Zephyrnet Logo

SEO News You Can Use: Google Updates Its Misrepresentation Policy With Four Brand Criteria | SEOblog.com

Date:

Merchants and retail brands gain more insight on how to make their business more visible on Google Search. In a recent post from Google Merchant Center, the search giant outlines four primary factors to increase your trust and safety, protecting your business and customers from potential misrepresentation issues.

Here are the four factors to keep in mind:

  • Business Identity
    • Your business and domain names should be consistent with an accurate and unique About Us page. 
    • Urge your customers to follow your social media profiles, linking your website to your social accounts.
  • Transparency
    • Be clear and transparent about your business policies, such as shipping, returns and privacy. 
    • Your business model and operations should be clear and understandable.
  • Online Reputation
    • Display trust signals all over your content to establish trust with your customers. This includes product and business reviews, testimonials, third-party badges and seals of approvals. 
    • Clearly communicate how your customers can reach you and how your customer support works. 
    • Blog posts and third-party mentions of your business should be communicated with your customers.
  • Professional Design
    • Your website should have essential professional features like an SSL certificate for consumer protection, accessibility and ease of navigation. 
    • Your website shouldn’t have unnecessary redirects and broken links. 
    • Avoid using placeholder texts and images on your website.

The update helps Google understand your business better and allows them to “better represent you.”

This is more than just an issue for search engine optimization (SEO), though. Google knows that people will likely “research about your products and businesses,” so having reliable information on your website and across platforms is crucial. Because of this, Google promises to review multiple signals about your business across the web, saying that this is an ongoing process.

This means these guidelines will evolve over time as Google identifies and develops new trust signals they can rely on.

These aren’t the only practices that help rank your business better in Search. They also provided more ways you can help Google understand your business:

With these guidelines, Google is helping brands and businesses overcome the barrage of AI-generated content by ensuring they have authentic, accurate information that the search giant can use to help customers find trustworthy brands across the web.

Read Google’s full help document here.

More SEO News You Can Use

Google Adds 30 GA4 Metrics for eCommerce: Just a couple of weeks after its release, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is rolling out additional measurement features for eCommerce brands. With a whopping total of 36 new metrics, you will now have more options for crafting your reports in GA4’s custom report builder. Released on July 20, 2023, this update brings 18 new eCommerce dimensions, 15 new eCommerce metrics and three new revenue exploration metrics. This is good news for eCommerce brands who want to yield more meaningful insights from GA4. Check out these dimensions and metrics yourself from your GA4 dashboard. Read the complete list of new metrics in Google’s new release notes or check out Search Engine Journal’s article.

Don’t Choose Cheap TLDs – Google Team: If you plan to save on domain fees with cheap top-level domains (TLDs), the Google Search Relations Team advises you don’t. In their latest episode of Search Off The Record podcast, Google’s John Mueller said, “people should stay away from the cheapest TLDs, especially if they’re free.” He explained that spammers typically target free TLDs, flagging your content as potential spam. Gary Illyes further explained that Google “might not want to pick up sitemaps from those domain names because the chances of leading to spam are way too high.” So, what should you do? The team suggests you acquire reliable TLDs within your budget, like .com. And if you’re curious if matching your domain name with your keywords (like fantastic.coffee for a coffee shop) could improve SEO, Illyes said it doesn’t. Dive deeper into this story with Search Engine Journal. Listen to the full episode of Search Off The Record here.

Google Rolls Out Automatic FAQs for Business Profiles: You don’t have to worry about creating your own FAQ section on GBP – Google’s new Automation FAQ  generator will handle it for you. Spotted by Twitter user Shameem Adhikarath, the Automatic FAQs will use your available business information like opening hours, appointments, contact information and more. Don’t worry, you can still add 10 more unique FAQs that “automatic FAQs don’t cover,” according to Adhikarath’s post. Read the full story on Search Engine Roundtable.

TikTok’s Commercial Content Library Launched: Get more information about TikTok’s paid ads with the platform’s newly-released Commercial Content Library. This searchable database provides information about a paid ad’s creative, running dates, main targeting parameters and more. TikTok said they’d tested an early version of the Library with researchers and civil society before releasing it to the broader public. While anyone can use the Library today, TikTok’s Commercial Content API is only available for users with a TikTok Developers account to “prevent malicious actors from misusing [this] data.” Read TikTok’s announcement here. For more of this story, read this article from Search Engine Land.

Bing Search and Bing Chat Get Dark Mode: Starting July 26, 2023, Bing is rolling out Dark Mode for Search and Chat for mobile and desktop. According to Microsoft’s Jordi Ribas, this feature will be rolled out “in the next few days.” To access Dark Mode, you must click the hamburger menu at the top-right corner of Bing, find the Appearance section and click Dark. Some users already tried the feature and pointed out the different shades of Dark between Search and Chat. Others in the thread loved the new look. This is a long time coming for Bing since Google already had this feature for a long time. Now, Bing’s Dark Mode will improve its accessibility and attractiveness as a search engine alternative to Google. Check out Search Engine Roundtable for more information.

Editor’s Note: “SEO News You Can Use” is a weekly blog post posted every Monday morning only on SEOblog.com, rounding up all the top SEO news from around the world. Our goal is to make SEOblog.com a one-stop-shop for everyone looking for SEO news, education and for hiring an SEO expert with our comprehensive SEO agency directory.

spot_img

Latest Intelligence

spot_img