Howdy. We hope everyone is having a great week. We want to extend especially warm greetings to our readers at one of the companies facing a lawsuit for not advertising on X. Tough break. Lego, Unilever, Amazon, and Pinterest are in the same boat– a boat that Ralph Lauren and Verizon recently exited when they agreed to resume their X advertisements. In any case, best of luck to you.
The Q&A sections of Google Business Profiles are experiencing changes. Until the recent past, questions appeared under the name of the person who asked them. We’re now seeing anonymous questions that show up under “People are asking” or “Others are asking” banners.
Big city restaurants were the first businesses to get blessed with these new questions. That’s where we first saw them, anyway. The phenomenon then crept into places like concert venues, casinos, race tracks, and even a jai alai enterprise– establishments the public visits for food or entertainment.
These questions are more widespread now. Most home services businesses have them. Out of all the primary GBP categories we’ve inspected (which was many of them, but not all), the only one we’ve seen without “Others are asking” questions are assisted living facilities.
Google hasn’t announced anything about this development. The new questions look like AI-driven samplings of questions that could apply to all businesses in a given vertical. We do not know if answering the anonymous questions will boost rankings, but we can confidently say that it will not hurt anything to do so. In any case, if you or your clients manage businesses without these new, anonymous questions, they’re probably coming soon. Keep your eyes peeled.
Here are this week’s closing links. In a previous life, a blue Twitter checkmark was the ultimate internet status symbol (it spawned a cottage corruption industry, actually– people would pay Twitter employees $15,000 for them). This Buffer article explains Bluesky’s new verification system and what you need to do to get verified yourself. Next, from HubSpot, is How to run a marketing campaign on a tight budget. Third, from Hootsuite is How to use Instagram auto-reply to get leads, sales, and more. Finally, a Google research paper that explains how Google crawls the content of a business website to determine rankings when searchers seek out a specific service they need. Search Engine Journal summarized the research paper on Monday.
That’s all for this week. Keep doing great things.