SEO News You Can Use: Google News Unveils New Desktop Design

On June 22, Google News revealed a brand new customizable look for its main page. Users can now modify the local and global news displayed at the top of their feed by adding filters, personalizing topics and expanding a new Fact Check section to enhance the user experience and make it easier to discover, stay up-to-date on and validate important news.

New Filters and Personalizing Topics – You have the option of viewing local news from various locations and can also tweak the layout by selecting, adding, removing or dragging the sort order of which trending or local news articles you want to appear at the top of the homepage. 

Expanding the Fact Check Section – You now have access to additional contextualized news articles reviewed by independent organizations to substantiate the initial statement and make informed decisions about the content. More information about the source is available in the About This Result section on Google Search. 

In addition, Google announced several areas it would be focusing on to help global news publishers:

• Providing newsrooms and journalists with resources, training programs and financing.
• The Global News Equity Fund is a multi-million dollar initiative to help the news industry become more diverse and equitable.
• Granting journalists that work with local and marginalized communities $1 million in funding.
• Making investments in an advertising campaign for local media channels.

Furthermore, Spain can now enjoy Google News once more after an eight-year absence (since 2014).

More SEO News You Can Use

Google LIMoE – Deeper Learning Via a Single AI: As a step toward achieving its objective of an AI architecture dubbed Pathways, Google has unveiled a new technology called Learning Multiple Modalities with One Sparse Mixture-of-Experts Model (LIMoE). Pathways is a single model artificial intelligence (AI) that can learn to perform various tasks currently carried out using multiple algorithms. It combines the processing of vision and text, processing them simultaneously. As a result, it achieves better problem-solving results more efficiently. Additionally, it can complete a task by delegating each to different “experts” who are professionals in that area of the assignment. For more info, check out Google’s AI blog here.

Google Guideline Updates for Product Variants Pages and Rich Results: Google recently added information about how rich results can be utilized for product variants where each product variant has a unique URL to the support page. The only thing that changed is that by simply adding the phrase “This includes product variants where each product variant has a separate URL,” Google clarified how rich results on product variants function. Google allows a variety of URL configurations; however, it suggests using underscores instead of hyphens in URLs as it simplifies segmentation. Although not entirely new, these guidelines should be significantly helpful to make sure your product variant pages are qualified to display product-rich results in Google Search.

Google Makes Substantial Changes to SEO Office Hours Format Frequency: According to Search Engine Land, Google has reduced its SEO Office Hours frequency. In the past, John Mueller of Google would respond to live Google search and SEO-related inquiries from website owners, webmasters and SEOs. Instead, Mueller is now requesting that questions are submitted in advance, and he will record and post his responses afterward. He claimed that the improvements were made so that people could more easily digest shorter movies and that they also assisted him and other Google employees in “sort of preparing for these sessions” so that the responses were more pertinent.

LGBTQ+ Owned Attribute Added to Google Business Profiles: For businesses owned by LGBTQ+ people, Google has announced the addition of a new attribute to Google Business Profiles. It is now simpler to locate LGBTQ+-owned businesses in their local communities by using this new attribute, which may be added to a verified Google Business Profile, potentially boosting visibility and conversion. In contrast to Google’s LGBTQ+ Friendly and Transgender Safespace, which was introduced in 2020, this new attribute is more objective. It is intended only to spotlight LGBTQ+ company owners and promote diversity, much as the attributes for Black-owned and Latino-owned businesses.

Meta Releases New Policy To Tackle Fake Reviews: In the United States, Meta has introduced a new community feedback policy. All of Meta’s products or features may be temporarily or permanently unavailable to users who violate the policy. It focuses on fraudulent reviews that show up in its Question and Answer or Ratings and Review sections on Marketplace and Shops. Meta said it aims to “keep irrelevant, false, and disrespectful comments off our platforms.” Meta further stated that it prefers evaluations to be founded on actual customer purchasing experiences. Meta has compiled five factors that could cause reviews to be highlighted: Manipulation, Incentivization, Irrelevance, Graphic or Inappropriate Content and Spam.

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.