SEO Wash-up Monday 17th June

Google Updates

Google lets restaurants & customers add or edit dishes – Google has announced  that both restaurants and their customers can now add popular dishes to their Google local panel results. They have also mentioned that the popular dishes feature is powered by a machine learning algorithm that matches dish names, which is provided by any Google Maps user with relevant photos and reviews.

This is only live for Android devices worldwide at the moment, but will be rolled out to iOS users in the coming months. The most popular dishes for restaurants can be seen in their business page on Google Maps within the Android app. So owners, managers and their customers can add or name dishes directly on the business profile through Google Maps.

Changes to Google AdSense – All Google AdSense publishers have received an email that was sent out mentioning there are big changes happening to Google AdSense. Google mentioned that they will be removing text only ads. They are moving towards richer ad formats, phasing out text-only and display-only ad units to further improve user experience, and to fully reflect the pool of ads we have in the market.

Below are six changes they are making;

1. Ad sizes – they have made it easier to create and manage ad units.
2. Ad types – they are moving towards richer ad formats
3. Text ad styles – They are removing text ad styles for a combined text & display ads. As this feature is being removed, any existing ad styles will also be optimized by Google in the following months.
4. If no ads available – They are removing the ‘If no ads available’ option and default to either collapsing the ad space or showing a blank space.
5. Experiments – They are also removing outdated ad unit setting experiments.
6. Synchronous code – Changing your ad code type to synchronous in your AdSense account won’t be available anymore.

Google are testing local pack carousels – It seems like the search giant is at it again as they are testing a new a carousel design for the local pack. Although they have tested an alternative form of this back in 2017, they are yet again running tests this year.

On desktop search results page to have a More Results Button – In 2018, around April, Google had changed the mobile search results page from having the option to go to the next page of results and rather than a ‘more results’ button. However, Google is now testing this same user experience for the desktop search.