Category: google

Google still plans to remove featured snippets from the right rail on desktop and move the feature into the main listings. URLs shown in featured snippets that appear in the right rail of Google desktop results will continue to be included in the main organic listings, for the time being, anyway. For now, the right-sidebar featured snippet also appears as a regular listing within the main results column. Why we care Google still plans to remove featured snippets from the right rail and move the feature to the main listings.…

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John Mueller said that the Google team goes through reconsideration requests in batches, so sometimes it can feel like there is a backlog. Google’s John Mueller said that when you get a manual action in Google Search Console and then submit that reconsideration request that Google will likely go through those requests in batches, group them into categories either by language or by type. What are reconsideration requests. A reconsideration request is a request to have Google review your site after you fix problems identified in a manual action or security issues notification.…

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According to the New York Post, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is planning to review the Google-Fitbit deal over concerns about consumer privacy. We reported last month that Google had agreed to acquire Fitbit for $2.1 billion. As part of the announcement, Google did its best to reassure current users that it would respect their privacy and that their personal data would not be sold to third parties or be used for advertising. A couple of weeks later, it came to light that Facebook had also been interested in the wearable company, losing out in…

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Smart Compose, one of Google’s more controversial features is making the jump from Gmail to Docs. Smart Compose is an AI-driven feature that Google unveiled last year. The feature was built on Smart Reply and uses machine learning to suggest words while composing an email. Many language generation models suggest words based on the preceding word. Smart Compose goes beyond that, looking at the email subject line and the preceding email, if you’re replying to one. Google is now beginning the process of integrating Smart Compose into Docs. Smart Compose for…

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The new element appears to not have a fixed position but resides below the local pack, sometimes right below. Google is starting to show a new option to “search by photos” box in certain local verticals. It appears only in mobile results right now and is distinct from “interesting finds” and “discover more places,” which are also photo-centric boxes in SERPs. This was discovered initially by Mike Blumenthal. Examples of the “Search by photos” option appearing in Google Search for some local queries. No fixed position. The above result is for “Tacos near…

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Facebook is also being investigated in another multistate action lead by New York. Highly anticipated, it’s now official. State attorneys general have launched formal probes of Google and Facebook. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton will lead an investigation of alleged anti-competitive behavior by Google and, separately, New York Attorney General Letitia James is spearheading another multistate probe into Facebook. The latter was announced last week. All 50 states pile on. The Google investigation, made formal today, is supported by all 50 state attorneys general — every single state. The Facebook investigation so far has…

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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.…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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