Apr 8 2025
Google Merchant Center Updates: Changes For Online Sellers via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

Google is changing its Merchant Center rules. These updates will roll out in two phases and affect how sellers list products in Shopping ads and free listings.

The changes impact instalment pricing, energy labels, member pricing, and US sales tax information.

Immediate Changes (Starting April 8)

Three key changes are now in effect:

1. New Instalment Pricing Rules

Google no longer allows the [price] attribute to be used for deposits on installment products.

Sellers must use the [downpayment] sub-attribute within the [installment] attribute. The [price] attribute must show what customers pay when paying in full upfront.

2. Updated Energy Labels:

For EU countries, Google replaced the energy efficiency class attributes with the broader [certification] attribute.

This supports both new and old EU energy labels. Norway, Switzerland, and the UK still use the original energy attributes.

3. Better Delivery Options:

Google added more delivery details at the product level. New attributes include [carrier_shipping] and options to specify business days for handling and transit. These help show more accurate delivery times in ads and listings.

Changes Starting July 1

More changes are coming on July 1:

Member Pricing Updates

Google will stop allowing member prices in the regular [price] or [sale_price] attributes. This applies worldwide for both paid and free membership programs.

Instead, use the [loyalty_program] attribute. Products that don’t follow this rule might be disapproved after July 1.

No More US Sales Tax Requirements

Google will stop requiring US sellers to provide sales tax information through the [tax] and [tax_category] attributes or Merchant Center settings.

Products previously rejected for missing tax information may start appearing in results, which could affect your ad spending.

Google notes that US sellers must still submit tax information until July 1.

What These Changes Mean for Sellers

These updates will require changes to how you structure product data.

If you offer payment plans, the new rules clarify how to show full payment versus installment options. This helps shoppers understand pricing better.

The energy label changes for EU countries match current regulations and give more options for showing graphical labels.

The member pricing change will affect many retailers. You must use the loyalty program attribute instead of regular price fields if you offer loyalty discounts.

Once the sales tax requirement ends, US sellers will benefit from simpler feeds, which may fix some common disapproval issues.

Getting Your Merchant Center Ready

To keep your listings working well:

  1. Check your feeds for any outdated attributes
  2. Update installment pricing right away
  3. EU sellers: switch to the new certification attribute for energy labels
  4. Change how you handle loyalty pricing before July 1
  5. Watch for improved performance of listings that were previously disapproved for tax issues

Google notes:

“With this change, offers currently disapproved for missing tax information may begin to receive traffic.”

By adapting to these changes early, you can avoid disruptions to your Shopping ads and listings while benefiting from better product data and delivery information.

Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock

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Apr 8 2025
WordPress Contributor Cutbacks Cause Core Development To Stall via @sejournal, @martinibuster

WordPress project leaders recently discussed how to proceed due to concern that organizations have dramatically cut back on the number of hours donated to contributing to WordPress. They decided that WordPress 6.8 would be the final major release of 2025 and that minor core releases will continue as needed.

While no formal commitment was made to future major releases after 2025, it kind of implies that future major releases are limited to one per year as long as the current contributor levels remain at this low level.

However that’s not for certain and it went unstated and prompted one of the contributors to ask the question in one of the comments:

“Is the new release cadence one major release a year now, or is that just for this year?

If getting users to wait a year for major updates, can I suggest some work towards an open road map so people can at least see what they are waiting for and in an ideal world, where resources are limited, vote on said features to help prioritise what the community wants from WordPress.”

Gutenberg & Core Trac Tickets Remain Flat

Gutenberg and Core Trac ticket volumes remained flat for the past six months, which means that the total number of tickets (number of unresolved issues) remains essentially the same, signalling stagnation in development as opposed to forward momentum.

New feature development in Gutenberg has declined sharply since January, which means that the creation of new blocks, capabilities, and user experience improvements has also slowed. This is cause for concern because a drop in new feature development indicates that the editor is not gaining new capabilities as quickly as it was in previous months, resulting in fewer enhancements, fewer innovations, and potentially less progress toward the long-term goals of the block editor project.

Work On Release Automation

One of the benefits discussed for slowing down the pace of development is that it frees up time to work on release automation, which means automating parts of the development. What exactly that means is not documented.

This is what the documentation says about it in the context of a benefit of slowing down the pace of development:

“Allows for work to further automate release processes, making future releases quicker and less manual.”

Focus On Canonical WordPress Plugins

It was decided that focusing on WordPress.org developed plugins, called canonical plugins, offered a path forward to improving core and adding features to it outside of contributions to the core itself. The canonical plugins discussed are Preferred Languages, 2FA (two-factor authentication), and Performance tools.

A long-running issue about the canonical plugins discussed at the meeting is the lack of user feedback about their canonical plugins, noting that the main source of feedback is when something breaks. The only other user feedback metric they have to work with is active installations, which doesn’t tell them anything about how users interact with a canonical plugin feature or how they feel about its usefulness and usability.

The documentation notes:

“First is the need for better means to collect user feedback. Active installs is currently the only metric available, but doesn’t provide enough value. Does a user actually interact with the feature? In what ways? Do they feel it’s valuable? Feedback is mainly received from users when something breaks. There was agreement to explore telemetry and ways to establish meaningful feedback loops within canonical plugins.”

Another issue with canonical plugins is that they’re not widely promoted and apparently many people don’t even know about them, partly because there’s no clear way for users to discover and  access them.

They wrote:

“The second improvement needed is promotion. It’s often not widely known that canonical plugins exist or that they are officially maintained. Different ways to raise awareness about canonical plugins will be explored, including posts on the WordPress.org News blog, mentioning them in presentations such as State of the Word, and possibly the currently barren Tools page in the WordPress admin.”

That issue was echoed in the comments section by core contributors:

“Can you post a link so I can view all the canonical plugins please?

Is it the random selection under the dotorg user account?
https://profiles.wordpress.org/wordpressdotorg/#content-plugins

Or is it the six plugins listed as ‘beta’?

https://wordpress.org/plugins/browse/beta/”

“Also agree with the other commenters and the post that canonical plugins are woefully under promoted. As a developer and WordPress professional they are rarely on my radar until I stumble upon them. Is there even a link to them in the repository where we can view them all?”

Backlog Management

Contributors were encouraged to continue to work on clearing the backlog of around 13,000 tickets (open issues or feature requests) in both the Core Track and Gutenberg repository. Minor releases can continue with bugfixes.

Final Decisions

The final decisions made are that WordPress 6.8 will be the final major release of 2025. Gutenberg plugin releases will continue every two weeks and minor core releases will continue throughout the year, as needed, with a more relaxed pace for including enhancements. However, the rule of “no new files in minor releases” will still be followed. The project will begin quarterly contributor strategy calls to keep discussions going and adapt as needed.

Read the official documentation of the meeting:

Dotorg Core Committers Check In

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Tithi Luadthong

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Apr 8 2025
Google Says Disavow Tool Not Part Of Normal Site Maintenance via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s John Mueller, at the Search Central NYC event, answered a question about what to do about toxic backlinks and responded with an overview of what goes on inside Google with links in order to explain why the disavow tool is something only sites that are guilty of something and know it should be using.

What To Do If Disavow Tool Is No Longer Available?

Google has a tool that allows publishers and SEOs to disavow links, which is basically telling Google to not count certain links. The purpose of the disavow tool arose after Google penalized countless thousands of sites for buying links. This was during the Penguin update in 2012. Getting rid of paid links was a difficult thing and some link sellers were asking for payment for removing the links. SEOs raised the idea of a disavow tool to help them get rid of the links their clients and themselves purchased and after a time Google agreed to provide that tool for that one purpose: to remove paid links.

Someone submitted a question for John Mueller to answer, asking what should SEOs do if the disavow tool is no longer available, asking:

“How can we remove toxic backlinks?”

The phrase “toxic backlinks” is something that the SEO backlink removal services and tools invented as part of scaring people into buying their backlink data and tools. That’s not a phrase that Googlers used, it’s totally 100% invented by SEO tool companies.

Google’s John Mueller answered:

“So internally we don’t have a notion of toxic backlinks. We don’t have a notion of toxic backlinks internally.

So it’s not that you need to use this tool for that. It’s also not something where if you’re looking at the links to your website and you see random foreign links coming to your website, that’s not bad nor are they causing a problem.

For the most part, we work really hard to try to just ignore them. I would mostly use the disavow tool for situations where you’ve been actually buying links and you’ve got a manual link spam action and you need to clean that up. Then the Disavow tool kind of helps you to resolve that, but obviously you also need to stop buying links, otherwise that manual action is not going to go away.”

Disavowing Links Is Not Normal Site Maintenance

Mueller continued his answer by pointing out that using a disavow tool on a regular basis is not a normal thing to do as part of site maintenance.

He said:

“But that’s essentially like from my point of view, the disavow tool is not something that you need to do on a regular basis. It’s not a part of normal site maintenance. I would really only use that if you have a manual spam action.”

I know there are some people who are “victims” of bad inbound links and blame those links for their poor rankings. So they disavow the bad links and their rankings never improve. One would think that the failure of the disavow tool to fix their ranking problems would cause them to see if something else is the problem but some people are so convinced that their sites are perfect that considering their site is poorly optimized is not an option for them.

But all of the cases I’ve looked at where people say they’re victims of negative SEO, 100% of them have problems with their SEO or content issues. Google’s algorithms aren’t affected by random links, that’s just not how link ranking algorithms work.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com

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Apr 7 2025
Shopify CEO’s Memo Marks A Pivotal Moment For AI In The Workplace via @sejournal, @martinibuster

A memo by Shopify’s CEO Tobi Lütke sets a company-wide expectation for the use of AI not just throughout the company but also encourages employees to think about how their end users can use AI. Everyone needs to read this because it marks a pivotal moment in how everyone should be using AI to hundredfold increase what they can accomplish and to visualize how AI can be employed for end users as well.

The internal memo details a company-wide reflexive AI usage strategy, which means using AI as a matter of course. It sets the stage for reshaping how merchants use Shopify and points toward a future where entrepreneurship on Shopify is AI-native by design. The memo signals how AI is swiftly becoming central to how all businesses will operate, especially yours.

Reflexive Use Of AI

The heart of the memo is the CEOs encouragement of discovering how AI can be applied to every aspect of how work gets done internally, citing his own usage of AI and how he feels he’s only scratching the surface of how it can be integrated into his own workflow. He asks all employees to “tinker” with AI and encourage company-wide adoption so that the usage of AI becomes reflexive.

His use of the word reflexive is important because it means doing something without consciously thinking about it. The express meaning then is that he really wants AI everywhere and the reason for that is because AI has the ability to boost productivity not just ten times but a hundredfold.

Tobias advocates for the transformational qualities of AI as a productivity multiplier, citing the reflexive use of it for unlocking exponential gains in what can be accomplished at Shopify.

He wrote:

“We are all lucky to work with some amazing colleagues, the kind who contribute 10X of what was previously thought possible. It’s my favorite thing about this company. And what’s even more amazing is that, for the first time, we see the tools become 10X themselves.

I’ve seen many of these people approach implausible tasks, ones we wouldn’t even have chosen to tackle before, with reflexive and brilliant usage of AI to get 100X the work done.”

Workplace Expectations and Requirements

What’s important about the Lütke memo is that it sets expectations about the use of AI in the workplace in a way that should serve as an inspiration for how all workplaces may consider following as well.

Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of all Shopify employees and it will be factored into the peer and performance review questionnaires. Employees will be mandated to demonstrate why AI cannot be used to accomplish goals before asking for more resources. The expectations for AI usage is not just about software engineers, it applies to all employees, including all the way to the top at the executive management level.

AI At Every Workflow Step

The memo sets the expectation that AI must be involved during the GSD (Get Sh*t Done) prototype phase and at a “fraction of the time it used to take.” Teams are also encouraged to envision their projects as if AI were also a part of the team.

He writes:

“What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team? This question can lead to really fun discussions and projects.”

And elsewhere:

“In my On Leadership memo years ago, I described Shopify as a red queen race based on the Alice in Wonderland story—you have to keep running just to stay still. In a company growing 20-40% year over year, you must improve by at least that every year just to re-qualify. This goes for me as well as everyone else.

This sounds daunting, but given the nature of the tools, this doesn’t even sound terribly ambitious to me anymore. It’s also exactly the kind of environment that our top performers tell us they want. Learning together, surrounded by people who also are on their own journey of personal growth and working on worthwhile, meaningful, and hard problems is precisely the environment Shopify was created to provide. This represents both an opportunity and a requirement, deeply connected to our core values of Be a Constant Learner and Thrive on Change. These aren’t just aspirational phrases—they’re fundamental expectations that come with being a part of this world-class team. This is what we founders wanted, and this is what we built.”

Learning, Collaboration, and Community

The other exciting part of Lütke’s memo for AI usage in the workplace is that he encourages employees to share their discoveries and breakthroughs with each other so that all employees can benefit from new and creative ways of getting things done with AI, to share all of their wins with each other.

“We’ll learn and adapt together as a team. We’ll be sharing Ws (and Ls!) with each other as we experiment with new AI capabilities, and we’ll dedicate time to AI integration in our monthly business reviews and product development cycles. Slack and Vault have lots of places where people share prompts that they developed, like #revenue-ai-use-cases and #ai-centaurs.”

Takeaways

Lütke’s memo shows how AI is radically changing the workplace at Shopify and how it can spread across every workforce, including your own.

Shopify is envisioning the next stage of ecommerce entrepreneurship, AI-everything, where AI is an ubiquitous presence for merchants. This is an example of the kind of leadership all entrepreneurs and small businesses should have, to start thinking of how they can integrate AI for themselves and their customers instead of lowering the window blinds to spy across the street to see what competitors are doing.

Read the entire memo:

Featured Image by Shutterstock/TarikVision

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Apr 7 2025
Google Chrome Adds New Tools For Better Mobile Testing via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

Chrome has added new DevTools features that help developers test website performance based on real-world data.

Available in Chrome 134, these tools include CPU throttling calibration and other improvements that help bridge the gap between development environments and actual experiences.

How This Helps

Developers build websites on powerful desktop computers. However, many users visit these sites on much slower mobile devices.

This creates a problem: performance issues may not show up during testing.

Chrome DevTools has offered CPU throttling for years, letting developers simulate slower devices. But choosing the right throttling level has been mostly guesswork.

This update is designed to eliminate the guesswork.

CPU Throttling Calibration

The main new feature in Chrome 134 is CPU throttling calibration. It creates testing presets specifically for your development machine.

After a quick test, DevTools creates two options:

  • “Low-tier mobile” – Mimics very basic devices
  • “Mid-tier mobile” – Matches average mobile device speed
Screenshot from: developer.chrome.com/blog/devtools-grounded-real-world, April 2025.

Brendan Kenny states in the Chrome Developers Blog:

“We generally recommend the ‘mid-tier’ preset for most testing. If many of your users have even slower devices, the ‘low-tier’ option can help catch issues affecting those users.”

Setting up calibration is easy:

  • Open the Performance panel’s Environment settings
  • Select “Calibrate…” from the CPU throttling dropdown
  • Let DevTools run a quick test
  • Start using your new calibrated presets
Screenshot from: developer.chrome.com/blog/devtools-grounded-real-world, April 2025.

What Throttling Can & Can’t Do

The new calibration makes testing more accurate, but it has limits.

Throttling works by pausing the browser tab to make tasks take longer. This method is useful for simulating JavaScript and layout calculations.

Tests show that calibrated throttling closely matches how these processes run on real mobile devices.

However, CPU throttling doesn’t accurately simulate:

  • Graphics-heavy operations
  • Slower storage speeds
  • Limited memory
  • Device heating issues

Chrome’s testing showed that visually complex pages could take twice as long on real mobile devices compared to simulated tests.

This means you should still test on real devices, especially for visually rich websites.

Real-World Data Integration

Besides CPU calibration, Chrome 134 adds several features that use real-world performance data:

  • Throttling suggestions based on your actual site visitors
  • Alerts when your test results don’t match real-user experiences
  • Performance insights that flag mismatches between tests and reality
  • Smarter organization of performance tips based on your users’ actual needs
  • Better tracking of what settings were used for each test

These features help ensure your testing matches what users experience rather than artificial lab conditions.

Why It Matters For SEO & Marketing

These new tools solve a disconnect between websites that work well in development but struggle on real devices.

Chrome 134 helps ensure your performance improvements benefit users by providing more realistic testing conditions.

As mobile continues to dominate web traffic, these tools provide a better foundation for improving user experience, conversion rates, and search rankings.

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Apr 7 2025
Google Maps Gets An Upgrade To Combat Fake Reviews via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

Google has updated its AI systems for Maps and Business Profiles, which now use Gemini to identify risky profile edits and fake reviews.

Gemini Finds Suspicious Profile Edits

Google is employing Gemini to spot fake changes to Business Profiles.

It can distinguish between a regular update, like a slight name change, and a sudden, suspicious shift, such as changing a business category from a “cafe” to a “plumber.”

In its announcement, Google said:

“We trained a new model with the help of Gemini that identifies potentially suspicious profile edits. A business that changes its name from ‘Zoe’s Coffee House’ to ‘Zoe’s Cafe’ isn’t suspicious—but a business that suddenly changes its category from ‘cafe’ to ‘plumber’ is.”

Google says this new system has blocked thousands of risky edits this year.

New Tools to Stop Fake Five-Star Reviews

Google will use Gemini to spot fake five-star reviews by tracking reviews over time. This allows the system to find new signs of abuse, even after the review is posted.

The company has launched alerts in the US, UK, and India. These alerts warn users when suspicious five-star reviews have been removed. Google plans to roll out the alerts worldwide next month.

See an example of the alerts below.

2024 in Numbers: Content Moderation

Google shared strong numbers from its work in 2024:

  • Over 240 million policy-violating reviews were blocked or removed before many people saw them.
  • More than 70 million risky edits to Maps listings were stopped.
  • Over 12 million fake Business Profiles were removed or blocked.
  • Posting was restricted on over 900,000 accounts that broke the rules repeatedly.

What This Means for SEO and Local Marketers

For SEO specialists and local marketing professionals, these updates underline the need for honest review strategies and careful Business Profile management.

As Google’s AI improves, tricks like fake reviews and unauthorized profile changes are easier to catch. Companies using shady tactics will face steeper penalties, while those focusing on genuine customer engagement will gain more trust from Google.

Best Practices for Local SEO

Given these advancements, local SEO professionals should:

  1.  Ensure client review practices follow Google’s rules.
  2. Ensure all Business Profiles are correctly claimed and managed.
  3. Monitor profile changes and review patterns.
  4. Focus on getting honest customer feedback.
  5. Use Google’s tools to report any suspicious activities by competitors.

Looking Ahead

Google plans to keep improving its systems. The company stated it will “keep working on the front lines and behind the scenes to keep content on Google Maps helpful and reliable.”

More details are available in its Content Trust and Safety Report.

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Apr 7 2025
Kinsta WordPress Updater Prevents Failed Plugin Updates via @sejournal, @martinibuster

WordPress hosting provider Kinsta announced an automated plugin updater that detects and recovers from bad updates by rolling back the plugin to its previous state and preventing downtime from affecting website performance. Failed plugin updates are prevented from going live and publishers are immediately notified.

Kinsta shared that a scan of users indicated that the average WordPress installation has 21 active WordPress plugins, suggesting that the average WordPress site is becoming increasingly complex.

That kind of plugin usage means that time spent updating and troubleshooting issues can take up a greater amount of time. Plugins don’t always function well with each other which can lead to updating issues. Kinsta’s new Automatic Updates solves that issue by completely automating plugin updates which will assure that all plugins are up to date.

Keeping WordPress Plugins Updated Is A Security Issue

Outdated plugins can quickly escalate into a nightmare scenario due to vulnerabilities which in turn can have a profound negative effect on search performance. An effective plan for updating plugin is essential for every WordPress-powered website.

According to Kinsta:

“Nothing confirms the need for automatic updates like finding plugins and themes that are not just out of date but also dangerously vulnerable to security breaches”

Advanced Configuration Options

The new plugin updater enables users to choose update days and time windows and can choose custom URLs for testing. False positives can be reduced by hiding dynamic elements. Sensitivity settings allow users to be able to set how strictly visual differences are flagged, further decreasing false positives.

All plugin updates are logged and can be reviewed by users, including before and after screenshots. Users can be emailed for both successful and unsuccessful updates.

The new service costs $3/month for each environment where the service is active, with zero limits to the amount of managed plugins and themes that are monitored.

Read more at Kinsta:

Kinsta Automatic Updates: Hands-free WordPress plugin and theme management

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com

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