Google Keen, GMB custom hours and more: Week 25 in SEO

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Last week has been interesting in terms of SEO news. I’ve summarised the most important five updates below:

Google My Business: New custom hours feature

For brick and mortar firms or companies that pick-up and deliver items to customers (such as couriers, medical laboratories etcetera) Google My Business added a long-waited feature: more categories of hours. 

The complete list of hours includes 9 categories:

  • Access
  • Brunch
  • Delivery
  • Drive-through
  • Happy hours
  • Kitchen
  • Pickup
  • Senior hours
  • Takeout

Let’s say you manage a medical cabinet where gynaecological examinations can be performed only in the morning or supermarkets which seniors can visit only during certain time slots.  You can set up special hours in your GMB property account, clicking Info > More hours > add the time slots you need.

google my business special hours 3

Fact check feature in Google Image Search + ClaimReview

Google announced a new feature in its Image Search that allows users to check the source of images in case they have doubts about their authenticity.

In case you are interested in testing it now, you may encounter it if you’re lucky or if you’re searching images connected to controversial topics or intriguing articles. In that lucky case, you will see a “Fact Check” label only underneath certain image thumbnails.

fact check sharks google

ClaimReview structured data markup for images

In parallel, Google encourages publishers to use ClaimReview markup ( structured data), to detail fact check content that has to be indexed. ClaimReview is already available on YouTube in a few ley-countries.

More details regarding this SEO news you may read on Google Blog.

E-A-T SEO rating measurement is still a blur

In another SEO news of last week, John Mueller – the Google Search specialist I wrote recently – replied a Twiter user that E-A-T is not a measurement system, but a concept included in Quality Rater’s guidelines.

As far as I see, current white-hat SEO practice shows that E-A-T principles work great. But how we should decode John Mueller’s message, it’s not very clear yet.

Google Keen

Even if it is not directly related to the SEO activities, Google Keen caught my attention because it is an application that analyzes the editorial consumption of website users.

What is Google Keen?

Google Keen

Google Keen is a machine learning app build at Google with a very useful purpose: recommend more relevant pages to its Google Search users.

Keen is one of the experimental projects developed by Area 120, which Google calls “a workshop for Google’s experimental products” and PAIR, the People + AI Research human-centred research project.

It uses recommendations algorithms and principles similar to Pinterest, but it has 2 big differences:

  1. Focuses on full web page content, not only on images;
  2. It is based on Google Search AI algorithm.

seo news - new google keen

Apparently Keen will offer Google Search users 3 levels of privacy:

  • public recommendations
  • kept within a controlled network (aka “Share only with friends”)
  • private (only me access)

One of Google Keen app’s objectives is to extend the user search journey by enriching it with highly relevant search suggestions. There are already a bunch of paid RSS aggregators that optimise content based on users reading behaviour, so we should wait and see if Keen could make them obsolete or if it will be able to replace people’s need of forwarding content to friends.

Until then, you can check out for free the desktop or the Android app here: https://staykeen.com

Google Knowledge Graph card bug on Winston Churchill

No software is flawless, but all software bugs are fixable. In another SEO news alert, an unfortunate event happened to Google Knowledge Graph card last week, when the search engine didn’t display the proper media on Winston Churchill and a few other great leaders.

How Winston Churchill became SEO news

In the case of Winston Churchill Knowledge Graph card error, all famous pictures of former British PM disappeared from Knowledge Graph card. The situation lasted a few hours until Google fixed the bug quite fast, populating the respective profile with pictures.

Churchill’s profile was a topic in April too, when Google Search displayed an image of UK’s PM in his younger days. According to Google, fixing this reported bug actually caused June 14 display error.

Winston Churchill

Here are two of Google Search Liaison reactions on Twitter: