SEO Wash-up Monday 21st March 22

Google Update

New tools for smart shopping & local campaigns is being replaced by performance max – Google have released a new set of tools and features to help advertisers with existing Google or new smart shopping campaigns as well as local campaigns. The existing campaigns will get replaced by ‘Performance Max campaigns’. This includes a new migration tool and API migrations.

Google said as a reminder, that in July 2022 any existing and future smart shopping campaigns will begin automatic upgrades to the performance max campaigns and local campaigns will also begin automatic upgrades starting around August this year. There is a one-click migration tool that will be available for smart shopping campaigns in April and then in June for Local campaigns. The tool gives you flexibility to upgrade specific campaigns or all of your campaigns at once. After that, Smart Shopping campaigns will auto-upgrade between July and September 2022. And Local campaigns will auto-upgrade between August and September.

Google also mentions that the API migration will be available later this year. The AdWords API will stop on April 27, 2022. Developers using SSC via the AdWords API should migrate to the Google Ads API using SSC as early as possible. The self-migration by the Google Ads API will only be available after AdWords API is fully gone.

Google Search Console Launches URL Inspection API – Google has launched a new API for Search Console called the ‘URL Inspection API’. The API lets you programmatically interact with the ‘URL Inspection Tool’ that you would manually interact with within Google Search Console, but with code.  The responses you’d get from the API would tell you the index status, AMP, rich results, and mobile usability of any URL you have verified access to in Google Search Console.

Also there is an API quota that limits you to 2,000 queries per day and 600 queries per minute. So it is not unlimited use and you won’t be able to run this API across all your URLs on a daily basis, at least not if your site has thousands of pages.

Google Merchant Center adds auto-tagging to free listings – Google Merchant Center has mentioned that the auto-tagging is now available for free listings on Google Shopping.  So when auto-tagging is enabled and a user clicks your free product listing/free local product listing, the auto-tagging adds some additional information including a parameter called “result ID” to the URL parameters that searchers click on.

The parameter can be analysed by your Google Analytics to track these result IDs and give you more insight into your Merchant Center listings. This will allow you to see how effectively your free listings and free local listings lead to valuable customer activity, such as purchases.

Google mobile search has been testing colourful magnifying Glass within the search bar – It seems that Google is testing making the black/grey magnifying glass in the search bar of the mobile search results page a bit more colourful. The magnifying glass itself has the Google colours with red, green, yellow and blue.