Sharing is caring; Wednesday’s daily brief

Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, sharing your knowledge and helping your colleagues is what it is all about.

Since the early days of search marketing, sharing knowledge with your colleagues and helping your friends in your industry has been what has made this industry so great. Back in the early 2000s, we had old-fashioned online forums where we’d go to share what we are seeing in search. 

We’d ask our colleagues for help with challenging technical SEO issues or maybe after a friend’s affiliate site got pummeled by the Google Florida update in 2002, we offered support and guidance. We were and still are a very tight community. We’ve expanded to social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and heck, even Clubhouse. But this just gives us more ways to share, help and grow our professional industry.

The search marketing industry has grown a lot over the last two decades. A search engine that some of us laughed at in 1999 went public under the ticker GOOG and now dominates the world. We all have the war scars to show how many search algorithm updates we’ve been through; including lost jobs, businesses turned upside down and maybe even worse.

But one thing I am proud of is that still, we all have each other’s backs. When you see a colleague is down both ranking-wise or even emotionally, someone in our industry takes notice and reaches out to help. We are one industry, we are one big search family, and we all care for each other.

Keep on sharing, caring and helping our friends in the search marketing industry. One small piece of advice, try to give each and every one the benefit of the doubt and it will make this process a lot easier.

Barry Schwartz,
Emotional support search liaison

Advertisers will lose the ability to create new broad match modifier keywords in late July

When Google first announced that it was expanding phrase match to include broad match modifier (BMM) traffic, the company also told us that after the new behavior rolled out worldwide, advertisers would not be able to create new BMM keywords — that deadline is now about a month away. Come late July, advertisers will no longer be able to create new BMM keywords, but they’ll still be able to view historical metrics and edit attributes, like bid or status. However, if you want to edit the keyword text, you’ll have to first convert your BMM keyword to phrase match.

It seems like this is the final step in deprecating BMM keywords. Since existing BMM keywords are already being treated under the expanded phrase match behavior, it’s a good idea to convert your keywords if you haven’t already. This will enable you to start gathering new keyword stats sooner and it may make account management easier because you’re no longer working with a deprecated match type. If you need some converting your BMM keywords, Google has added bulk editing tools in both Google Ads and Google Ads Editor.

Read more here.

Google Merchant Center policy no longer requires payment details early on

Google has updated and relaxed its merchant center policy around “insufficient payment information” to no longer require you to show the payment methods that you accept until the checkout page. Prior you had to show what payment methods you accepted on earlier pages in the buying process. 

“Beginning June 28, 2021, Merchants will no longer be required to provide their accepted payment methods on their website to customers before the checkout process. Merchants will still need to make sure at least one conventional payment method is available to customers during checkout,” Google wrote.
Why we care. If you felt this data was making a mess of your other pages, you can now remove that templated information from all your pages outside of the checkout. You can use that space to upsell other products or to add more unique and useful content specific to that page.  Or you can leave it, it is totally up to you.

Google Ads API changes: New asset-based extension types available

Announced earlier this year, Google Ad’s existing feed-based extension setup will be deprecated and the asset-based paradigm will replace it. Account owners will need to take action to maintain control over their ad extensions. “The following Asset-based extension types are now available to all accounts: Callout, Promotion, Sitelink and Structured Snippet,” wrote Andrew Burke, Google Ads API team, in an announcement yesterday. These extension types will be auto-migrated on October 20, 2021.

“Though originally scheduled for release later this year, Asset-based Image extensions will not be available in the Google Ads API until 2022,” added Burke.

What to do. Google recommends migrating “Callout, Promotion, Sitelink, and Structured Snippet extensions in your accounts to Asset-based extensions using the Google Ads API” ASAP so you’ll still be able to modify your extensions. “You will soon be able to opt individual Google Ads client accounts out of this auto migration; the opt out process will be announced on this blog when available,” added Burke.

Why we care. Ensure that you or the tool provider you use is prepared for this API change. Though minor, it has the potential to affect how and if your ad extensions show in search results.

Expandable menus, crawl but not indexed, accented characters and link units.

Expandable menu text. Martin Splitt from Google said on Twitter that using expandable menu text on your navigation bar or menus is fine for Google and not considered cloaking.

Crawled – currently not indexed. Do you see a lot of “crawled – currently not indexed” issues in your coverage report within Google Search Console? It might be a sign of a quality issue with your site, implied John Mueller of Google.

Accented characters in content. Should you use accented characters in your content or should you write the content without the accents? John Mueller of Google said it depends, but in some cases you might want to use both variations on the same page of your content.

AdSense link units. Google has been slowly retiring the AdSense link units; Google said “now reached the final stage of that process: removing fixed-sized link units from the AdSense interface.” So that’s all folks.

We’ve curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader.

• 4 New SEO Tactics You May Be Overlooking in 2021 – Go Fish Digital
• Blockchain, Fake News, and E-A-T – Kevin Indig
• Chrome New Tab Page cards remind about past searches – 9to5Google
• Google search feature gives wrong guidance on UK self-isolation rules – The Guardian
• How to Influence “Years in Business” in the Local Pack Results – Sterling Sky
• Microsoft Bing Remove Language Tabs – Search Engine Roundtable