Posted January 24, 2023 | by Afjal Ahmed | in Wash Up Monday

SEO Wash-up Monday 23rd January 2023

Google Updates

New Google ads policy disallows promoting content that risks harming users – Google has updated its advertising policies to disallow the promotion of content or engaging in behaviour that risks harm to Google users, Google employees, or the Google Ads ecosystem. If you do this, Google can restrict or block your ads or suspend your Google Ads account.

Google tests sponsored label on desktop search ads – Google has been testing displaying the new “sponsored” ad label on the desktop search results. Google has launched the new sponsored ad label on mobile search two months ago and tested it also on Discover recently, and is now also testing it on the desktop interface.

Google tests “About” carousel for websites – Google has been testing a new search feature to tell you more about a website. This is an “about” carousel that shows more information about a site, including information from the site itself and third-party sites.

Google search product listings with price history graph – Google seem to have been testing a “price history” chart or graph in the Google Shopping search product listings interface. There has been chatter and screenshots shared on social media showing a video screencast of it in action.

Google testing displaying local business profiles in Google discover – Google had been testing including the local business profile listings in Google Discover. There is this new section named “mentioned in this article” where Google can show the local business listing of companies that were noted in the article.

Bing Update

Bing will switch to the new Bingbot user agent – Bing has been testing a new BingBot user agent, and mention that they will slowly roll it out to more percentages of crawls throughout the year. A spokesman from Microsoft has mentioned the new BingBot is still only doing 50% of all crawls, it will move to 100% of all crawls in early January.

Here has been the rollout so far: