3 min
Google My Business New Feature
- Google has started to allow select business the ability to create customized short URLs for their GMB listing. Even though the feature is only available to some companies right now, experts believe that this is more than a test feature, as there is already an article in the help center on it.
- This feature allows you to create a short URL, “short names” as deemed by Google, that are between 5-32 characters and take you directly to the GMB/Maps listing.
- Why does this matter? This feature makes it easier for companies to promote a URL that users can actually remember. This can be effective across print, email, and local marketing materials. This can also help to drive reviews by using the /reviews feature. It is advisable to look into this early and claim your URL short name; if you need to change this in the future the short name can be changed up to three times per year.
Signed Exchange Feature Allows AMP Results To Use Publishers URL
- Google officially announced and rolled out signed exchanges for Google Search’s AMP web results. Signed exchanges enable displaying the publisher’s domain when content is instantly loaded via Google Search.
- Signed exchange allows the browser to trust a document as if it belongs to your origin and effectively allows for instant-loading AMP pages from your own domain. Notably, AMP pages can now load as the publisher’s domain instead of google.com/amp
- Currently, this feature is only available on Google chrome, but will expand to other browsers. Publishers will need both to publish both the signed exchanged version of the content as well as the non-signed exchange version.
More Google Indexing Issues
- March and April have been tough months for Google engineers. Last week’s news was full of updates and retractions on the status of the Google indexing issues. Unfortunately, this week isn’t any different.
- This week Google announced that they are aware of indexing issues within the Google News content. Google has declared that it is unrelated to the prior week’s issue and its only for a limited number of publishers. Specifically, some have noticed that the content affected is related to content published within the last 24 hours.
- Publisher’s should check Google News to see if their latest content is posting or if they have been affected by this bug.