Five of the most interesting search stories from this week

It's time for our weekly update from the world of search marketing and beyond.

This week we have new antitrust measures against Google from Europe, new mobile shopping formats, and Google testing store inventory searches in GMB.

New mobile formats from Google

Google announced this week that it will soon begin rolling out new mobile features for PLAs, holiday booking filters, its YouTube's TrueView shopping feature and a new Showcase Shopping ad format.

No SEO advantage to removing older content

In a question to Google's John Mueller (as reported by SEMpost), he gave some useful advice on whether or not to remove older content.

In a nutshell, there's no benefit to be had in terms of SEO. As John says, 'just removing old content doesn't automatically cause a ranking advantage.'

There is a quality question though, and sites with older content that doesn't match the quality of the new may wish to improve or remove.

Then there's the question of making content easy to crawl. John Mueller:

"…if there is a lot of content that you have like this, then it could be affecting your crawl rate, in that if we waste a lot of time crawling content on your site and we miss the new content, then that's probably not that great for you. "

Google in trouble with Europe (again)

The European Commission has sent two 'Statements of Objections' to Google, on the following issues:

Google abusing its dominant position 'by systematically favouring its comparison shopping service in its search result pages.'

Abusing its position by 'artificially restricting the possibility of third party websites to display search advertisements from Google's competitors.'

Here's the full statement.

Google showing store inventory in GMB results

As spotted by Nicolai Helling on G+, Google seems to be testing a new feature which allows shoppers to search store inventory from Google My Business results.

Did a June Google update benefit publishers?

According to SimilarWeb, Google may have released an update in June. Roy Hinkis at SimilarWeb has looked into this, and it suggest that publishers may be the beneficiaries.

He has seen that news sites have increased their organic search traffic. New York Post, for example, has seen it organic search traffic increase by 155% between May and June this year.

Graham Charlton is Editor in Chief at ClickZ Global.

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