Ginny Marvin says, “If you’re running video campaigns on Google properties and have set ad rotations to Optimize for conversions or to Rotate evenly, you’ll want to take note that Google will be switching your rotation setting to Optimize for views — if it hasn’t already. Advertisers are seeing a notice in AdWords that Optimize for views is now the only ad rotation setting available for video campaigns and that all campaigns will be automatically changed to that setting in January. Under campaign settings for video campaigns, Optimize for conversions and Rotate evenly options are... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Google has just removed another feature from the Google Search Console: the content keywords report, one of the earliest features found in the Google Search Console when it was first built. Google said when the tool first launched, this report was the “only way to see what Googlebot found when it crawled a website.” Now, you have features like Search Analytics and Fetch, and others. Google also said “users were often confused about the keywords listed in content keywords.” So Google decided to remove the feature for those reasons. This is not a surprising move;... [...]

Zak Stambor says, “Google adds distance and location reports to AdWords reporting tools to help retailers understand where their store visitors come from. Google is bolstering its AdWords reporting tools with an eye toward helping omnichannel retailers better understand which shoppers search online and then visit their stores. That information is important, Google says, because 76% of consumers who search for something nearby on their smartphone visit a related merchant within a day, and 28% of those searches result in a purchase. That’s why the search giant today added distance and location... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “Image extensions have come and gone and come again. Google tested them in 2013, but they never got off the ground. Bing Ads brought its own version of image extensions out of beta just over a year ago. Now, Google appears to be giving images in text ads another spin. This time in a type of Sitelinks test. In a screen shot provided by The Zebra, a mobile ad for Quotewizard.com includes a swipeable carousel of sitelinks with accompanying images. It’s not clear if this test is also running on desktop. The inclusion of images in these extensions is interesting, as is... [...]

Annie Pilon says, “If you’re hosting or attending a Thanksgiving dinner this year, there’s a good chance you’ve used Google to help with the planning. And for businesses, all of those searches can lead to some really helpful insights. The search engine giant just released a search trends report that shows some of the most popular search terms around Thanksgiving. Not surprisingly, the most popular searches revolve around how to cook turkey. And people also searched for other alternative recipes, like prime rib, green bean casserole and pumpkin pie. But there are also other trends that... [...]

Ryan Shelley says, “Google has started testing its mobile-first index. This new index will look first at the mobile version of your website for its ranking signals and fall back on the desktop version when there is no mobile version. Google has been slowly moving toward a mobile-first index for quite a while now. Google first hinted at their intentions of a mobile-first index about a year ago, but November 4 was the first time Google has posted details about the mobile-first index on their own blog. So if you have been slow in joining the mobile revolution, now is the time to take action.... [...]

Greg Sterling says, “Many critics of the presidential election are partly blaming false information and fake news stories propagated on Google and Facebook for influencing the outcome. While some Facebook employees share this concern, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has largely dismissed the notion that fake news on Facebook contributed to Trump’s victory. Despite this, both Google and Facebook have now taken steps to address the challenge of false news. Google is implementing a policy change that bars sites displaying fake news from using ads from the Google Display Network. This is an attempt... [...]

Tony Edward says, “Google has updated the How Search Works page to say they now have knowledge of over 130 trillion pages across the web. The page reads, “Search starts with the web. It’s made up of over 130 trillion individual pages and it’s constantly growing.” That figure is up by 100 trillion pages from when Google first launched this web page back in March 1, 2013. In fact, the original blog post from Google shows the metric of pages back then, which was less than four years ago, to be only 30 trillion pages. This story has been updated to reflect that this number is not based... [...]

Tony Edward says, “Most of us are aware of link penalties that occur if you have low-quality or spam links pointing to your site. But did you know you can also be penalized by Google for how you link to other websites from your site? Yup, you sure can. It’s called an “unnatural outbound links” penalty, and similar to the inbound link penalty, it can be applied partially or sitewide. Recently, we conducted an audit for a new client, and we flagged the spammy linking that was being done in a particular section of their site. The content manager was unknowingly allowing guest bloggers... [...]

Ayaz Nanji says, “Google Search Console (previously Google Webmaster Tools) is a free service by Google that allows you to check your website’s indexing status and to optimize its visibility for searchers. To adjust your website in Google Search Console, you need to go to the dashboard and select your site’s main property. If it’s www, then select that choice. If you have an SSL certificate, you’ll have to select the property with “https” (with or without www—depending on your main mirror). Let’s start from the Search Appearance. We’ll go... [...]