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
- Fact check feature in Google Image Search + ClaimReview
- E-A-T SEO rating measurement is still a blur
- Google Keen
- Google Knowledge Graph card bug on Winston Churchill
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.
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.
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.
That's not something we'd explicitly measure for Search — it's a concept we wrote about in our Quality Rater's guidelines ( https://t.co/ElOQSQ5UxL ), so I'd check that out.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 15, 2020
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 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:
- Focuses on full web page content, not only on images;
- It is based on Google Search AI algorithm.
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.
Here are two of Google Search Liaison reactions on Twitter:
At the end of April, we received feedback that the image of Churchill automatically selected by our systems wasn’t representative of him. The systems had selected a picture of a younger Winston Churchill (shown below), while he’s more famously & iconically pictured when older… pic.twitter.com/eqEirPH6TV
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) June 14, 2020
We’re exploring why the first terms for Churchill, Wilson, MacDonald & Baldwin are not shown. It might be that our systems are only displaying the last term of prime ministers who had non-consecutive terms. We’ll seek to address this to avoid any unintentional concern….
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) June 14, 2020
