valley cheerleaders are scooping up NFTs left and right! Saturday Night Live even did a sketch about NFTs: So here’s what you need to know about NFTs […]

After many months of Google teasing us that Google Search Console will gain support for regular expressions, even sharing a help document around it, Google has finally launched regex support in the performance report filters.

Google announced that you can now enable continuous audience sharing from your sub-accounts, this is in addition to continuous audience sharing in your manager accounts that was enabled a year ago.

Google’s John Mueller said again that the best method to block Google from crawling and then indexing your staging site is to block GoogleBot and other humans with authentication. Prompt the access request to the staging site by requiring them to enter a valid username and password to access the staging environment.

Yahoo Answers has been a staple of the internet for over 15 years, since June 28, 2005. Now, Yahoo is going to close it and not really provide an archive, like when they closed the Yahoo Directory – another piece of internet history.

Google has been changing and testing the interface for its sitelinks for as long as I can remember. Well, here is another test, for the Google Ads version of the sitelinks, where Google is displaying them as a vertical list view.

Microsoft Advertising announced a bunch of additions and what is coming soon yesterday. Some of the bigger news is that you can now use the API to import your Google Ads data. Plus Microsoft added countdown customizers for Responsive Search Ads, Universal Event Tracking (UET) Tag Helper, seasonal segments available for In-market Audiences and more.