Back in 2019, Google began testing and piloting showing 3D/AR images for products and other items in its search results. We even saw it being tested on desktop starting last year. Now it seems Google has rolled it out to more sites, even those sites that are not part of the pilot/beta rollout.

John Mueller from Google was asked if you should worry that massive link disavow lists can hurt you negatively and also if you remove the list that it might also hurt you. John said you should not be worried at all, when he was asked how worried should you be, he said “zero.”

Schema.org has a new design, it seems like the design went live this week. The Schema.org validator also looks fresh and new. It is unclear if there were any other changes made, outside of the design update.

Brandon Saltalamacchia, the founder of Retro Dodo, covered his meeting he had with Danny Sullivan at Google – he covered it under the title A Brief Meeting With Google After The Apocalypse. Danny Sullivan said later that this was the second time he recently had such a meeting and he is working on setting up the third one soon.

Google seems to be testing its AI-organized search results pages for local search queries. We saw Google testing this for shopping-related queries after Google announced at I/O that it would roll out AI-organized search results in the coming months.

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

This week, guess what, we had more volatility over the weekend and also a blip in the middle of the week. Google also had another indexing bug that lasted only about an hour. Google Search Console had a bug with new owner notifications. Google Search Console now lets you enter your shipping…

It is not news that Google now mixes in ads within organic results, but I have to say it still feels super icky to me that Google does this. Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, confirmed that search ads can appear directly below organic featured snippets, as part of Google’s “ongoing evolution of dynamic ad placement on search.”

Google may be testing auto-playing the video thumbnails it has within its search results page. I am not sure if this is some sort of browser bug or something else, but Google may auto-play the video thumbnail without sound in the search results.

Bing is testing a voting feature in the Bing Search results. You can vote up or vote down specific search results in the search results page. It even shows you the percentage of votes for those who voted it up versus voted it down.

There are new reports that a booking/appointment system run by Thumbtack, a local search service, is automatically adding its booking links and service to Google Business Profiles. Well, you can opt out, if you don’t want it. But I am sure most businesses will have no clue this was added to their local listings in Google Search and Google Maps.

Google has added a method in Search Console settings to add your shipping and return information. This should make it easier for some merchants to specify their shipping and return details to Google Search, so that information can be shown in Google Search.

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

Google is also testing this new ad format labeled “People also browsed.” I guess this shows you what other products on Google searchers looked at for a similar query and is now showing you ads that match those browser sessions for those queries.

Google seems to be testing a new ad format with two rows of shopping ads in the search results in a carousel format, so you can scroll through more shopping ads at the same time. I don’t believe I’ve seen this format before – have you?

Google’s John Mueller said in a video he posted yesterday that the feedback submitted and Google collected around the March 2024 core update has “been really helpful in evaluations and discussions.” He added the Google teams have “been reviewing with the search quality and ranking teams.”

Google is now showing the translated search results feature in more languages, adding Arabic, Gujarati, Korean, Persian, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, Vietnamese to the list of of now 21 languages.