After it looked like Apple might no-show, the company has committed to sending a representative to a Senate antitrust hearing on app store competition later this month.

Last week, Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Mike Lee (R-UT) put public pressure on the company to attend the hearing, which will be held by the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights.

App stores are one corner of tech that looks the most like a duopoly, a perception that Apple’s high-profile battle with Fortnite-maker Epic is only elevating. Meanwhile, with a number of state-level tech regulation efforts brewing, Arizona is looking to relieve developers from Apple and Google’s hefty cut of app store profits.

In a letter last week, Klobuchar and Lee, the subcommittee’s ranking member, accused Apple of “abruptly” deciding that it wouldn’t send a witness to the hearing, which is set for April 21.

“Apple’s sudden change in course to refuse to provide a witness to testify before the subcommittee on app store competition issues in April, when the company is clearly willing to discuss them in other public forums, is unacceptable,” the lawmakers wrote.

By Monday, that pressure had apparently done its work, with Apple agreeing to attend the hearing.

Join Google on May 27 at 8 a.m. PT for Google Marketing Livestream 2021 — a virtual keynote where they will announce new products and share the latest trends and insights. You’ll also hear from industry leaders who have transformed their businesses to adapt to the new realities

Register now to get a front row seat.

You can use this to get some keyword ideas to add to your content, the keyword density in the URLs ranking on that term. I don’t think it will replace tools like Frase, Neural Text, etc but who would not like a free tool for some quick tips on improving content?

The sheet uses the creator’s serpapi.com details so you don’t have to do any configuration other than entering the focus keyword, your URL, SERP language and country.

Businesses are complaining that people are posting reviews for them but they aren’t publishing on Google SERP. Check out the post and add more examples if you know of any and they will help Google prioritize the issue.

Making changes to your GMB listing just got easier. Now you can update business info, hours and even upload photos right from Google Search.

Owners will have the option to click on the edit profile button ( which only they can see) and get presented with a modal where they can edit this information, I believe prior to this that would just redirect you to the GMB dashboard.

During the Search Central hangout, a site owner submitted a question asking Mueller about blocking a country where they’re receiving an abundance of bot traffic. Google’s John Mueller advises site owners to be careful not to block Googlebot if they choose to block traffic from an entire country.

Aleyda talks about some common E-commerce SEO issues and how to fix them. She looks at liises like

• Poorly Linked Sub-Categories, Faceted Pages and Products with Search Demand
• To Block or Noindex Meant to be Crawled and Index sub-categories and faceted Pages with Search Demand
• To Index Internal Search Results that cannibalize the site categories/sub-categories/facet Pages
• Category and sub-categories pages with very little, non-unique, differentiated content
• Product pages with very little, non-unique content that don’t get into the index and/or cannibalize each other
• Highly Dynamic Product Pages returning errors or inconsistent status based on its inventory stage

Google is ending support for the Google Shopping apps on Android and iOS. The clients will continue to work through June. It comes as Google has been expanding shopping functionality in Search, Image Search, and YouTube. All the functionality will be available via the Shopping tab on Gogole.com on the web.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider has just released version 15.0 with some cool features. The compare feature is only available in database storage mode.

Some of the new features

1) Crawl Comparison
2) Site Structure Comparison
3) Change Detection
4) URL Mapping For Staging / Different URL Structure Comparison
and more

If you are seeing an uptick in soft 404s and a drop in rankings on desktops, then you might not be alone.

Due to a recent change on Google’s side (likey from last week) that is related to how it detects soft 404 pages has reportedly been recently updated and is causing innocent sites that are not supposed to be affected to nonetheless lose search traffic from users on a desktop. Google is aware of the issue.

Microsoft is buying AI speech tech firm Nuance for $19.7 billion, bolstering the Redmond, Washington-based tech giant’s prowess in voice recognition and giving it further leverage in the health care market, where Nuance sells many products.

Nuance is best known for its Dragon software, which uses deep learning to transcribe speech and improves its accuracy over time by adapting to a user’s voice. Nuance has licensed this tech for many services and applications, including, most famously, Apple’s digital assistant Siri. (Though to what degree Siri currently relies on Dragon to answer users’ queries is unclear.) Dragon is an industry leader in terms of transcription accuracy.

The $19.7 billion acquisition of Nuance is Microsoft’s second-largest behind its purchase of LinkedIn in 2016 for $26 billion.

Besides being its own app, Google Lens is also available in Image Search, Photos, and integrated across Android. Google is now bringing Lens to the desktop web inside Google Photos for convenient text copying through optical character recognition (OCR).

A site that updates every day with the most useful SEO related tweets & threads.

It appears that Google might get confused about thin affiliate pages vs e-comm pages in some cases. Some users are noticing a drop in ranking with commerce pages with the Product Review Algo Update. I haven’t seen any significant drops in e-comm pages yet, if you folks have seen them please do send me some info about them, would love to take a look.

Yep, I've seen similar cases. Just shared screenshots of commerce websites with increased visibility since the recent update.

– https://t.co/baVkpap2zP
– https://t.co/6ROffSnLlK
– https://t.co/pT6wFLNpwM

It's weird, because all examples are websites with non-English content.

— Alexander Außermayr (@Aussermayr) April 12, 2021

A federal appeals court struck a significant blow against disability rights this week when it ruled that a Florida grocery store’s inaccessible website did not violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ruling contradicts a 2019 decision by a different appeals court holding that Domino’s did violate the ADA when it failed to make its app accessible to blind people. The disagreement between courts creates uncertainty about the rules that will govern online accessibility in the future.

LinkedIn is introducing “stay-at-home mom,” “stay-at-home dad,” and “stay-at-home parent” job titles to allow full-time parents and caretakers to more accurately display their roles. Additionally, in the coming weeks, if you use one of these new stay-at-home job descriptions and set the employment type field to “self-employed,” you will no longer need to specify a company or employer.

In the future, they also plan to add a new field specifically for employment gap types to the Profile like “parental leave,” “family care” or “sabbatical,” so that people can address any gaps in their career journey.

PSI scores change quite a bit from run to run. Now you can use this handy tool to run multiple test samples on Page Speed Insights(PSI), and calculates average field and lab scores.

You can run up to 3 tests in the free version and choose desktop or mobile view.

Learn how multi-location retailers can use Google Merchant Center to uncover a treasure trove of data to power local SEO campaigns.