Google rolling out new ways to find great deals on the shopping tab

When it comes to shopping online, users are desperately looking for new ways to save more money. In a recent trend, Google found that searches for “discount offers” and have increased 50% since last year. That’s why Google is rolling out new tools for ecommerce stores to list their best deals and discounts in the search results, which is currently free for all merchants in the United States.

This will help to build a bridge that will connect deal seekers between and online retailers who wants to promote their products on Google Shopping. Learn more about these new features that retailers can start using today.

Free Deals Listings in Google Search Results

Starting today, Google is showcasing deals in the shopping tab found on search results. For example, if you’re searching for “backpacks,” you can see a new section in shopping tab that will organize and show you “backpack deals” that are competitively priced or discounted from retailers across the web.

In October 2021, Google will start showing deals in the search results during major sales moments, like “Black Friday deals” or “Cyber Monday sales,” shoppers will see a new section highlighting relevant deals, alongside other related sales information.

Add More Inventory, Drive More Sales, Attract New Buyers

In the coming months, deals section will also appear on the main search results page. Merchants can take advantage of this feature regardless of whether they pay for advertising on Google. This will create great opportunities for ecommerce stores to add inventory, drive sales, attract new buyers and build brand awareness during important shopping events and peak holiday season.

How To Customize Promotions in Google Merchant Center?

Another update launched today in Merchant Center allows retailers to customize their promotions. It’s now possible to indicate if a deal is only available to first-time customers.

For example, the title of the promotion can now say “10% off for new members.” The promotions will be shown to all shoppers, but only those who meet a retailer’s specified criteria will be able to access the promotional price.

Google also adding new ways for creators and consumers to more easily connect — especially when it comes to product reviews.

Better Merchandising Insights

In one last update rolling out now, Google is adding two new features to the best sellers report:

Historical best seller data: Helps retailers predict sales trends for the upcoming season with insights into popular products from previous shopping events.

Relative product demand: Helps retailers gauge the relative demand between products in the same category and country, as well as the potential opportunity when stocking new products.

Merchants can access the best sellers report after opting into market insights within Merchant Center.

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How Google Ranks Search Results and Handles Spam

Google illustrated what different types of traffic drops look like.

Google publish in a blog post and described what types of organic search traffic drops look like in the Search Console Performance Reports  and how you can analyze those traffic drops. A drop in organic search traffic can happen for several reasons, and most of them can be reversed. But it may not be straightforward to understand what exactly happened to your site.

What are the main causes for drops in organic search traffic?

To help you understand about search traffic drops, Google posted sketches of “examples of drops and what they could potentially mean.”  This shows you visually what a site-wide technical issue or a manual action looks like compared to normal seasonality in search traffic, compared to a technical issue on a page level or an algorithm change (like a core update) or simply a reporting glitch in Search Console. Here are those sketches:

There are five main causes for drops in Search traffic:

Technical Issues: Errors that can prevent Google from crawling, indexing, or serving your pages to users – for example server availability, robots.txt fetching, page not found, and others. Note that the issues can be site-wide (for example, your website is down) or page-wide (for example, a misplaced noindex tag, which would depend on Google crawling the page, meaning there would be a slower drop in traffic).

Security Issues: If your site is affected by a security threat, Google may alert users before they reach your site with warnings or interstitial pages, which may decrease Search traffic.

Manual Actions: If your site does not comply with Google’s guidelines, some of your pages or the entire site may be omitted from Google Search results through a Manual Action.

Algorithmic Changes: Google is always improving how it assesses content and updating its algorithm accordingly; core updates and other smaller updates may change how some pages perform in Google Search results. To keep track of future updates, subscribe to our Google Search News YouTube series or follow us on Twitter.

Search Interest Disruption: Sometimes changes in user behavior will change the demand for certain queries, either as a result of a new trend, or seasonality throughout the year. This means your traffic may drop simply as a result of external influences.

How To Analyze Drop in Organic Search Traffic?

The best way to understand what happened to your traffic is to look at your Search Console Performance Report main chart, since it summarizes a lot of information. Analyzing the shape of the line will tell you a lot already.

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Google Added A New Page Experience Report in Search Console

The page experience update is rolling out to all users globally

Google’s Page Experience algorithm update is starting to roll out now and will be completed by the end of August 2021. The update will be slowly rolling out to all users globally. Top Stories will begin using the signal by this Thursday.

In an announcement, the company states:

“We’ll begin using page experience as part of our ranking systems beginning in mid-June 2021. However, page experience won’t play its full role as part of those systems until the end of August. You can think of it as if you’re adding a flavoring to a food you’re preparing. Rather than add the flavor all at once into the mix, we’ll be slowly adding it all over this time period.”

Sites should not expect to see drastic changes as a result of this update, Google says, and any sudden drops or spikes should be mitigated by the gradual rollout process.

The page experience update will consider several page experience signals, including the three Core Web Vitals metrics: LCP, FID, and CLS (as well as Chrome’s recent fix to CLS). In addition, the Top Stories carousel feature on Google Search will be updated to include all news content, as long as it meets the Google News policies. This means that using the AMP format is no longer required and that any page, irrespective of its Core Web Vitals score or page experience status, will be eligible to appear in the Top Stories carousel.

If you’re looking for more details, take a look at the Core Web Vitals & Page Experience Update FAQs.

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Google Added A New Page Experience Report in Search Console

Learn how to improve your content with Search Console Insights

Google is launching a new experience called Search Console Insights which is designed to help site owners better understand their audience. This experience joins data from both Search Console and Google Analytics in a joint effort to make it easy to understand content performance.

Whether you are a web content creator, blogger, or a website owner, and independent of your technical expertise, it can provide you with an overview and helpful insights on how your content is performing. This new experience will gradually be rolled out to all site owners in the upcoming days.

What is Search Console Insights?

This is a new experience tailored for content creators and publishers and can help them understand how audiences discover their site’s content and what resonates with their audiences. This new experience is powered by data from both Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

How can GSC Insights help you?

The new experience will help site owners, content creators and bloggers to better understand their content’s performance. For instance, it can help answer the following questions:

1. What are your best performing pieces of content?
2. How are your new pieces of content performing?
3. How do people discover your content across the web?
4. What people search for on Google before they visit your content?
5. Which article refers users to your website and content?

How can you access GSC Insights?

• Select GSC Insights from the top of Search Console’s Overview page.
• Use this link to access it directly and save a bookmark (you can always search for ‘search console insights’ on Google and visit our site!)
• Coming soon – In the iOS Google App, select Search Console Insights in the account menu (tap your profile picture).
• Google is working to also add Android Google App support.

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Google Search Console Drop Rich Result Performance Report

Does anyone know from where Google Knowledge Panel is picking?

If you search for [seo] and look at the Google Knowledge Panel on the right, you will see a section that says “Monthly Cost: $2819 per month.” That links to an SEO Company’s services packages page but it makes it looks like the monthly cost for SEO is that fee, no matter what firm you hire.

Here is a screen shot:

The Google Knowledge Panel is pulling that data in because the featured snippet for that query comes from that site. This is the interesting part but the bad part is that you all know that monthly cost for SEO services can range in a very big way and Google showing that for this or any other service like it is simply wrong.

This was spotted on Twitter and also other search terms such as ppc and other queries which are including salary, career growth, education, number of jobs, and other kind of details.  In the latest Knowledge Panel test, I’m seeing this in various different formats.

But the SEO Community is not looking happy. Here are some feedbacks:

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Find the best prices and places to buy with Google Shopping

All merchants need to meet professional standards on their websites

May 27, 2021 – Google announced a new Google Shopping and Google Merchant Center policy update where sites that do not meet certain professional and editorial standards would have their accounts suspended. They will be notified with a “Website needs improvement” policy status in their Merchant Center accounts.

Google said it “requires that all merchants meet certain professional and editorial standards on their websites. As such, Merchants with websites that do not meet basic requirements will see a ‘Website needs improvement’ policy status and have their accounts suspended until requirements are met. This policy is intended to protect users from poor shopping experiences, such as incomplete websites, confusing or inaccurate product information, broken links on the website, etc.”

Examples of what’s not allowed on Google Merchant Center

• Content that is unnecessarily difficult or frustrating to navigate
• Website that is not fully functional
• Website that has incomplete or difficult to understand business information
• Promotions that do not use commonly accepted spelling and grammar
• Punctuation, symbols, capitalization, spacing, or repetition that are not used correctly or for their intended purpose
• Promotions that are not relevant to the landing page
• Promotions that do not use the features of the Shopping ad for their intended purpose
• Website that is using generic placeholders or templated content
• Retailer landing pages or associated site domains that Google deems unsafe
• Website that has inaccurate, missing, or duplicate product details

You can learn more about how to improve your website and professional requirements from Google Merchant Center Help. Google said “in order to provide a quality user experience, Google requires that all Shopping ads meet high professional and editorial standards. We only allow promotions that are clear and professional in appearance. These ads should lead users to products and landing pages that are relevant, useful, and easy to interact with.”

If you get the website needs improvement notice Google said you can first “make sure that your website is fully-functional, has content specific to your business, and the information available is easy to understand and complete.” Google added that “your website shouldn’t have broken links, templated content, or placeholders of text or images.”

If you get the website needs improvement notice Google said you can first “make sure that your website is fully-functional, has content specific to your business, and the information available is easy to understand and complete.” Google added that “your website shouldn’t have broken links, templated content, or placeholders of text or images.”

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Find the best prices and places to buy with Google Shopping

Facebook Steps Up Efforts To Combat Misinformation

Facebook announced that they are launching new ways to inform people if they’re interacting with content that’s been rated by a fact-checker as well as taking stronger action against people who repeatedly share misinformation on Facebook. Whether it’s false or misleading content about COVID-19 and vaccines, climate change, elections or other topics, the social media giant will make sure that only few people can see misinformation.

Pages That Repeatedly Share False Claims

Facebook want to give people more information before they like a Page that has repeatedly shared content that fact-checkers have rated, so you’ll see a pop up if you go to like one of these Pages. You can also click to learn more, including that fact-checkers said some posts shared by this Page include false information and a link to more information about our fact-checking program. This will help people make an informed decision about whether they want to follow the Page.

Facebook Expanding Penalties For Individual Accounts

In late 2016, Facebook launched fact-checking program – aimed on reducing viral misinformation. Facebook took strong action against Pages, Groups, Instagram accounts and domains that sharing misinformation. Now, the company is expanding some of these efforts to include penalties for individual Facebook accounts too. Since today, Facebook will reduce the distribution of all posts in News Feed from an individual’s account if they repeatedly share content that has been rated by one of our fact-checking partners. Facebook already reduce a single post’s reach in News Feed if it has been debunked.

Redesigned Notifications When People Share Fact-Checked Content

Currently the Company only notify users when they share content that a fact-checker later rates, but now they redesigned these notifications to make it easier to understand when this happens. The notification includes the fact-checker’s article debunking the claim as well as a prompt to share the article with their followers. It also includes a notice that people who repeatedly share false information may have their posts moved lower in News Feed so other people are less likely to see them.

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Why Google decided to sunset the rich result search appearance?

Google announced that they are removing the generic rich result filter from the Google Search Console performance report search appearance section. It means that users will no longer to see that how well rich results are performing on the website. Instead, you will drill into each individual rich result that your site supports to see how they are doing.

What is Rich Result?

Rich Results (also known as “Rich Snippets ”) are normal Google search results with additional data displayed. This extra data is usually pulled from Structured Data found in a page’s HTML. Common Rich Snippet types include reviews, recipes and events.

Google said this generic one is no longer required since they have “breakouts for most rich result types.” Google added “in addition, we realize that grouping data for rich results is not ideal, as each type may have a significantly different behavior. Therefore we decided to sunset the Rich result search appearance in Google Search Console.”

So instead of filtering on “rich results” you will filter using the search appearance filter in the performance report on specific types. There are currently 19 supported search appearance types including a few AMP versions, Android app, event, FAQs, how-to, job details, job listings, practice problems, product results, Q&A, recipe rich rich results, recipe gallery, review snippets, special announcements, videos, web light, web story and more to come. The generic Rich Results would show “any type of rich result defined in structured data listed in the search gallery. This includes all rich-result subtypes such as job listing and AMP article rich results showing in the Google Search Console.

Here is the screenshot: 

The rich result performance report in Google Search Console is going away on August 1, 2021 from both the interface  including the API and this will not impact your website traffic from Google, it is just a reporting change.

SEO Takeaways From Google I/O 2021

Refresh Your SEO knowledge and learn new things from Google I/O 2021.

I watched the SEO sessions online at Google I/O 2021. This part of Google I/O is especially useful for SEOs who want to update and refresh their knowledge and learn new things. Honestly, I really learned a lot of new techniques and I want to share SEO takeaways in this blog post.

SEO Takeaways From Google I/O 2021

• What’s New in Search
• Preparing for Page Experience Signals
• What’s New in Web Vitals
• The Business Impact of Core Web Vitals

• Fetching in the SEO language is called crawling.
• Crawling is similar to how developers use widget or URL to request the page.
• After the page has been crawled and rendered to process any JavaScript, the results are then parsed.
• Parsing in the SEO language is called indexing.
• Headings and other texts from the DOM are extracted and stored as tokens for an index of URLs.
• Search engines use various machine-readable elements to interpret the content on the page and to decide whether to store the page in the index or skip it.
• Structured data are one of these elements that provide additional information about the page and its content.
• In order for Google to understand the links, they should be well-formed HTML elements and point at reasonable and fetchable URLs.
• With the processing, Google also looks for links to new pages (both internal and external)

Updates in Crawling (HTTP/2)

HTTP/2 is the next major version of HTTP (the protocol used for transferring data on the internet).

• HTTP/2 crawling allows Google to request more URLs with a similar load on the server.
• The decision to crawl with HTTP/2 is based on whether the server supports it and whether Google systems determine there’s a possible efficiency gain.
• Website owners do not need to do anything other than enabling HTTPS and HTTP/2 support on their web server.
• Over half of all URLs are now crawled with HTTP/2. Thanks to stream multiplexing and header compression, the number of connections and the bandwidth have both gone down significantly.

Structured Data

When it comes to machine-readable information on a page, Google primarily relies on structured data embedded in the HTML pages.

• JSON-LD has become the most popular way to provide structured data.
• All of Google’s modern search specific metadata can be provided through JSON-LD and the schema.org vocabulary.

Preparing for Page Experience Signals

Page Experience Pillars

Google Search has always considered user experience as part of ranking.

• Mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal (2014)
• HTTPS (2014)

Page Experience has four pillars of user experience:

• Loading (how fast or slow the resources of the page are downloaded and displayed on the user’s browser)
• User Annoyance (some of the webpage behavior that may get in the way of a user accomplishing a task)
• Security & Privacy (how safe, secure, and privacy-friendly a web page is)
• Accessibility (whether the site is accessible to all users, including those with disabilities). *15% of users worldwide have some form of disability.

These four pillars provide a structure of how you should think about the page experience for your site.

Core Web Vitals (update to CLS)

LCP, FID, and CLS are Core Web Vitals, a set of metrics that apply to all the web pages and should be measured by all site owners and will be surfaced across all the Google tools. Core Web Vitals are a robust set of threshold guidance that map to user expectations.

Each Core Web Vitals metric:

• represents a distinct facet of user experience
• is measurable in the field
• reflects the real-world experience of a critical user-centric outcome

Page Experience Ranking Coming to Desktop

Page experience is critical to all users regardless of the device they are using. Updated guidance, documentation, and tools will be provided.

What’s New in Web Vitals

Web Vitals are metrics for web pages with a focus on user experience. They measure problems that frustrate users like poor performance or content shifting around.

• Core Web Vitals is a subset of Web Vitals considered most important to focus on.
• Core Web Vitals apply to all web pages and are surfaced across all Google tools.
• They are measurable in the field so you can get a ground truth of what real users see.
• They focus on the critical user-centric outcome (a small set of metrics).

Business Impact of Core Web Vitals

Here some nice screenshots I thought I would share with you. It’s about how different people look at Core Web Vitals.

Catch up on what you missed or re-watch your favorites on demand at Google I/O 2021.

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Google Announced Multitask Unified Model at Google IO

Google announced its next big change in how it understands queries and language on the web – they are calling it MUM – Multitask Unified Model. This is not live yet but Google wanted to share a bit about it. Google said this “new technology Google is exploring internally to better understand language & make it easier to get helpful responses to complex Search needs.”

Google said it is like BERT in that it built on a Transformer architecture but it is 1,000 times more powerful. MUM not only understands language, Google said but it also generates language. Google said MUM is “trained across 75 different languages and many different tasks at once, allowing it to develop a more comprehensive understanding of information and world knowledge than previous models. And MUM is multimodal, so it understands information across text and images and, in the future, can expand to more modalities like video and audio.”

Here is the example:

In the example above, Google said MUM can surface insights based on its deep knowledge of the world, it could highlight that while both mountains are roughly the same elevation, fall is the rainy season on Mt. Fuji so you might need a waterproof jacket. MUM could also surface helpful subtopics for deeper exploration — like the top-rated gear or best training exercises — with pointers to helpful articles, videos and images from across the web.

It is also really good with languages and understanding information across types. Google said “MUM-powered features and improvements to our products in the coming months and years.”

You can learn more at the Google blog.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

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Google Product Reviews Algorithm Update