Google Eliminates Checkout Badge From SERPs

Hi Everyone,
Those brightly-colored Google Checkout badges will disappear from e-tailers’ AdWords ads, according to a post in Checkout Help first spotted by eCommerceCircle. They’ll continue to be displayed in product search.

Checkout icons in AdWords were originally introduced in 2006 and a new badge design was rolled out in 2007.

As for the elimination of the badges… “We’re making this change to improve the user experience on Google search results pages,” an e-mail sent by Google reportedly said, according to eCommerceCircle.

The move comes as Google steps up efforts to increase adoption of +1, another brightly-colored badge appearing in search results. Earlier today, the company announced that publishers can now put +1 badges on their sites to gather support from their users. When people click the +1 button on sites, that URL displays with the badge whenever it appears in SERPs.

Google’s decision also comes as it focuses its payments energy on Google Wallet, announced last week. Though Google Checkout was announced to great fanfare in 2006, it hasn’t been as successful as originally expected. A lawsuit filed against Google last week by competitor PayPal refers to Checkout as “mostly a tool for acquiring customer information for the benefit of Google’s other products and services.”