SEARCHENGINES
Google Testing Two Rows Of Story Boxes Under A Snippet

I am not even sure what to call this, maybe a brand story snippet, maybe story boxes, I am just not sure. But Google seems to be testing showing two rows of article boxes with images (even including social media sites) about a brand below the brand’s search result snippet.
This was spotted by Kunjan Shah on Twitter and despite trying to replicate this myself in countless browsers, I was unsuccessful. Here is his screenshot, click on it to enlarge:
Here is another person who spotted this, also with the right side bar:
Google testing displaying images thumbnails on the left side of the search result snippets, again?@rustybrick pic.twitter.com/WrQMS3Gdkq
— Slavica Nikolic (@cacizmi) June 22, 2022
(SEO)
Google continuing to test some wonky image feature. @glenngabe has been very into thishttps://t.co/GHEHEWVQMW
This is desktop, mind you! pic.twitter.com/rH3qn9HBTK
— Shalom Goodman (@ShalomGood) June 17, 2022
Have you seen this before? I know we’ve seen these image boxes before but I am not sure if we’ve seen this on desktop in this fashion before?
And what is this even called?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Source: www.seroundtable.com
SEARCHENGINES
New Google Rich Results Guidelines Prevent Prohibited, Regulated Or Harmful Products

Google Search has added new content guidelines to the rich results help document. These new guidelines directly disallow you to markup product or content that are widely prohibited or regulated, or that can facilitate serious harm to self or others. Google said it will simply not show rich results on such products.
Product examples include firearms & weapons, recreational drugs, tobacco, vaping products, gambling-related products and other products that can pose acute threats of physical harm.
The new guidelines were posted over here and read:
Don’t mark up content that promotes widely prohibited or regulated goods, services, or information that may facilitate serious and/or immediate or long term harm to self or others. This includes content related to firearms & weapons, recreational drugs, tobacco & vaping products and gambling-related products.
This new policy is effective already and I assume you will soon, if not already, not see rich results in Google Search for these types of products. This includes Google not showing star ratings, prices, or availability information and so on.
Google told me “this policy change will align the rich snippets feature with other Search surfaces that display product information from merchants, to help provide consistency and clarity.”
Google will not issue manual actions in Google Search Console for violation of this guidelines, Google will simply will just not show the rich results in Google Search.
Here is a screenshot from Glenn Gabe of it already going missing for sites:
And yep, review snippets are gone from the SERPs already for the verticals impacted. Will be interesting to track this over time. Here’s a quick example: pic.twitter.com/4h5nWcMdlb
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) June 30, 2022
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Source: www.seroundtable.com