Today In SEO & Search News: February 8, 2017

Today In SEO & Search News: February 8, 2017

It’s been an exciting day in the search and SEO realm and rather than babble a build-up let’s just jump into what’s going on.

Only Two Months To Prep For The Holidays

SEO for the holidays

Alright, that might be a bit of an overstatement but in an article published earlier today by yours truly over on Search Engine Land I discuss all that’s involved in prepping for the holidays, some handy tactics for seasonal keyword research and some timing data that actually does reinforce that everything you do int he next two months will be more valuable for the holidays than anything you do after. It actually is time to get working on it.

Ask An SEO
Jenny Halasz over at Search Engine Journal does a column #AskAnSEO (fill out the form in the article and you can ask her yours).  In today’s piece she answers questions about indexing issues on a news site, non-intrusive banners and their impact on rankings, ad content ratios, interstitials and supplemental content.  An article with tons of great advice and worth the read if any of the above apply to you or you work for an agency and they might apply to one of your clients now or in the future.

Bing Ads Exclusion
Bing today announced the addition of exclusions to their remarketing campaigns.  With remarketing (for those who don’t know) you have an options to target your ads to people who have been to your site previously. Now you can reverse that and target people through their ad system that haven’t been to your site or combine targeting to focus in on people who have been to your cart but haven’t been to your thank you page.  A great step forward for Bing Advertisers.

YouTube Adds Mobile Livestreaming
If you have 10k+ subscribers you will now have access to mobile live streaming.  They assure us that soon it will be rolled out to everyone.  Is this a reaction to Facebook Live and it’s popularity? Probably. And will it soon dominate Facebook Live? Probably. And now you know why Google is doing it.

Pinterest Let’s You Search With Your Camera
Penterest search via camera
A handy feature is getting more handy over at Pinterest. In an announcement on their blog yesterday they’re adding the ability to simply point your phone at an object of interest to you and it will find objects that are similar. What it’s doing it pretty clear from the gif they provided above but the power I think is in the shopping applications. I already have some interesting SEO strategies in my head for this one I’ll be testing soon.

Google Data Studio Connects To Search Console
Making the “what took you so long” list Google Data Studio now uses Search Console as a data source making it a far more powerful tool to view and deal with your various metrics and information.  I haven’t played with it yet but I sure will.

Google About To Purge Millions Of Apps
Google has sent out the emails warning developers that whose who don’t adhere to current User Data policies will see their apps removed or at least reduced to “very limited visibility” ZDNet reported. This includes some basics like having a privacy policy. A benefit will be a lot of old, unupdated and ignored apps are about to go away.

Another Google Update
And saving the best for last … it looks like there’s another Google Update. Reported by Barry Schwartz over on Search Engine Roundtable the update doesn’t seem to be related to to links or spam but rather is simply a signal update. We’re seeing movement here at Beanstalk but before anyone celebrates or panics – some of the movement doesn’t make sense so I have a hunch we’ll see more to come.

And that’s it for the day. If you think we’ve missed anything please feel free to add it to the comments below.