As I mentioned briefly last week, Google announced mass layoffs last week, and I discuss what I know so far about it. There are also reports that Google is pushing advertisers to use third-party resellers and not their internal staff. The DOJ sued Google again to break up its ad business. Microsoft announced its earnings, showing how Bing’s search ad growth continues to slow. Bing also may have had a search ranking algorithm update. Google Search Console content ideas beta feature may go away in March. Google Search Console Insights has an achievements section. Google confirmed a bug with some preferred languages in Google Search, and they blame mobile-first indexing. Google Ads had an outage on Monday morning that caused huge headaches. Google has no preferences between connected structured data and not connected structured data. Google will parse the image elements even when those elements are enclosed within other elements. Google published a new case study after 18 months, this one from Vimeo on video SEO. Google said generating tons of fake URLs on a site won’t cause SEO issues. Google Business Profiles now supports cars for sale inventory for US dealerships. Bing is testing infinite scroll. Google is testing two justifications in the local results. Google is also testing a new trusted store badge. Bing has a new menu for image search that uses a drop-down and adds explore and collect. Account-level negative keywords are now available on Google Ads. Google will sunset Google Optimize on September 30th. And it seems like Yahoo Search may be making a comeback to Search – that would be exciting. And if you want to help sponsor those vlogs, go to patreon.com/barryschwartz. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

SPONSOR: This week’s video recap is sponsored by Duda, the Professional Website Builder You Can Call Your Own.

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Google is testing a new design for the trusted store badge in the paid shopping results. The Google Trusted Stores program to all U.S. merchants back in 2012, along with that came a badge in the search results to make those listings stand out.

FYI – here is how to qualify for this trusted store badge.

Brian Freiesleben spotted this new badge the other day and posted a screenshot on Twitter – here is that screenshot:

Curently, the badge looks more like this version from last year:

And the original one looked like this:

Brian said on Twitter, “Would love to see Google add this to organic products from trusted merchants as well, but not sure if that’s likely.”

Looks like Google is testing out a new badge for advertisers that are trusted merchants.

Would love to see Google add this to organic products from trusted merchants as well, but not sure if that’s likely 😉

Second screenshot is what appears after clicking the badge. pic.twitter.com/3lXIU9m04d

— Brian Freiesleben (@type_SEO) January 25, 2023

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Last December, we caught Google testing an experimental feature named content ideas in Google Search Console. Well, yesterday, Google sent more invites to this feature but noted the feature is only available until March 28, 2023 and then it goes away.

Both Robin Dirksen on Twitter and Deepak Ness on Twitter shared screenshots of this feature but the new part is the March 28th date.

The email they received about this feature reads, “Note: This feature be available only until March 28, 2023, and only to select properties.” Then when you access the feature, there is a notice in the interface that says, “New! Get inspiration for new content (available until March 28).”

Here are those screenshots (click to enlarge):

We know this seems like the Question Hub feature and that Google Question Hub shut down this month. So maybe this content ideas feature is also shutting down but not until the end of March?

Here are more tweets with this:

Just received an email from Google Search Console about “Content ideas”

For me, it will be available till March 28 (2023) – what will happen after that is unknown (for now) pic.twitter.com/hjVtrStJXP

— Robin Dirksen (@robindirksen1) January 25, 2023

Here’s it: pic.twitter.com/thAvEgI95t

— DeepakNess (@DeepakNesss) January 25, 2023

Hmmm… This is interesting Introducing “Content ideas”: Get inspiration for new content from Google – has this been reported on yet @rustybrick ? pic.twitter.com/aUOt3sYoTJ

— @[email protected] (@ChuckPrice518) January 25, 2023

“content ideas” GSC feature (US based) company/website.@rustybrick reported it in December but looked to be exclusive to India/Pakistan.https://t.co/Pg0sQIEXAT pic.twitter.com/iGoQhfAzYe

— Nick LeRoy (@NickLeRoy) January 25, 2023

I do wonder if Google is only testing it until then and maybe will bring it to more users later or if Google is completely killing it off on March 28th?

Forum discussion at Twitter.