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Google Business Profiles To Drop Product Management For Merchant Center?

Published

8 months ago

June 2, 2022

Google Business Profiles To Drop Product Management For Merchant Center?

The folks at WhiteSpark showed screenshots of Google Business Profile limiting the control you have over your product listings within your local panel. They showed how “businesses can no longer edit existing Products on their Google Business Profiles and can only add new Products through Merchant Center.” Google Products is now automatically linked to Merchant Center in the GBP Manager. Google later on in the day reverted this change.

I spoke with someone at Google and they reassured me this was a bug that lasted a few hours or so and they have no intention to force people to manage their products in the Google Merchant Center.

Honestly I guess it would makes sense to move product management from Business Profiles to Merchant Center, as Google is gently pushing people away from the Google Business Profile Manager in general but again, Google said no – while you can manage your products in Merchant Center, Google has no intention to stop anyone from managing their products in Google Profile Manager.

Darren Shaw asked on Twitter “Is it the end of Google Products as we know it? Businesses can no longer edit existing Products on their Google Business Profiles (GBP) and can only add new Products through Merchant Center!”

When they try to edit products, they get this red notice that reads “Products can’t be edited. You can only delete products.”

Personally, I see the ability to add products on my business profile. But I have never done so, so I do not know if this will work and then I won’t be able to edit it after. I don’t sell product, so I rather not test this out – I believe the folks at WhiteSpark:

After a few hours of this bug, Google put things back, but it does make you wonder if this is the direction Google is headed. I mean, it makes sense Google would do this based on all other signals. Again, Google said no – this is not the direction Google is going with this.

We checked a bunch of profiles and we’re able to add and edit Products manually again.🐛 I wonder if this is just a sign of things to come though?

— Allie Margeson (@SeoAllie) May 31, 2022

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Source: www.seroundtable.com

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SEARCHENGINES

Google Search Console Verification Does Not Impact Your Ranking In Google Search

Published

2 hours ago

February 2, 2023

Entireweb News Bot

Gary Illyes of Google said in the Google SEO office-hours from yesterday that verifying your website in Google Search Console won’t impact your Google Search indexing or ranking whatsoever.

Gary said, “Having your site verified in Search Console or changing the verification code and method has no effect on indexing or ranking whatsoever.”

John Mueller of Google previously said that Search Console verification doesn’t help with crawling either.

Gary added later that Search Console gives you data and analytics that can help you make improvements to your site to help you rank better in Google Search potentially. “You can use the data that Search Console gives you to improve your site and thus potentially do better in Search with your site, but otherwise has no effect on search whatsoever,” he added.

Here is the video embed at the 15:27 mark:

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Source link

SEARCHENGINES

Google Say Most Common Reason For Blocking Googlebot Are Firewalls or CDNs Issues

Published

8 hours ago

February 1, 2023

Entireweb News Bot

Gary Illyes from Google posted a new PSA on LinkedIn saying that the most common reason a site unexpectedly blocks Googlebot from crawling is due to a misconfiguration of a firewall or CDN.

Gary wrote, “check what traffic your firewalls and CDN are blocking.” “By far the most common issue in my inbox is related to firewalls or CDNs blocking googlebot traffic. If I reach out to the blocking site, in the vast majority of the cases the blockage is unintended.”

So what can you do? Gary said, “I’ve said this before, but want to emphasize it again: make a habit of checking your block rules. We publish our IP ranges so it should be very easy to run an automation that checks the block rules against the googlebot subnets.”

Gary linked to this help document for more details.

In short, do what you can to test to see if your site is accessible to Googlebot. You can use the URL inspection tool in Google Search Console, as one method. Also, confirm with your CDN or firewall company that they are allowing Googlebot and ask them to prove it.

Forum discussion at on LinkedIn.

Source link

SEARCHENGINES

Google Search Testing More Card Box Like Buttons In Search

Published

14 hours ago

February 1, 2023

Entireweb News Bot

Google is testing more card and box-like elements in the search results. We covered this with the product results interface a few weeks back but now we are seeing them for other elements.

Here are screenshots shared with me of these designs:

Via @b4k_khushal: