Google sent out notices via email to Google Merchant Center merchants about a change to how Google collects and uses conversion data that you share with Google. Google said it may use that data for new reporting and also for ways to improve Google Search experiences and services.

Google has posted that it begin to accept and run ads for Daily Fantasy Sports and lottery couriers in many states within the United States. This change goes into affect on July 15, 2024 and advertisers must apply for certification.

Google is now showing Local Service Ads directly in the mobile version of the Google local business finder interface in Google Search. We know Google is showing LSAs now on Google Maps for iOS but now we are also seeing it on this surface.

As you may remember, Google Ads requires political ads to disclose if the content, images or other assets in any way used synthetic content (i.e. AI content). Now Google Ads seems to be adding a checkbox for these ads to check off if these ads use “Altered or synthetic content.”

Google has confirmed it is working to fix the delays and latency issues with the Google Search Console Performance reports. This happens to the performance reports and often other reports in Google Search Console every now and then and generally Google is able to get it to catch up over time.

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. After the Google June spam update completed…

Google is testing placing the top quality store badge and icon next to the site name area in the Google mobile search results. This brings up that icon from the bottom portion of the snippet to the very top of the snippet.

Bing added a new guideline to its Bing Webmaster Guidelines named Prompt Injection. A prompt injection is a type of cyberattack against large language models (LLMs). Hackers disguise malicious inputs as legitimate prompts, manipulating generative AI systems (GenAI) into leaking sensitive data, spreading misinformation, or worse, according to IBM.

There are reports that some sites hit by the Google September 2023 Helpful Content Update are seeing small, somewhat tiny, lifts over the past week or so. Again, based on what we’ve been tracking, we have yet to see any recoveries but we are all hopeful we will see significant recoveries for some of those sites with the next core update.

Gary Illyes from Google explained two reasons why soft 404 errors are bad. Soft 404s are when a page returns a 200 status okay, but Google thinks that page should return a 404 page not found error. According to Gary, soft 404s are bad because they (1) limit crawl budget and (2) the pages won’t likely show up in Google Search.

A Google community manager, Alistair D., posted a Reviews troubleshooting and FAQs document in the Google Business Profiles forums. It goes through why reviews go missing, why reviews are removed and how to troubleshoot those issues with the Google Business Profiles tools.

On the heels of the completion of the June 2024 spam update this Thursday, June 27th, I am now seeing signs of an unconfirmed Google Search ranking algorithm update and volatility. It seems more heated than the week of this spam update rollout but less weak than you’d see with a Google core update.

Google seems to be rolling out new WordPress specific conversion code for Google Ads. This seems like a Google Tag code with easier set up for WordPress sites.

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 is testing link cards at the top of the AI Overviews…

Google is testing placing the link cards at the top of the AI Overviews box within Google Search. Instead of having them deep at the bottom, they are being tested at the top, which would clearly drive more clicks to publishers than the current implementation.

Google Product Studio, which is part of Google Merchant Center Next, now works in the UK, India, and Japan. Google also added file upload support to Product Studio and additional seasonal-themed templates.

Microsoft may now include AI generated content within the Bing Search people also ask sections. Bing is labeling some of the people also ask boxes with the disclaimer, “Includes Al generated content.”