This Week In Search: June 16, 2017

Here’s what happened on the week ending on June 16, 2017 in search and SEO.  Looking for a different date? You’ll find it here.

Link Building: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Winning article of the week for both my favorite featured image AND good content is the link building analysis by Jeremy Knauff over on Search Engine Journal. Jeremy covers what kinds of link still hold value and offers some solid advice on how to get them. Definitely recommended reading.

Bing Ads Desktop Bid Adjustment
Bing has just added the ability to completely opt out of desktop in their device targeting bid adjustments. This allows their advertisers to create campaigns specifically for mobile for the first time and is a necessary step. This is a rollout over a few weeks but if you don’t ahve it yet .. you will soon.

Google News On Drugs

Spammers had their way with Google News. As Barry Schwartz reported for Search Engine Land, spammers used hacked pages on news sites to rank pages in the Google News feed with pharmaceuticals. The problem does seem to be solved now but definitely something Google needs to keep their eyes on.  Pharmaceuticals are easy enough to detect but what if the hackers just wanted to … so … skew an election and put out false information?

2017 Periodic Table On SEO Factors
Search Engine Land has published their latest periodic table of search engine ranking factors.  Some interesting changes in what factors and mattering most presently but nothing too surprising.  Always recommended reading.

How To Know If You’ve Screwed Your AdWords account
Daniel Gilbert over on Search Engine Land published a very informative piece that’s a must-read for anyone involved in AdWords. In the piece Daniel provides a script that scans your account for common errors. It’s really quite a smart and useful bit of code and highly recommended.

Featured Snippets Are Stealing Your Traffic

Over on the ahrefs blog they covered their most recent study that found (to no surprise) that featured snippets are stealing your traffic. Of course the fact is, they’re taking traffic as a whole so it’s still better to be the featured snippet than not but rest assured … traffic is being lost. The question remains however – does that matter? Did you lose a conversion?

Google Won’t Build Featured Snippet Analytics Into Search Console
And in an entirely related story, Google has said they won’t build featured snippet analytics into the Search Console. I can’t help but think these two things might be tied together – after all … would you want to clearly display the impact that featured snippets had on CTR?

Mobile First Index Coming In 2018
At SMX Advanced Google’s Gary Illyes announced that Google’s mobile-first index likely isn’t coming until 2018 and has promised that they will ‘communicate a lot’ prior to it’s rollout. It’s going to be interesting so see how Google handles some of the issues Gary talked about in his sessions. If you don’t have a responsive site this is recommended reading.

Google Launched A Website Builder
As part of their Google My Business offering Google has launched a micro-site website builder.  I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet but let me say … I don’t expect WordPress to suffer based on my very quick glimpse of it and a bit of reading on what it is. Of course in their defense they’re not targeting any of the major CMS … they’re just trying to get sites in the hands of people who don’t have them, likely mainly to be listed on their business pages. Hopefully it does it’s job.

Bing Introduces Custom Audiences and In-Market Targeting
Matt Southern over on Search Engine Journal covered the announcement that Bing Ads has added two new features to help advertisers reach their target marketing.  In-Marketing Audiences targets people in an industry that have sent signals via search patterns and behavior that they have intent to purchase within a sector. Custom Audiences are telemarketing lists based on your own users’ behavior. Bing will look at that audience and create similar ones. Both interesting features and worth checking out.

How Pinterest Teaches It’s Computers To See

Over on MarTech Today Tim Pearson wrote a great piece on a very interesting and challenging subject – how to teach computers to see images and recognize what’s in them.  It’s a very interesting read that covers how Pinterest has accomplished what they have and what it means.  In my opinion this is a very important area to understand.

Amazon Acquires Whole Foods
And of course this had to be covered. For those living under a rock, Amazon has acquired Whole Foods for $13.7 billion dollars. This is a major move against companies like Walmart and in my opinion is a critical turning-point for Amazon. If this works as they hope the acquisition will allow users to order their groceries (including fresh produce) and have them delivered within hours making a trip to Walmart all but irrelevant. If it doesn’t work it is a major monetary error and sets up Walmart and other competitors to take advantage. This is definitely a story to watch.