Google testing black hyperlinks and green ad tags

Over the last week or so Google appear to be rolling out a test on the SERP on a small number of users. At Displaying Ads our team have seen black hyperlinks (instead of blue) and green ad tags (in place of orange).

Personally, I only saw this happen on Safari iOS while signed in – Chrome iOS did not show the black links even when signed in.

Google Links 1       Google Links 2

This showed up on paid and organic listings and has made it very difficult to decipher the difference between ad copy, structured snippet and callout extensions.

Other users are experiencing a much brighter blue hyperlink and the orange tag is also being tested in a green similar to that of the display URL (see below)

At the time of writing this looks to be only a test on a small pool of subjects. However, it will be interesting to see if the test is rolled out further, and if so, which of the elements will be kept.  

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