SEO Wash-up Monday 10th February

Google

Google Maps and local links to other businesses – On Google maps and local, it used to show a business listing profile with the address, and near the address it sometimes shows other businesses nearby. Whereas now, it shows where that business is sandwiched in between other businesses.

This is designed to help users find the place and not for competitive reasons.

Moving your domain – Moving all your URLs from one place to another will result in a much faster website migration rather than taking portions of your website to migrate. However, if you leave some URLs on your old domain, then it will cause issues and slow the migration down in Google’s systems.

A spokesman from Google mentions that if users keep pages on the old domain that are not redirecting, then that’s something that will confuse our systems. They recommend that users move all URLs over all at once, so that Google will pick that up much faster than doing partial migrations.

Google rich results test embedded resources – They have upgraded the rich results test to show embedded resources. Although it is in beta, it can show external elements included by a page.

Google Favicons & Black Ad Label Now Live – It was something that was known within the SEO community that was coming, well now it is live. Google has now officially rolled out the favicons and black ad label search interface on desktop. Although they have been testing it for months on desktop after it launched in mobile search back in 2019, it’s now live on desktop.

Bing

Bing launches ‘Bing Pages’ – They have launched Bing Pages, which is a beta program that lets users manage their presence on Microsoft products such as Bing and Outlook.com. They mention that the participants who sign up for this program get their own page on Bing to highlight their contact information and social media channels.

You can also promote your social media posts in relevant search results at no cost. Businesses can use Bing Pages to customize their Outlook profile with updated contact info, images, and content. These changes also appear in Bing search results.