Category: google

Your clients may be getting emails from Google Search Console with their performance for the month. Google is now sending some verified Google Search Console site owners monthly reports showing how well their sites are performing in Google search. The email report going out now says “your July performance on Google Search.” What is this report. This report shows a monthly summary of data from your Google Search Console reports. Data from your performance reports including clicks, impressions, average rankings, the top-performing content pages, top countries, mobile vs desktop performance, and much more.…

Read More

A new incident fuels the perception that smart speakers are spying on their owners Google acknowledged an earlier report from Belgian broadcaster VRT News about third-party subcontractors being able to access recordings of Google Home device owners. According to the report, the audio clips reviewed included enough information to reportedly determine the home addresses of several of the involved individuals. Clips used by speech and language experts. Google says it sends clips to third-party language experts to ensure that Google is understanding local speech and accents. The company explained this process in a blog post today, saying…

Read More

The faster Assistant will be available on Pixel phones ‘later this year’ and could become a major competitive advantage. Google’s Assistant is on a billion devices. Google sees it as a kind of connective tissue in its growing device ecosystem, from smartphones to the web and to Google Home/Nest smart speakers and displays. This morning as expected, Google made several Assistant-related announcements. The most significant of them was relatively technical: the migration of speech processing from the cloud to the device itself. Not exactly ‘search personalization.’ The Assistant announcements included “Duplex on the…

Read More

Not fixed yet – but Google is working on it and has been communicating better about the issue. On Friday, Google said it fully resolved the de-indexing issue that started on Thursday afternoon. But now Google is saying it is not fully resolved just yet and is still working on reprocessing a lot of the URLs that were delisted from the search index on Friday. Google suspects the issue should be resolved shortly and will provide another update when it is fully resolved. What happened? On Thursday Google began to delist many URLs…

Read More

To bring consistency to reporting, Google Ads will begin including cross-device conversion data in all attribution reports starting May 1. This includes metrics such as Conversions total, Conversions Value and Last Click Conversions. Why you should care. Currently, cross-device conversion activity is only included in the Devices, Assisting Devices and Device Paths attribution reports. That means conversion metric calculations are inconsistent when looking at different reports. The change will mean cross-device metrics are included and treated the same across all attribution reports. Not retroactive. Keep in mind that the cross-device conversion data will only…

Read More

Will this reduce the issues with fraud and spam in the Google My Business listings? We’ll see. Marissa Nordahl, a Google My Business Community Manager announced that Google launched a new form named the Business Redressal Complaint Form that will allow searchers and users to “report fraudulent activity relating to businesses Google Maps,” she said. The form is designed to help Google tackle some of the serious issues around bad and fraudulent information on Google Maps. Google said you should use the form if “you come across misleading information or fraudulent activity on Google…

Read More

The Secure URL label HTTPS will no longer be seen on Google Chrome by September of this year. Google believes that secure websites should be the norm and as such, do not need any more labels. The news was confirmed on May 17 by Google Chrome Security Product Manager Emily Schecter on the company’s official blog. According to Schecter, users of Chrome version 69 will no longer see the green “Secure” label and lock icon beside HTTPS secure websites starting in September. Meanwhile, sites without HTTPS certificates will trigger a “Not Secure”…

Read More

You can now edit the code in the rich results test and see what those edits do in real time. Google has updated its Rich Results Test tool to let webmasters edit the code and see how those edits impact their results results. Google announced this as part of the Chrome Developer Summit this morning. What are rich results? Rich results are search results that go beyond the standard blue link, they may include a carousels, images, stars, ratings, images or other non-textual user interface elements. How it works. Here…

Read More

Google’s response is that significant SERP personalization is ‘a myth.’ Greg Sterling on December 4, 2018 at 4:11 pm More A new study (via Wired) from Google rival DuckDuckGo charges that Google search personalization is contributing to “filter bubbles.” Google disputes this and says that search personalization is mostly a myth. The notion of filter bubbles in social media or search has been a controversial topic since the term was coined a number of years ago by Eli Pariser to describe how relevance algorithms tend to reinforce users’ existing beliefs and biases.…

Read More

The company is investing in Duo and Android Messages, where it says it’s seeing consumer traction. Google has struggled with its messaging strategy over the years, with numerous experiments and false starts since Google Talk was launched in 2005. Add to that list two of its more recent initiatives, Hangouts and Allo, which are being shuttered. Hangouts will live on as an enterprise tool, while Allo’s features are being integrated in the Android messaging app Messages. Allo will be supported until March 2019 and users can export their messaging histories…

Read More