SEO Wash-up Monday 30th July

Google Updates

Hotel search tests price insights – Google is testing new features every other day with their hotel search results. You may now notice price insights that basically aims to tell you if you are getting a good deal or not at that hotel. The deal itself is based on the price for that specific hotel, for your chosen dates or the time of the booking, and based on similar hotels in the nearby area.

Hotel search results design – You may have noticed that you can now see Google is testing a new design and layout for hotel search results in its results pages. If you can see the new design, it looks more compact and modular as opposed to the card based list view in the current design.

Image search tests new layout – There are rumours that you should be seeing a new look for Google image search results. If you get to see the new look, it looks whiter and tiled in more of a format that overlaps images a bit. Furthermore, the title and URL of the image is also shown by default, without having to click on the image.

Google My Business shows competitors posts – Google now shows for some businesses the Google Posts from their competitors in the Google My Business dashboard as a way to encourage businesses to use Google Posts more. The whole point of this is to make businesses fear of missing out and to more businesses to utilize Google Posts.

Google AdWords redirects to Google Ads – The search giant told us about a month ago that they are rebranding AdWords to Google Ads. This is after 17+ years of using the brand name AdWords for their search ad product. As of now they have officially redirected the old Adwords, so when you go to adwords.google.com, it will be redirected to ads.google.com and the AdWords logo and branding is gone.

Google drops public submit to index tool – Google has announced on their social media profile that they may or may already have dropped the public submission feature to submit URLs to Google. They say that you can still continue to use the Google Search Console’s Fetch & Submit for individual pages or use XML Sitemaps to feed pages to Google.

Google may combine URLs before crawling – When it comes to search results, Google doesn’t want to list the duplicate content, a lot of duplication detection takes place to combine URLs and content. You may think that Google needs to first crawl the pages to see the content and meta information before combining pages. It is actually not like that according to John Mueller, who said that often they can do this before they even crawl the site.