SEO Wash-up Monday 25th March

Google Updates

Google automobile knowledge panel – Google now shows a new knowledge panel and search result interface for car related keywords. If you search for a make, brand and year, you get this neat packed up search result with all the details on that specific car.

Google Assistant can book a restaurant reservation – You may have realised that Google kept switching on the Google Assistant call feature within your Google My Business account. They have announced that they are rolling out the ability for the Google Assistant to book tables at restaurants in 43 US States. This feature starts with Pixel phones, although they have mentioned that over the next few weeks, they’ll start slowly bringing this feature to more Android and IOS devices. Alabama, Alaska, New York, Ohio, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont and Washington are some of the US States that is supported.

Google in-depth articles go missing – The search giant has in-depth articles for its snippets, they started this in 2013 but they now are gone. According to another SEO company, the in-depth articles no longer show up.

Google search ranking algorithm update – You may see plenty of signs from the SEO community that there is a Google algorithm update going on right now. The update started on the 12th March and is still continuing.

Google tests new simple black ad label – The search giant is at it again and now it seems like they are changing the ad label in their search results with trials. The last time they changed it was back in 2017, when they went with a green outline ad label. The new test shows small black text labelled as ad and that is it. Before that it was a green to yellow label, it seems as they like to change things up with their ad labels every now and then to drive new eyes to the ads.

Bing

BingBot crawls your site and used for webmaster tools verification – Bing has tasked the BingBots to not only crawl your website but also to be used to verify your website in Bing Webmaster Tools. So if you use the meta tag verification method, BingBot will be the one who goes and checks for that meta tag. Furthermore, if you’re facing crawl issues, the most reliable way to get verified is the DNS option.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia lost traffic after Google featured snippets – A former Bing representative who is an experience SEO has said that Wikipedia’s traffic dropped by 21% after Google launched their featured snippets. Although this is huge and it is the first time seeing the metric, this is not confirmed as to where the information for the metric is accurate. The former Bing representative did chime in on a question related to Bing and this but did not deny saying this.