Google has been making a big push of late with Local Services Ads, which includes its two underlying “trust certifications,” Google Guaranteed (home services) and Google Screened (professional services). And recently the company started making the Google Guaranteed badge available to businesses for a monthly fee, outside of participation in Local Services Ads (LSA). Badges in…
There are widespread reports that manual actions are disappearing from Google Search Console. If you had manual actions and they are not showing up this morning, you are not alone. Daniel Waisberg from Google said he is investigating these reports. What is a manual action? Google will issue a manual action against a site when…
Google unveiled the Page Experience update in May, coupling that announcement with a new set of metrics called Core Web Vitals and laying out its plan to remove the AMP restriction on its Top Stories carousel. Last week, the company revealed that the page experience signals in ranking will go live in May 2021. With…
After what appears to be several years in development, Google has beta-launched a program for small businesses (SMBs) to help them become better marketers on Google. Called Small Business Advisors (SBA), the program offers 50-minute individualized consulting sessions on a range of products from Google My Business to Ads and Analytics to YouTube. No enterprises…
In January 2019, Google notified advertisers and agencies about a new program in which Google Ads would automatically make changes in ad accounts — unless the advertisers opted-out of the pilot program. It caused a big stir, but then nothing much seemed to happen. Then on Friday, I heard from Lior Krolewicz of Yael Consulting…
A year after officially closing down the old version of Google Search Console, Google announced that it has migrated the disavow link tool from the old Search Console to the new Search Console. Where is the disavow link tool? The new location for the disavow link tool is now at https://search.google.com/search-console/disavow-links. Previously it was located…
A recent update to the Instagram app suggests the company is going all-in on Reels, much to the dismay of loyal users. Those who have logged in to Instagram over the past couple of days will have noticed a small but meaningful change to the user interface. On the bottom navigation bar, users will now…
Michael Lewittes, a veteran entertainment journalist who worked at numerous large media outlets, started his entertainment news site Gossip Cop and later sold it to a private equity firm at the top of the site’s performance. We discussed how he did it and how he managed to work through numerous Google search algorithm updates —…
The problem of hijacked Google My Business listings (GMB) – where someone other than the business gains control of the local profile – appears to be growing. SterlingSky’s Joy Hawkins has reported on the trend and some of the methods used by spammers and scammers. GMB phishing. Unethical local marketers are effectively phishing, using the…
It’s the 2020 holiday shopping season and it’s different than previous shopping seasons, and retailers everywhere are going to need to manage things carefully. Let’s take a closer look. Shoppers will lean on digital A Google-commissioned Ipsos survey says that 74 percent of U.S. Shoppers are going to do more online shopping than they did previously this…