Video results in Google SERPs, Google Ads Updates, 301s, CWV Slow Countries

Today is Tuesday, January 11th, and a few Google and marketing news updates for you from updates to video results in Google to a few google ads updates, redirecting a website and blocking slow counties to increase CWV scores.

We saw trending results on mobile for the discovery section, and now it looks like Google is rolling this out as a test to videos in mobile search. 

It looks like it’s been seen in the wild for food, music, and restaurants. I continue to like seeing this, I think it helps push new results to more people and allows for some virality in the SERPs.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-trending-videos-32725.html

A couple Google Ads updates:

This happened a few days ago, but Google is allowing ads for sports betting from certified and state-licensed entities in New York. Advertisers must apply for certification which started on the 7th of January. 

https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/11522848?hl=en&ref_topic=29265

The IndexNow Plugin for WordPress was updated on Monday with a few bug fixes and domain resolutions. If you were having issues with installation or it wasn’t verifying your domain properly, try updating the plugin and see if that fixes it. It’s a very lightweight plugin that doesn’t affect site performance, so I encourage you to install it on your WordPress site.

A question was asked during last week’s SEO office hours about dates, and John had a bit of a follow up type question where he linked out to the Google documentation on the best way for Google to understand the date for your page. This is really useful and we’ve had some issues in the past with articles that were revised by showed an older date which didn’t make as much sense for the user.

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/03/help-google-search-know-best-date-for

A TechSEO Reddit thread where Marwoob had asked about blocking counties that have much lower core web vital scores, and also happen to be counties they don’t serve. 

There was a good discussion on the pros and cons to doing this, John Mueller chimed in with some good ideas and some code to check how their site was doing against others in that country in order to see if it was worthwhile. In the end, I think there is some merit to blocking from counties you will absolutely not be able to service, however you never know if that will change in the future. 

Last one here is a reddit thread about migrating your site and keeping the old pages live even though you have 301 redirects. John Mueller chimed in that it’s not a bad idea to keep them around, simply because from a technical side, they may be needed to actually handle the redirect as well as not removing your hosting completely until you see the redirect fully taken in Google and don’t forget about server logs and any other data that might be on there when you remove the site or take down the server.