On Tuesday 13th July 2021, France’s antitrust authority issued Google a fine to the tune of €500 million, which equates to $593M, for failing to negotiate with publishers in good faith regarding showcasing news.

Following the fine, Google has been granted two months to create proposals to compensate French news publishers.

If the tech giant fails to comply, the French authorities could issue further fines of €900,000 per day, which equates to approximately $1.065 million daily.

Looks like Google might be testing a Featured Snippet kinda result when you do a search for branded podcast searches.

Sample Query: Try searching for edge of the web , experts on the wire, etc on Mobile. I was able to trigger the result from Australia.

On July 20, 2021, Google will discontinue the ability for those with verified knowledge panels to use Google Posts. To be clear, this only impacts verified knowledge panels, not the local Google Posts you manage within Google My Business.

Starting on July 20, 2021,  you will no longer be able to create new posts via Posts on Google or use the authoring tool to make updates to the knowledge panel.

Google’s July 2021 Core Update rolled out quickly and lasted a total of 11 days, formally concluding on July 12. Check the winners, losers and analysis of this from Lily Ray.

See how the various tab implementation on a page impacts SEO.

Microsoft Bing lets you share some of the direct answers (or as Google calls it, featured snippets) on social or other means. You can see this yourself by searching on Bing for [search engine] and then notice the share icons at the top of this box.

It can be daunting for some to dive into GSC and find all those “what, where, why, when, how, etc.” type search queries, you can use this simple Data Studio dashboard to visualize the data in a much clearer format.

• Immediately see what questions your potential customers are asking to find your product or service
• Easily sort questions by impressions, clickthrough rate and average position
• Edit the report for different search queries to suit your business needs
• Share the report with others in your business

Get it from here

GoDaddy online store customers can now easily integrate their product inventory across Google at no additional cost. This means that GoDaddy merchants can now get discovered across Search, Shopping, Image Search and YouTube in just a few clicks. With this integration, GoDaddy merchants can upload their products to Google, create free listings and ad campaigns and review performance metrics — all without leaving GoDaddy’s Online Store.

A study of 1,000 personal injury law firms—the top 20 firms from each of the 50 largest U.S. cities—to see just how quickly Google rankings decline based on distance from a business. While the sharp decline in ranking over the first mile appears in nearly every city, what happens afterwards varies considerably across the different cities used in this study.

Why rank organically when you can buy ads and show up in between your competitors brand searches? Wonder if they will claim this to be a bug or a test.

This short video explains how Google Search understands when there’s a trending event and reacts to display fresh, reliable and helpful content, such as showing maps, local resources and news information during wildfires or other crisis events.

Want to speed up your keyword research process? This session on Moz talks about using python and Natural Language processing to give you keyword research superpowers.

Glenn Gabe provide lots of insights from Google’s double core update. He talks about findings from Finance sites, Health and medical sites, Reversals from June, Rich snippets impact and much more.

In this session from MozCon 2021 Cyrus Shepard shares various SEO experiments on the title, meta descriptions and more and the impact they had on SEO traffic.

Google is announcing a new structured data property and new editorial content policy.

The directApply property is an optional way that enables you to share if your job listing offers a direct apply experience. Google define a direct apply experience in terms of the user actions required to apply for the job, which means that the user is offered a short and straightforward application process on your page.

Google adding a new editorial content policy for job postings on Google Search (go into effect on October 1, 2021). The new editorial content policy include guidance around obstructive text and images, excessive and distractive ads, or content that doesn’t add any value to the job posting. Job listings should also follow basic grammar rules, such as proper capitalization.

Last December, Google began testing Travel Insights with Google in the Asia Pacific region; it’s a set of tools providing powerful insights into real-time travel demand based on global Google Search data. Today they are launching Travel Insights with Google in the United States.

There are two free tools available within Travel Insights with Google that provide rich data and actionable insights.

Destination Insights gives travel businesses, governments, and tourism boards a clear picture of top sources of demand per destination. This can help users understand where potential travelers may be coming from and adjust marketing campaigns accordingly.

The second tool, Hotel Insights, helps hoteliers analyze search trends so they can understand where interest is coming from and attract new guests by creating a stronger digital presence.

Some users are noticing that businesses opted into Call History (a USA only feature), is showing a “Google Number” in their phone numbers drop down on mobile.

Some users are starting to see a test on Google where the Map pack has no map. Usually, they have a map embed on the top which seems to be missing in this.

Google’s John Mueller said that Google Search tries “to find the primary language per page.” So when you mix languages on a single page, that might cause issues for Google.