SEO Wash-up Monday 7th October

Google Updates

Google has new movie schema – Google has rolled out two Movie and TV related  schema micro-formats. . The first one is to enhance user experience when searching on mobile devices. The other update is new developer documents for movie structured data.

• Movie & TV search interface – You canswipe left or right with this interface on a number of shows and movies, you can then later come back to help improve your recommendations. If you use Google on your mobile phone to search for movies or TV related queries, it will show you the new user interface.
• Structured data developer documents for movies – The search giant has wrote up some new developer documents specific to movie structured data. This specifically tells you what Google supports against what is the overall Schema.org support. It also says that you can provide details about the movies, such as the title of the movie, director of the movie, and an image of the movie. Although the movie carousel is only available on mobile devices.

Google lets users pin live scores to the search results – The new feature allows you to pin live scores to search results. So for example, if there is a football or rugby game, you can click on the pin live score button shown on the screen, then drag that overlay anywhere you want on the Google search results screen.

Google redesigned call only ads layout – It seems that Google has redesigned the layout for the Google call only ads, which means that your business name and headline will show directly below your phone number, along with a larger phone icon. Google has mentioned that this will make it clear to users what you offer and make the call-to-action more prominent.

They also mention that on an average, their advertisers that use the new call-only ads design have seen an increase in phone calls, an increase in call conversions as well as better cost efficiencies. The new look helps call-only ads stand out from other text ads, reducing accidental clicks from users who didn’t intend to make a call.

Google tests colourful dots – Google seems to be testing colourful dots. The colours are as follows, a blue, red, yellow and green set of dots that help users understand different search result elements. So if you click on the dots, it will then launch an about this result box that will help you understand what the search feature does.

Bing Updates

Bing tests scrollable tabs search result snippets – Bing is testing a new design and layout for the search results snippets. Bing’s new layout looks like a carousel of tabs that you can horizontally scroll through when looking at a specific search result.