Here’s what’s happened in the past 24 hours in the world of SEO and Internet Marketing:
Google Acquires Fabric
Matt Southern over on Search Engine Journal reports about the acquisition of Fabric, a popular mobile development platform, by Google. This come on top of their announcement of SMB website building tools (still in beta) earlier this month.
Google Accused Of Selling School Kids’ Web History Data
The Attorney General of Mississippi is suing Google with allegations that the company is harvesting the web histories of school children using it’s cloud for education. The AG Jim Hood alleges that the data is then sold to third parties for use in targeted advertising. This would be a violation of their 2015 agreement.
Google’s Testing New Local Ads
We covered yesterday the shopping ads in the local pack. What we didn’t look at was how this differs from current models and what’s in “store” (pun intended). Fortunately Ginny Marvin has use covered over on Search Engine Land, building on Barry’s story.
Bing Allows For The Scheduling Of Ad Extensions
Bing has announced that they are now supporting the scheduling of ad extensions. This will give advertisers the ability to use the extensions for ads with time-sensitive offers and other similar needs and will be available for the following extensions:
- App Extension
- Sitelink Extension
- Callout Extension
- Call Extension
- Review Extension
- Location Extension
- Structured Snippet Extension
Matt Cutts Retires From Google
Matt Cutts has announced on his blog that the leave of absence he has taken from Google has become permanent and he will be remaining with the US Digital Service. For our readers who don’t know Matt Cutts (has it been that long?) he was the Google rep to SEO, the head of the search quality team. He was critically important to their growth and if you’re interested there’s a 3-part retrospective of his work with them on Search Engine Watch. Not a surprise but still sad to see him go.
Can’t Get A Pixel
The Verge reports that Google Pixel’s are extremely difficult to find and consumers are frustrated despite it being called a home run on launch. Now this might not seem like a huge issue as there are other Android products to use but …
Google Loses Android Friends
On The Register Andrew Orlowski discussed the issue Google faces with the move to hold back some Android features for only their own Pixel phone essentially meaning that other manufacturers are working at a disadvantage promoting Google’s own OS.
My personal opinion – this isn’t the last we’ll hear of this. Google will face anti-trust issues at best and lose major manufacturers like Samsung who they’re pitting themselves directly against. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.
Google Home Commands
Not really news per-se but c|net’s Taylor Martin and David Priest have compiled and published a list of all the Google Home commands that presently work with the device. I found a few I didn’t know about in the list and it’ll be interesting to test them out. Hopefully you’ll find some as well.