Daily Search Forum Recap: May 6, 2021

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

Google Local Services Ads Bug May Have Changed Your Bid Mode
Google has a bug with its Local Service Ads program where it may change your bid mode from “Maximize Leads” to “Max Per Lead.” Ginny Marvin from Google confirmed the issue yesterday afternoon and said “this is a bug that we are working on fixing.”

Google My Business Contact Us Form Select Business Drop Down
Google added a business selection drop down feature to the Google My Business contact us form. So now when you go to the contact us form in the Google My Business help section, it will ask you to select which business you need help with.

Changing A Bit Of Content Based On IP Address; Google Likely Won’t Penalize You
Technically, if you change your content based on the IPs or user agents visiting that piece of content, specifically giving GoogleBot different content than your users, that would be against Google’s cloaking policy and warrant a Google penalty. But based on the intent of that change, most likely, you won’t be penalized.

Google Confirms Your Content Be Indexed But Not On All Data Centers
Google’s John Mueller confirmed something most of us know, that your site and/or pages can be indexed by Google Search but that not all data centers may have that URL in that specific index at the same time. John said it is rare to see but it can happen.

Google Talks Hypothetically About Speed As A Ranking Factor – It’s Small
Google’s John Mueller, Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt released their latests “search off the record” podcast where they pretend to create a search engine named Steve and discuss how they would build it out. One topic they spent a lot of time on is the topic of page speed (i.e. the upcoming page experience update) and how much it would be weighted.

Google My Business Wheelchair Accessibility Attributes
A week or so ago, Google added to Google My Business the ability to add attributes to your business listing that specify if your business is wheelchair accessible. This includes wheelchair accessible entrance, parking lot, restroom, seating and maybe more.

Metal Scraps G Google Logo
Here is a G logo hanging in the Google Dublin office but this one seems to be made of metal scraps. Tons of little random metal pieces welded together to form the Google Dublin office back in 2017.

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

We’re pretty good at recrawling "important" URLs quickly, so likely that will settle down soon. In really bad cases, I’d consider hiding the full site for a while (this doesn’t affect indexing, we’ll, John Mueller on Twitter
Amazing. Love that a tweet ranks for this query, which gets thousands of searches p/mo. The account ranking in the Featured Snippet does look to be an authority on the topic, so not too unusual. But yes, a baby porcupine is, Brodie Clark on Twitter
Everyone will have different things they’d consider to be success when it comes to a website. Some people might be happy if their site is reachable online, others want to be found, some want to sell somethi, John Mueller on Twitter
It’s not uncommon to have some amount of spam on UGC platforms, and of course, legitimate pages could also be hosted there targeting queries like that. (Parasite-hosting is usually less about UGC, John Mueller on Twitter

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