We hope you are in good health. Here are some of the major SEO news updates of the week you need to know-

Search Related Updates And News From Major Search Engines

Google Launches New Shopping Features To Enhance Visibility of ‘Nearby’ Product Inventory

As per Adobe’s Digital Economy Index data, ‘’buy online, pickup in store’’(BOPIS)grew by more than 250% over year in August. Google is also saying something similar. Google is also saying something similar. They recently reported that searches for ‘’curbside pickup’’ increased tenfold over the last few months during the pandemic. Google is taking some steps to become the platform where consumers search for products, both online and offline. The company has announced that it is making nearby product inventory features more discoverable with new Shopping UI features like new local stores card, more prominent ‘’nearby’’ filter below the shopping tab and higher visibility or Curbside and in-store pickup labels.

Google My Business Now Has More Attributes For Listings

Google My Business listings will now be able to highlight health and safety measures that they are taking for protecting customers during COVID-19. Making customers aware of the efforts that businesses are taking for their safety can be the major difference in selecting one company over another. Attributes on a Google My Business profile are specifically designed to draw the attention of searchers by highlighting vital service offerings. Searchers can utilize these attributes to make better decisions about where to visit. The new health and safety attributes that businesses can add to their profiles include appointment required, mask required, staff wear masks and get temperature checked, and temperature check required.

Google Merges Custom Affinity and Custom Intent Into Custom Audiences

In an updated announced this week, Google has streamlined its audience options for YouTube, Gmail, Discovery and Display campaigns. Earlier, advertisers were able to set up audience to be either ‘’custom affinity’’ or ‘’custom intent’’. They are now known as ‘’custom audiences’’ and are set up in the Audiences section at the Ad Group or Campaign level. These audience types can be set up in Audience manager section of a Google Ads account as well.

Google Offers Support For Regional Video Structured Data

Google has started offering support for a structured data property for Videos, known as regionsAllowed. The structured data property enables a publisher to inform Google that a video is for a particular region. A structured data property is a way to inform a search engine what attributes and relationships are of a thing. The new structured data property is part of VideoObject structured data type. A structured data character is a way of labelling what type of information is being communicated.The regionsAllowed structure data property is meant to define a video is intended for which regions. A search engine can utilize is data to limit what regions to show a rich result about a specific video.

Googlebot To Start Crawling Websites Over HTTP/2 From November 2020

From November this year, Googlebot will support crawling over HTTP/2 for some sites. HTTP/2 is the next version of HTTP. Google recently made this announcement about this upcoming update on its company blog. HTTP/2 is an upgraded version of HTTP because of better architecture. The architecture on which it is built enables it to offer more features for clients and servers. It is more efficient and faster than HTTP. Google has stated that the change is being made for making crawling more efficient when it comes to server and resource page. The switch to crawling some websites over HTTP/2 will be done in phases.

Keep A Track of The Latest News From Social Networking Sites

Facebook Business Suite Is Now A Combination of Instagram, Pages & Messenger Tools

Facebook Business Suite has become a new hub on desktop as well as mobile where businesses can gain access to tools they require for managing their presence on Messenger, Instagram and Facebook. At present, Business Suite has capabilities like advertising, posting, messaging and insights. Facebook is introducing Business Suit as a response to research which shows that business owners want a better way of managing activities without being distracted from their business operations.

Author

Navneet Kaushal is the Editor-in-Chief of PageTraffic Buzz. A leading search strategist, Navneet helps clients maintain an edge in search engines and the online media. Navneet is also the CEO of SEO Services company PageTraffic which is one of the leading search marketing company in Asia.