“There’s a lot of variety here in terms of what businesses are growing and which ones are falling,” said Alexis Sanders, senior SEO manager for Merkle, referencing the striking departure from typical search behavior due to the COVID-19 pandemic during our first Live With Search Engine Land video chat Monday. “You can see with things…
Bing is now using a new type of structured data markup for special announcements related specifically to COVID-19. This new markup is designed for announcements such as: Special hours and closures for local businesses. Information on risk assessment and testing centers. Travel restrictions and guidelines. Here’s more information about each of these types of announcements…
On Friday, Google temporarily disabled new local reviews as well as the ability of businesses to post review responses. This initially surprised many local SEOs, although it was previewed in Google’s earlier announcement about limited GMB functionality during the coronavirus crisis. There are a LOT of things with Google My Business that are not functioning…
Snapchat is huge. Despite hits and losses, it’s still gaining millions of new users per year. In fact, it now has over 218 million daily active users. As a marketer, this alone is a huge reason to promote your brand’s message on Snapchat. And there are other reasons to use this popular social network. For instance,…
Google Ads has new policies, going into effect in May, on advertising government documents and official services. Government documents and official services now fall under the ‘other restricted businesses’ policy, which means Google will no longer show ads for them. As stated by Google, this policy applies to the government itself and companies that provide…
Google is temporarily removing some features from Google My Business as a result of limitations caused by the COVID-19 situation. “During the unprecedented COVID-19 situation, we are taking steps to protect the health of our team members and reduce the need for people to come into our offices. As a result, there may be some…
Google has apparently disabled local reviews functionality — both for consumers and business owners. SterlingSky’s Jason Brown first flagged this issue on Friday. Joy Hawkins, also of SterlingSky, added, “Any review responses posted right now aren’t publishing live. Same thing with leaving new reviews. None of the reviews I left 5 min ago are publishing.”…
Bing has launched a new portal for the indexing API and content submission API. Announced Friday, the new portal can be found at https://www.bing.com/webmasters/url-submission-api. The portal. The portal educates developers, web site owners and SEOs about these two APIs that Bing has been pushing for the past year or so. The portal provides an overview…
The right-sidebar featured snippet variant of Google search results has been migrated into the main results column, a Google spokesperson has confirmed. This change is the part of Google’s featured snippet deduplication, which began on January 22. Mordy Oberstein, CMO of RankRanger, spotted the update had rolled out Thursday. Google formerly showed featured snippets in…
Facebook is placing a coronavirus information center on top of all users’ news feeds with articles from vetted sources. This is being done to help ensure users are staying informed with the latest news from trusted authorities. “Today we’re announcing the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Information Center, featured at the top of News Feed, to provide a…