A week of good and bad news this week at Google. From the bad news of the indexing issue that impacted your rankings to the good news of Google’s News Showcase, Shopping Ads to be made free and more.

ICYMI, here’s what happened at Google This Week.

• Merchant Center Image Policy Enforcement Change
• Another Indexing Issue with News Content
• Google Launches Mini-Site of Holiday Marketing Resources
• New Performance Insights Metrics for Google My Business
• Google is Now Testing ‘People Also Search For’ on the Autocomplete Search Suggestions
• Google & Sitemaps.org Mirror Copies – A Duplicate Content Issue?
• Shopping Ads to be made Free Worldwide by Google
• URL Fragment Identifiers Showing on Google Search
• Two Indexing Outages Affecting Google Search Results
• Google’s Showcase News features will be coming to Search and Discover feed

Merchant Center Image Policy Enforcement Change

Google is changing the way it enforces image policies for advertising, selling and listing your products. Google is sunsetting account-level image enforcement and switching to item-level disapprovals. You can opt-in for automatic image improvements in Merchant Center, which will try to fix non-compliant images by automatically removing promotional overlays. If successful, the image will be replaced and the offer will be reapproved.

https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/9981451

Another Indexing Issue with News Content

Google once against had an indexing issue with news content on the 29th. Google confirmed the issue on Twitter saying “We have an issue with indexing News content, at the moment. It began around 4pm PT. We’re working to correct and will update when this is resolved.” Two hours later, Google said the issue was resolved. We have been reporting a lot of indexing issues with Google lately and other visible bugs.

We have an issue with indexing new News content, at the moment. It began around 4pm PT. We’re working to correct and will update when this is resolved.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) September 28, 2020

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-yet-again-had-a-new-indexing-issue-last-night-30182.html

Google Launches Mini-Site of Holiday Marketing Resources

Google has launched a mini-site of holiday marketing resources to help you reach customers through Search, Shopping and Maps.  The site shows personalised recommendations for small businesses. The site contains new tools, lessons, livestreams and how-to guides. There are two new tools for marketers. Grow My Store is a tool that analyses your site’s customer experience and shows how your site performs relative to others in the same retail category.  The Local Opportunity Finder tool helps businesses get the most out of their Google My Business profile by providing personalised recommendations.

New Performance Insights Metrics for Google My Business

Google My Business Insights has a new feature and is adding new performance metrics. It said that “business Profile Performance reporting is moving closer to your profile on Search and Maps. You’ll be able to access more of the core profile metrics directly from your Business Profile.”

They also added that “we start with interactions to let you know how often people have contacted you. More metrics will follow over the next months and will include detailed reports about searches and the number of people who saw the profile. After metrics are added to Performance reporting, the older versions of those metrics will eventually be removed from the Google My Business web and app platforms.”

Google mentioned specifically that these reports are initially only available on Search and will soon be coming to Maps.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-my-business-announced-new-performance-insights-metrics-30189.html

Google is Now Testing ‘People Also Search For’ on the  Autocomplete Search Suggestions

Google is testing and showing the ‘people also search for’ options. You won’t only get it on the search results, you will also have it on the Google search bar.

Check out the photo below from Saad AK on Twitter. Have you seen this and are you able to replicate it in the search auto-complete suggestion bar?

Now seeing the autocomplete People Also Search For test spotted by @SaadAlikhan1994 yesterday. Sometimes triggered on the second search bar click for me. Very entity-focused results. More details/examples via @rustybrick: https://t.co/SypfVtFQyc pic.twitter.com/dHf1aMfRR7

— Brodie Clark (@brodieseo) October 1, 2020

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-tests-people-also-search-for-search-suggestions-30190.html

Google & Sitemaps.org Mirror Copies – A Duplicate Content Issue?

Interestingly Google.com and Sitemaps.org look like they host and have the exact same copies of the Sitemaps.org info. A duplicate content issue it seems? In a twitter discussion, by Jamie Alberico , it was mentioned that if you search for [sitemaps.org faq] you get both sitemaps.org/faq.html and google.com/sitemaps/faq.html

John Muller of Google responded with this tweet:” I don’t know if this is still the case, it used to be that the responsibility for keeping the site up was shared and rotated between some of the initial companies involved. They likely all have a version of the site hosted somewhere because of that.”

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-sitemaps-org-mirror-copies-duplicate-content-30191.html

Shopping Ads to be made Free Worldwide by Google

Currently, Shopping Ads have been free in the US since April. Now they are bringing it to Europe, Asia and Latin America. Retailers can soon run a free listing on their Shopping tab. This will take effect as soon as mid-October.

Because of the pandemic that has resulted in a financial crisis, Google is trying to help businesses in these trying times. And this also the time many more people are moving their shopping activity online.

Google said: “And as consumers increasingly shop online, they’re searching not just for essentials but also things like toys, apparel, and home goods.

While this presents an opportunity for struggling businesses to reconnect with consumers, many cannot afford to do so at scale.”

“With hundreds of millions of shopping searches on Google each day, we know that many retailers have the items people need in stock and ready to ship but are less discoverable online.”

According to Google, this resulted in significantly increased engagement between customers and merchants in the US.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-combines-custom-affinity-and-custom-intent-into-custom-audiences/380906/

URL Fragment Identifiers Showing on Google Search

Google was found testing Search Console on displaying featured snippet scroll to  and highlights in Search Console and even some Sitelinks. In your Google Search Console reporting, sometimes you’ll see URL fragment identifiers – URLs with the # sign.

In a tweet, Google’s John Mueller said: “You might see fragment identifiers in Search Console if we show jump links in search, which sometimes show like sitelinks would.”

Google is supposed to ignore them, but we have definitely seen them counted separately in GSC – with their own rankings but often no clicks. We have also seen them drive rankings for Fraggles. They can also be bad, if there are too many, & cause Google confusion about canonicals.

— Cindy Krum (@Suzzicks) September 30, 2020

Here is an example of what it looks like:

Two Indexing Outages Affecting Google Search Results

There have been two kinds of outages impacting Google Search, and it was announced on twitter by Danny Sullivan of Google. Mobile indexing is one of them and the second is on the canonicalization. The duplicate content is directly affected by the second outage – how it will be displayed and handled in search results, even the syndicated content is not spared.

Google responded to the outage on Twitter:

We are currently working to resolve two separate indexing issues that have impacted some URLs. One is with mobile-indexing. The other is with canonicalization, how we detect and handle duplicate content. In either case, pages might not be indexed….

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) October 1, 2020

If a previously indexed page has gone, it might be the mobile-indexing issue, where we’re failing to select any page at all to index. If the canonical issue is involved, URL Inspector may show the URL as a duplicate & the Google-selected canonical will be different from it….

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) October 1, 2020

There’s no action to take with these issues on the part of site owners. We apologize for the issues here and are working rapidly to resolve them. We’ll update this thread as each is corrected.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) October 1, 2020

Google was very clear that they have already identified the problem and currently resolving the issue.

Google’s Showcase News features will be coming to Search and Discover feed

Last June, Google showed us its ‘News Showcase’ and yesterday they posted that they are rolling it out with a $1 billion financial commitment on partnering with publishers. Also, this will follow to Search and Google’s Discover feed.

There are two basic aspects of this feature, the significant content-licensing payments to news publishers and new “packaged” content panels providing deeper context and storytelling of different types with audio & video. Now publishers can control their new story panels, which in the past controlling such presentation was not possible.

Launching first in Germany and Brazil on Android, with OS to follow.

Thank You for Reading

Have you noticed any changes from Google this week?

Check back next Friday for the latest from Google This Week.

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