It’s been yet another big week in search and SEO with some massive rollouts, announcements and legal issues. So let’s jump right in with the top stories from the week …
Bing Ads Adds Competitive Metrics
Bing Ads has jus added some handy new features to their interface. Advertisers can now access data information related to how their site is performing and how much impression share is being lost due to different variables (budget, rank, etc.).
YouTube Crosses 1.5 Billion Logged-In Visitors Per Month
YouTube crossed a fairly significant milestone – 1.5 billion logged in users per month according to stats at VidCon. What’s more – those 1.5 billion are using the service for over an hour per day. The focus, it seems from comments from YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, is to take more marketshare from TV.
Google No Longer Spying On Your Emails
The fine folks at Google have announced on their blog that they’ll no longer be spying on our emails with their bots. They were doing so to provide more targeted ads. Their G Suite business is gaining traction and was already excluded from this crawling.
Google Uptime Rolls Out To All
Google Uptime, an app that enables people to watch YouTube together is now available for everyone via the iOS App Store. Basically, it allows users to watch videos in realtime with others and react to them.
Google rolled out two new features. The first highlights features of a location in local search listings and the second is the displaying of room costs for hotels in the map results. Both are excellent for users and rely on entity data. For those who don’t know entities, they’re important and you can read about how search engines use them here.
Google Algorithm Update
There was some type of significant Google Update that appears to have started on June 25th. It hasn’t been confirmed by Google yet and when/if it is it’ll probably just get the name Fred but all the tools seem to have picked it up. It wasn’t a huge update but it was significant. On our end we saw dramatic fluctuations in some sites and virtually nothing in others.
Facebook Hits 2 Billion Monthly Users
YouTube crossed 1.5 billion logged in users as we discussed above. Well not to be outdone Facebook also crossed a major threshold of 2 billion each month. That’s a lot of advertising power.
Google Fined 2.7 Billion Euro
Matt Souther over on Search Engine Journal covered the fine involved with the EU concluding that Google is abusing their search dominance to promote unfairly their other services. In this case they’re specifically referring to shopping and the penalty was 2.7 billion euro or just over $3 billion US.
Google News Gets A Cleaner Look
Google News got a facelift. As Greg Sterling over at Search Engine Land reported the new design simplifies the layout and navigation and makes gathering different views on a situation easier. It’s also easier to scan and they’ve directional tags such as FactCheck and Opinion.
Another Ransomware Attack
Another ransomware attack has been unleashed on the world roughly equivalent to WannaCry. Thankfully the ransomware required direct network connections and thus was limited in it’s spread outside the Ukraine. This all reinforces the need for high security in critical areas of our infrastructures.
Is this new? #ppcchat pic.twitter.com/HsQFfIKYQe
— Conrad O’Connell (@conradoconnell) June 28, 2017
Ginny Marvin over at Search Engine Land covered the discovery of a new checkbox to create different ads by reversing the headline order in AdWords. Google is obviously trying to make it easier to test simply ad variants.
Google Home 6x Better Than Alexa
A new study has found that Google Home is six times better at answering people’s questions. This matches the core conclusions found in other studies but in the end, consumers don’t seem to care as they tend to use them for music and basic functionality like news and weather.
Canadian Court Orders Google To Remove A Site Worldwide
A Canadian court has ruled that Google needs to remove a site from the search results worldwide and not just in Canada claiming that because the Internet is global so too much the blocking to be effective. Of course, Google will fight it and even if they lose they likely won’t comply as doing so would set a terrible precedent for countries censoring material based on their own laws and then requiring that to impact global results.
Google Updates Their Speed Tool
Google announced in their blog the updating of their Test My Site tool. The update ads more information on the real-world impact your site speed is having on your visitor count and provides advice on how to fix it with estimates on what that will mean to your visitors. A good enhancement to an already helpful too.
Get Access To Google’s Experimental Projects
Google is letting you sign up for early access to their experimental (20%) projects. Matt Southern at Search Engine Journal covered the announcement and what it means is that as projects are ready for early testing you can sign up to be one of those testers. For those in marketing it’s obviously recommended.
New Custom Rules For AdWords Editor
AdWords Editor has been updated with some new automated rules and custom to allow users to quickly find and fix issues with their campaigns. I’ll admit I noticed it before getting the memo and was both happy and then a bit curious if it was a feature I’d simply not noticed. Thankfully I hadn’t been blind (and when you see it you’ll know I’d have had to be) and they’re just added something handy.
Danny Sullivan Retires
After 21 years covering the SEO industry the godfather of SEO Mr. Danny Sullivan is retiring to pursue other interests. I have a ton of respect for the man who not only kept as all informed about what was going on back when noone else did to the organizer of the first conference I ever spoke at (or attended) over a decade ago. He will be missed. Here’s his final interview:
Bing Introduces Personalized Image & Video Feeds
Matt Southern covered the announcement by Bing that they’re now allowing users to personalize their image and video feeds based on their personal interests. A handy function to be sure.