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Google Sending Texts To Validate Google Business Profile Information

Published

7 months ago

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Google may be sending text messages to business owners to verify that the information they have listed in their Google Business Profile is accurate and up-to-date. This text comes from a confirmed Google phone number, but some local SEOs are worried that this is not really coming from Google. I did reach out to Google to confirm these are really coming from Google, but I have not yet heard back (I will update this story if/when I do hear back).

Molly Youngblood spotted this and posted this on Twitter saying she received a text message from a Google support phone number wanting to confirm my Google Business Profile. Here is a screenshot of that text (click to enlarge the image):

Google Business Profiles Texting Small

The 1-844-899-8101 phone number is a real Google phone number documented here by Google as a number Google uses to place automated calls from Google Assistant. Google wrote, “This article is about a Google Assistant feature that Google uses to contact a business.” “Google may also call or text to confirm your business details, including temporary closure or limited services due to COVID-19, so they are reflected accurately when people are looking for them on Google Search and Maps,” Google added.

So this seems legit and a real thing but I have never seen an example of Google doing this before.

Joe Youngblood, no relation to Molly, said “2 clients got the same thing, we’ve advised to ignore it for now.” So he recently got word of these texts, so maybe Google started to text businesses for this information recently.

Google has placed automated phone calls to verify information like this over the years, but texting, to me, is newish.

Everyone I asked thus far said this is new, and they have never seen this. Some are even suspicious that this might be a spoofed text number. Have you seen it?

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Update: Len decided to text the number to see what happens:



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Most SEOs Believe Google’s November Core & Reviews Updates Will Complete In December

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11 mins ago

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November 28, 2023

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Google Robot Waiting By Computer

The Google November 2023 core update and Google November 2023 reviews update are still both rolling out, and we have no estimated time of when they will finish rolling out. Both are well past their estimated two-week rollout period. I ran a poll yesterday asking SEOs when they think it will be done, and most said in December and not in the next few days left of November.

The poll had just under 600 votes in 24-hours and 79% said the update will be completed in December and 21% said in the last days remaining in November. I posted the poll on X – here it is:

Personally, I thought it would be done by now and I still think it will be done in the next day or so – but I am wrong a lot. 🙂

I do hope it is done today so they can roll out the Christmas holiday update (kidding…).

Forum discussion at X.

Update: I’ll have a story tomorrow but at least one of the updates is done in November:



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Google Search Console Was Down Today

Published

17 hours ago

on

November 28, 2023

By

Google Robot Hurt Tired

Google Search Console seems to be down right now. If you try to access it, you will get a 500 server error. I suspect Search Console will be back up shortly but right now, if it is down for you, you are not alone.

Update: At 8:52 am ET Google Search Console is back, the tool was offline for about 50 minutes.

Google’s Daniel Waisberg is 100% aware of the issue. He responded to some posts about the issue, saying, “we’re working on it.” John Mueller from Google is also reposting Daniel’s posts on X.

Here is what it looked like when you tried to access it while it was down:

Gsc 500 Error Down

Search Console went down at about 8 am ET and returned at 8:52 am ET.

Here are the posts on X from Daniel Waisberg of Google on this issue:

Who knows, maybe we will have a new Search Console feature when it returns?

Here are some of the complaints:

Update: At 8:52 am ET Google Search Console is back, the tool was offline for about 50 minutes.



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Google Testing New Flight Prices Rich Result?

Published

1 day ago

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November 27, 2023

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Woman Booking Flight Airport Google Logo

Google may be testing a new type of rich result for flight prices. This test shows a section under the flight search snippet that contains the dates, trip details and price.

This was spotted by Antoine Eripret who was able to trigger this numerous times, over numerous days, while in Spain. Here is his screenshot he posted on X:

Google Flight Prices Rich Result Test

He also posted this video of this in action for me:

Google Flight Prices Rich Result Test

Recently Google told us not to put flight prices in titles because those prices change too quickly. Maybe Google is testing updating those prices in more real time through the use of structured data and is thus more confident to show them as rich results and not title elements?

I don’t think Google officially supports flight schema but maybe they will soon?

Forum discussion at X.



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