SEO Wash-up Monday 8th August 2022

Google Update

Google shopping ads has been testing retail brand slider – Google has been testing a new feature for shopping ads, where you slide through the shopping ads carousel. This shows you which stores retail brands are being displayed. Although we cannot currently replicate this, the retail brand slider does help you see which merchants are being featured in this shopping ads carousel.

Google tests expandable local related carousels within snippets – Google is testing a search result snippet that shows an expandable drop-down menu under the snippet that contains weather, hotels, restaurants, visual stories, events and more. So when you click on these expandable menus, you get carousels of search results for those types of search features. Currently, we are not able to replicate this, so it could just have been a test.

Google shopping ads carousel with shaded backgrounds – Google is using a grey shaded background colour with some of the results within the Google shopping ads carousel. Google thinks a light grey background works better than a white background. This is not tiled, where every other result is shaded, it is based on some other algorithm, so maybe the colour of the photo of the product.

Bing Update

Bing SERPS tests “Click to see full answer” – A bit of a strange one from Microsoft Bing, but it seems Bing has been testing “click to see full answer” in its search results answer section before showing you the answer. This seems super counterintuitive for a search engine to require an additional click, but generally search engines test a lot of things.

Bing testing from this page featured snippet ‘on steroids’ – Microsoft Bing has been testing what might be a featured snippet ‘on steroids’ with a section named “from this page” in the search results page. This box shows you detailed automated generated question and answer content. There has been chatter and screenshots shared on social media where it says that Bing is now displaying a graphically improved version of their featured snippet. It contains dropdowns for several questions.” Although these questions do not appear on this website.

Bing autocomplete tells searches to use tab to fill in – Microsoft Bing has been testing a new annotation in the autocomplete search results to communicate to searchers that they can tap the tab key to finish the autocomplete without clicking on the term. It seems like you cannot click on the word “tab” but using tab on your keyboard does do the work.