Google has added a new user agent to its help documentation named Google-CWS. This is the Chrome Web Store user agent that is a user-triggered fetchers.

More details. Google posted about the new user agent over here, it reads; “The Chrome Web Store fetcher requests URLs that developers provide in the metadata of their Chrome extensions and themes.”

What are user-triggered fetchers. A user-triggered fetchers are initiated by users to perform a fetching function within a Google product.

The example provided by Google was “Google Site Verifier acts on a user’s request, or a site hosted on Google Cloud (GCP) has a feature that allows the site’s users to retrieve an external RSS feed. Because the fetch was requested by a user, these fetchers generally ignore robots.txt rules. The general technical properties of Google’s crawlers also apply to the user-triggered fetchers.”

Why we care. If you see this user agent in your crawl logs, you now know where it is from. The Chrome Web Store fetcher requests URLs that developers provide in the metadata of their Chrome extensions and themes.

John Mueller from Google posted an SEO tip and reminder for those who use cloud services, such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or others, to host images, videos or other content. John explained that you should probably verify those within Google Search Console. This will give you the ability to track the performance of those files in Google Search, including any debugging information when necessary.

Of course, in order to do this, you need to be able to control the DNS and most give you the option to do that through DNS CNAME. So you can set up your DNS to control those files in that cloud environment. For examples, it can be images.domain.com or videos.domain.com and so on.

The advice. Here is John’s post on this on Bluesky:

If you’re using a cloud provider to host images / videos / other content, you can and should verify the host in Search Console, so that you’re aware of potential issues that affect Google’s crawling & indexing, & Safe Browsing. Use a DNS CNAME to the bucket, then verify with DNS.

Using your own hostname (something like content.your-site.com) means you can verify it in Google Search Console to get crawl errors and malware alerts. You can verify using DNS verification… or just verifying your main domain.

To do this, set up a CNAME entry for your domain name and point at your cloud provider’s bucket, eg “content.your-site.com” uses a CNAME for “your-bucket.clodstorage.com” (or “buckets.clodstorage.com”). Also, you will have to update all links in your site (ugh, I know).

You need to update all the links within your site so that users only find your content with your new hostname. For bigger sites, this is a hassle, I know. Search & replace, then double-check by crawling the main sections of your site (all templates, all important URLs).

Caveat: if you need to do this for images, and you care about Image search traffic, know that this will cause fluctuations in Google Images (images are often recrawled slower than web pages and need to be “re-processed” with the new URLs). It’ll settle down though.

Bonus: if you use something like “content.your-site.com”, you can just verify the main domain with DNS in Search Console, and get all data for your website + the content hosted there in a single property in Search Console.

AND THAT’S NOT ALL. IF YOU ORDER NOW, YOU ALSO RECEIVE the ability to migrate to another cloud storage provider without breaking a sweat. Map the CNAME to the new bucket (if the file URLs remain the same), use redirects (it’s your hostname). It’s not really your site unless it’s on your domain name.”

Why we care. It is super common these days for websites to use numerous cloud hosting services and products. So it is totally possible that you are missing out on data, analytics and useful debugging details within Google Search Console for those services.

Verifying them on Search Console should not be a big deal for your site’s administrator and should it should unlock a lot of useful information for you and your SEO team.

💾

Advertisers are currently unable to access the Microsoft Advertising console right now. Microsoft confirmed there is an issue and that its engineering team is working to resolve it. This is impacting the web user interface to manage your Microsoft Advertising campaigns.

What Microsoft said. Navah Hopkins, the Microsoft Ads Liaison, posted:

“Confirming Microsoft Advertising UI is down. Our engineering team is investigating this issue with priority and we apologize for the inconvenience this may be causing. We will share more as we receive more updates.”

How to check the status. You can go to status.ads.microsoft.com to check the status of Microsoft Advertising. It currently shows that the Web UI is down:

Why we care. If you are currently trying to make changes to your ad campaigns, and you are trying to use the web interface, maybe try the mobile interface, Microsoft Ads Editor or a third-party tool that leverages the API.

Otherwise, you will have to wait for the web interface to start working again.

It seems ad serving is unaffected by this outage.

Update: At about 8pm ET, Microsoft said the issue was resolved:

Update: you should be able to access the UI now. We can confirm that Search ads were not impacted. There may be some delay in reporting. Thank you for your patience as we worked to solve this issue!