Google Ads will merge its advertising identify and business operation verification programs into a unified advertising verification program in March, according to an email sent by Google Ads to some advertisers today. The Google Ads unified advertising verification process is similar to the current identity verification process – you’re required to submit your legal business or individual name, along with any other supporting documentation. This information will be displayed in an ad disclosure. The email (see in full, below) shared details on what will change. New section: About your business. Google said it will ask advertisers questions (e.g., the advertiser’s industry and billing country) related to their Google Ads and account, which will be shown in a new section, About your business. Why? So Google can understand whether you are a direct or indirect provider of the products or services being advertised. Verification timeline change. Advertisers must submit their About your business answers within 30 days. Failure to do so will result in your account being paused. On top of that, Google said there will be an additional 30 days to complete any requested verifications, which could be identify, business operations, or both. Advertisers were previously given 30 days to start identity verification, and an additional 30 days to complete it. And advertisers were previously given 21 days to complete business verification, and were given a 7-day notice period before account suspension. Six reasons why Google may pause your account. If:
Why we care. Google began its push for greater transparency in political advertising in 2018. These changes are all meant to let searchers clearly know who is behind the ads they’re seeing and potentially clicking on. Hopefully, this will make for a safer user experience (e.g., less fraudulent and scam ads) and improve the Google Ads ecosystem. Here’s is the full text of the email Google Ads sent: In March 2022, Google will consolidate the current advertiser Identity verification and Business operations verification programs under a unified Advertiser verification program to provide a simplified and improved advertiser experience. Similar to the current approach, advertisers will be notified via an email and an in-account notification when they have been selected for the Advertiser verification program. Under this program, advertisers will be asked to initiate the verification process within 30 days, and will have another 30 days to complete all the requested verification requirements, which may comprise multiple steps, including verifying their identity, their business operations or both. As a part of the unified Advertiser verification program, there will be revised timelines and enforcement actions, details of which are below. What’s changing:
To run ads again, advertisers must complete the verification successfully by submitting the requested responses to the survey along with the relevant documentation (as applicable).
As part of Google’s ongoing transparency efforts, we will also make information about your Google Ads accounts and ad campaigns publicly available.
These changes will not impact the scope or requirements of Google’s other verification programs. We will begin implementing these updates to streamline the experience on March 31, 2022 with a gradual ramp up over two months. Thank you for your cooperation. Sincerely, The Google Ads Team The post Google Ads creates unified advertiser verification program appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/aHMo9Vgln
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SEO tool provider Deepcrawl has launched a technical SEO app for Wix websites, the company announced Monday. Designed for small and mid-sized enterprises, the app automates weekly site crawls and detects issues ranging from broken pages to content that doesn’t meet best-practice guidelines for SEO. The Deepcrawl app for Wix is available now for $7 per month. SEO is on the rise at Wix. Wix has been steadily built out its SEO capabilities and now offers the ability to edit your robots.txt file, custom URL structures and more. Wix’s direction and dedication to SEO has been quite apparent over the last few years. Over the longer term, this is something of an about-face for the company, which once suffered from a poor reputation within the SEO community over issues such as websites not showing up in Google search results. Why we care. The Deepcrawl app is an enterprise-level offering that may help SMEs on Wix monitor the technical health of their site. From an industry perspective, Deepcrawl’s app may be setting a precedent in terms of technical SEO tools available for closed content management systems. As mentioned above, Wix has been focusing on improving its SEO capabilities, which might help it appeal to more brands as well as the SEOs that serve those brands. The post Deepcrawl launches technical SEO app for Wix appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3S0jsXJdv Pinterest has launched an augmented reality (AR) feature that enables users to see what furniture looks like in their homes before they buy, the company announced Monday. Called “Try On for Home Decor,” the feature is already available for retailers such as Crate & Barrel, CB2, Walmart, West Elm and Wayfair. Why we care. This is hardly the first time augmented reality has been used to bring more of the offline shopping experience online (see below), but it does increase Pinterest’s shoppable pins with “Try on” enabled from 14,000 beauty pins to 80,000 home decor pins, according to Engadget. In addition, this capability is rolling out to a new product category with support from well-known retailers, which could be significant for Pinterest’s 444 million monthly active users (worldwide) as well as the brands looking to sell to them. If this feature strengthens Pinterest as a shopping platform, it’ll also strengthen it as an advertising channel as well. AR-powered Try On expands product categories. Pinterest first introduced its Try On feature in January 2021 for beauty products, specifically eyeshadow and lipstick. A month before that (December 2020), Google launched a similar feature in the mobile search results. Amazon also has a “View in your room” feature available on its mobile app for certain products as well. How it works. Users browsing home decor products on Pinterest’s Android or iOS apps will see three dots in the top-right corner of “Try On enabled” Pins. Select the Pin and “Try in your space” to view the product using the camera lens. Users can adjust and place the product to better help them visualize how it’ll look in-person. Users can also click the Pin to be taken to the checkout page of the retailer’s site. The post Pinterest rolls out AR ‘Try on’ feature for furniture items appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/5mgD46Pnu Google Ads has added recommendations to Discovery campaigns, the company announced Monday. In addition, the ability to automatically apply recommendations has rolled out to manager accounts and the platform is also adding more recommendations for Video campaigns. Why we care. Recommendations may help you troubleshoot your campaigns or identify opportunities for greater efficiency. However, advertisers should exercise caution when opting into auto-applied recommendations — while they might save you some time, it might not be the most effective way to spend your budget. Recommendations for Discovery campaigns. As mentioned above, recommendations are now available for Discovery campaigns. And, Google Ads is also now showing optimization scores for Discovery campaigns as well. Auto-apply recommendations in manager accounts. The ability to automatically apply recommendations has rolled out to manager accounts. Advertisers should note that, when turned on, this feature automatically applies all recommendation types that have been selected as new recommendations become available. More recommendations for Video campaigns. Google Ads is also bolstering its recommendations for Video campaigns. New examples of recommendations for this campaign type include:
The post Recommendations roll out to Discovery campaigns appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/J0wGaj1Xl Google has made changes to the way it handles Breadcrumbs and HowTo structured data within Google Search Console’s reporting tools. Google said it “changed the way that it evaluates and reports errors in Breadcrumbs and HowTo structured data.” The impact. This may impact the number of errors, issues and other metrics Google reports on within Google Search Console’s enhancement reports related to Breadcrumbs and HowTo structured data.Reporting change only. This is a reporting change only and this does not impact the visibility of your rich results in Google Search. What to do next. It is recommended that if you have Breadcrumbs and HowTo structured data, you should check the reports in Google Search Console and address the revised errors and issues that Google is now reporting. Google said “you may see changes in the number of Breadcrumbs and HowTo entities and issues reported for your property, as well as a change in severity of some issues from errors to warnings.”Why we care. Again, if you have Breadcrumbs and HowTo structured data on your site, you may now find new opportunities to resolve new errors or issues with your structured data. This may help you maintain your rich results in Google Search for those types of search result snippets.The post Google Search Console error reporting for Breadcrumbs and HowTo structured data changed appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3yt8uVUhi Google has released a new API under the Search Console APIs for the URL Inspection Tool, the search company announced this morning. The new URL Inspection API lets you programmatically access the data and reporting you’d get from the URL Inspection Tool but through software, like any API would.API limits. The API has limits, so you can’t just run it on every URL on every site in a single day. The API has a 2,000 queries per day and 600 queries per minute limit. So don’t expect to run it against your whole entire one-million page website today. You will have to queue things up or run it on as needed basis. Use cases. Google provided some use cases for the API, they include:
The results. The API will return indexed information from the URL Inspection Tool including index status, AMP, rich results, and mobile usability. You can see the full list of responses over here in the API docs. More details. You can learn more about this API in the API documentation over here. Here is a sample API response: Why we care. You can now programmatically add the URL Inspection details to your content management system, internal tools, dashboards and third-party tools can add integration as well. Expect a number of tool providers and content management systems to start adding features.And if you have ideas, feel free to build them out yourself. The post Google releases URL Inspection Tool API appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/gDCmohZ5x The post 20220131 SEL Brief appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/p6bokVwLx Google has published a new help document for SafeSearch that merges together all of Google’s SafeSearch details into one larger help document. This new document explains how SafeSearch works, adds some troubleshooting but the overall guidance of SafeSearch has not changed. What is SafeSearch. SafeSearch is Google’s adult content filter that aims to filter out explicit content from your results. Explicit results include sexually explicit content like pornography, violence, and gore, according to Google. New document. The new document is now located over here and it explains what SafeSearch is, how how SafeSearch works, how to see if SafeSearch is filtering out your site’s content and how to optimize your site for SafeSearch. It also goes through the metadata you can use with SafeSearch, as well as how to group your explicit content on your site into sections on your site for Google to better understand it. Finally, there is also a troubleshooting section at the bottom of the document. Some tips from the document. Again, the guidance in the new document are not new, they are the guidance Google has been sharing for years. Google does say it uses machine learning “and a variety of signals to identify explicit content, including words on the hosting web page and in links.”
Why we care. Sometimes sites can be labeled as explicit and be filtered out by Google’s SafeSearch filter. It doesn’t happen often but I see it come up from time to time and when it does, it can be frustrating to deal with. This document helps you understand how the SafeSearch filter works and what you can do to help all or parts of your site not be filtered, in an unintended way, by SafeSearch. The post Google merges its SafeSearch help information into a single new document appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/61eLF7Ab9 Google search results have been showing an “Untitled” title tag for some sites over the past 3 days. People who click on those sites are being sent to spam sites, according to postings from users on Hacker News and Reddit. ‘Untitled’ Google results. Here’s what a Hacker News user posted:
There is speculation in that thread that some of the reports of ‘Untitled’ results are due to compromised WordPress sites. That thread reference another Hacker News thread, which included additional evidence of the issue in a discussion about Google rewriting page titles:
On Reddit, there is additional discussion of this issue. One user shared what the “Untitled” titles look like: Google’s response. When alerted about the issue and thread via Twitter, Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan tweeted: “We’re working on it.” On Reddit, Sullivan added some additional context: “It’s not malware. It’s spam, something our systems normally would typically catch, so we’re checking on it to improve.” He also added: “I can’t reproduce that myself, but it still helps understanding you’re seeing it happen on desktop and your phone. We’re looking into it.“ Why we care. Many have questioned the quality of Google’s search results in recent months (to be fair: some SEO professionals have been questioning the quality of Google’s search results for even longer than that!). But spam or malware sites in search results is bad for users, which is bad for Google. While this issue won’t cause most users to abandon Google (where are they going to go?), it’s stuff like this that gives SEO and search a bad name. The post ‘Untitled’ search results sending users to spam sites, Google ‘working on it’ appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3GcHuwt Messy SEO is a column covering the nitty-gritty, unpolished tasks involved in the auditing, planning, and optimization of websites, using MarTech’s new domain as a case study. This installment of “Messy SEO” details my process of working with our marketing, content and development teams to further clean up the search engine results pages for MarTech. In Part 5, we discussed the fallout and improvements of our title changes and site structure issues. RELATED: How to optimize your site for better findability Identifying issues with our content and topicsOur MarTech website houses a lot of marketing industry content. In addition to the pieces we’ve published since its launch in May 2021, the domain has all of the content that was previously featured on Marketing Land and MarTech Today. One would think that with so much industry-specific content, Google would have an easy time finding and serving up relevant results for searchers. Unfortunately, it seems like the search engine is having a difficult time identifying our main topics. Many of the MarTech topics (shown below) that we cover are still getting little interaction in the SERPs.
After researching these keywords/topics and their related pages — taking note of the site structure issues we’d already identified — the problem we were experiencing became clear: We were missing pillar pages. Understanding the importance of pillar pagesContent pillar pages are designed to be the go-to source for your site’s main topics. They cover subjects in-depth, linking to related pieces covering the same topic (known as topic clusters), which helps site users find all the information they’re searching for. They serve as the ideal landing pages, introducing readers to your site’s subject matter. From a ranking perspective, pillar pages are gold. They have the potential to rank well for given topics and pass ranking signals to their related pages. After our content analysis, our team quickly realized the MarTech site was missing these key pillar pages. We had plenty of content covering a slew of marketing and technology topics, but no central pages that gave in-depth overviews on any subject in particular. Our top-ranking pages for the keywords shared above were largely evergreen “how to” articles. These are helpful resources for users, but don’t serve as good pillar pages.
The top-ranking page that came closest to the “pillar” style was our “Marketing Automation Landscape” article. It gave an overview of the topic, linked to related pages and was longer than an average piece of content on our site. So, seeing its potential, we added more in-depth content and links to other related pages. We then analyzed the rest of these pages and mapped out a strategy for creating new pillar pages, consolidating similar pages into hubs, and updating old content. Creating pillar pages that connect topic clustersDeveloping pillar pages became our next big project for MarTech. Our team outlined the highest-ranking pages for the site’s main topics (as described above) and reviewed their structure. We also looked for pages that weren’t ranking well but had the potential to become pillar content. We believe this was our missing puzzle piece. The issue wasn’t our lack of authoritative content; it was how we structured that content on this new MarTech domain, a conglomeration of content from two well-established marketing news sites. We began creating new pillar pages (and modifying pages with pillar potential) that met the following conditions:
There’s no magic formula to crafting a high-ranking, engaging pillar page. We simply found these criteria helped us create content that meets users’ needs and establishes topical hierarchy. Avoiding keyword cannibalizationWhile undergoing this process, our team is doing its best to avoid keyword cannibalization — the unfortunate scenario when multiple pages on your site are competing for the same keyword or topic. This scenario could end up harming our organic search performance. To prevent this issue, we are creating pillar pages under the following guidelines:
No guideline is foolproof; Google may still force these pillar pages to compete with similar content on our site. But we believe adding these content hubs to our site structure will help users and search engines find out what MarTech is all about. Have you had difficulties ranking for your site’s main topics? How are you addressing the issue? Email me at [email protected] with the subject line “Messy SEO Part 6” to let me know. More Messy SEORead more about our new MarTech domain’s SEO case study.
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