Good morning Search Marketer, and welcome, October.
October might not feel like the holidays, but looking at last year's search trends for "holiday gifts," interest began ticking up around the 15th. Now, add in Amazon Prime Day on October 13-14, and this year could see an even earlier kick-off to the holiday season.
Now's the time to get your product feeds in order. Yesterday, Google announced free Shopping listings are now available globally. Opting into Surfaces across Google in Merchant Center will allow your product listings to show organically in the Shopping tab in Search.
Google is also expanding Local Services Ads to Europe. They are available in Europe for 16 home services verticals such as appliance repair, house cleaning, pest control, plumbers and more. Google is testing auction bidding for LSAs in the U.S., but in Europe, pricing will be auction-based instead of based on a fixed cost per lead.
This week, antisemitic memes in image results highlighted vulnerabilities in search and got us talking about "data voids" — when there is a lack of relevant, quality content around a search term. Data voids leave openings for low quality and, in this week's case, offensive content to rise to the top of the search results. Subsequent coverage of the problem by multiple outlets actually exacerbated the problem.
All agree they're offensive. Google, however, is not taking explicit action for a few reasons. I happen to think these kinds of images have no place in search results, but acknowledge this opens up a complex discussion about content moderation and where lines get drawn, not to mention technical feasibility (though I tend to think that's a cop-out). It has sparked very interesting discussions here on our morning calls, and understanding why this kind of content rises to the top in the first place serves as a good reminder about how search works and doesn't.
Ginny Marvin,
Editor-in-Chief
