Google Testing “Value Alert” Notice In Google Shopping Ads

This time Google has another test running on product listing ads, to highlights “value” of the products.

Marked by Elizabeth Marsten at CommerceHub on Thursday, the test displays a “Value alert” message at the bottom of the ad and showing items that are on sale or significantly discounted. Yeah! Google is testing a new way of showing items.

Based on the size of the discount the “Value alert” message triggers itself but it’s not clear yet that the advertisers’ TrustedStores status has anything to do with the inclusion in the test.

Well, the experiment seems to be very limited at this point. We haven’t been able to get it to trigger. May be upcoming day Google will provide a detailed explanation on their new experiment.

Till then stay connected.

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Apple Confirms Their Web Crawler: Applebot

After much rumour about an Apple Web Crawler, Apple has finally posted a help document approving the presence of AppleBot.

Apple said, Applebot is the web crawler for Apple. AppleBot is “used by products including Siri and Spotlight Suggestions,” the company said.

The user-agent will usually follow the following string but will contain “Applebot” in it always:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.2 Safari/600.2.5 (Applebot/0.1)

Apple declares it will respect the usual robots.txt guidelines and robots meta tags. AppleBot currently originates in the 17.0.0.0 net block. If you don’t mention AppleBot in your robots.txt directive, Apple will follow what you mention for Googlebot. So if you want to block AppleBot and GoogleBot, you can just block GoogleBot, but it is recommended to block each independently.

If you figure our some unfamiliar AppleBot activity, you can always reach Apple about it at Apple-NOC “at” apple.com.

It is still uncertain if Apple plans on constructing and challenging with Google on search, but this is one step closer to that.

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Google Will Stop Displaying Emojis in SERP

Say goodbye to Emojis in the Google search results, at least from Google’s desktop search results.

From last couple of weeks Google has initiated displaying Emojis on desktop search results and then publishers, like Expedia, began trying to see if adding Emojis to their title tags and snippets would increase CTR from Google’s organic results or not.

After that, many other webmasters started adding emoji to their web page titles, finally leading to Google’s SERPs being somewhat overrun by cute and funny emoji symbols.

Google’s John Mueller said that the emoji will be removed from the search results soon, like Google dropped Unicode symbols back in 2003. It does not mean that your web pages will be penalized for putting emoji, Google will simply stop displaying the emoji in the search engine results pages.

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Google Launches Custom Voice Actions for Third Party Apps

According to a post this week focussed to Android developers Google is further growing his Voice Actions to third party applications to let consumers reach into apps on Android devices, beyond just launching them.

In some cases, this appears to enable a version of in-app search:
“Today, we launched our first set of partners for custom Google voice actions on Android. This feature will enable people to say things like “Ok Google, listen to NPR” or “Ok Google, show attractions near me on TripAdvisor.” We’re currently piloting custom voice actions with a select group of partners, but we plan to open it up more widely in the future — and we’d love to hear your ideas for actions you’d like to implement.”

Nearly a year ago we all have heard about this development from Google and it came just as Microsoft is expanding Cortana integration of third party apps.

Google has also expanded the range of developers and application producers contributing in Google Now, freshly adding 60+ new apps.

Google Now and Voice Actions will represent the future of search for Google on mobile devices rather than mobile friendly conventional search results. As, these experiences are much more practical and better adjusted for smartphone users and their usage settings.

Making money from these user experiences is a different subject, however.

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Google Says More Searches Now On Mobile Than On Desktop

Last year Google employees said that the mobile search queries would possibly overtake desktop queries sometime this year and now Google has just confirmed this.

Google says that “more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan.” The company declined to disclose more on what the other countries were, how lately this change occurred or what the comparative numbers of PC and mobile search queries are now.

Google also explained that the mobile queries include mobile browser-based searches and also those coming from Google’s mobile search apps.

This includes only smartphones, not tablets because Google counts tablets with desktops.

With the disclosure of this news that mobile search has now surpassed desktop search, we get a bit more colour and context for the recent mobile-friendly algorithm update.

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The Mobile Friendly Algorithm Has Fully Rolled Out

Google has confirmed that the mobile friendly algorithm is now fully rolled out to all data centres and fully in place.

Gary Illyes from Google confirmed this on Twitter that the algorithm is rolled out. Gary also added: Not all pages were reindexed yet so they don’t have the new scores. Yet.

The actual number of sites affected decreased considerably because a lot of sites became mobile friendly recently. So while most of the webmasters and tracking companies are not seeing all that much of a change in the mobile Google results, some are definitely noticing trivial changes in the mobile search results.

Will things in Google’s mobile search results change even more in coming weeks? No one knows. We just need to wait and watch how this MobileGeddon is going to affect the whole strategy.

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