Welcome to what’s become the weekend edition of the daily roundup as I didn’t get a chance to get to it yesterday. For some reason clients feel like I should get their work done as my first priority but thankfully weekends are great for catching up and after a morning of getting a bit more work done I’m finally ready to get the udpate done and hopefully give you some interesting reading for the remained of your weekend. So … here are the top SEO and search stories
Some New Features Announced To Google Remarketing
We covered the announcement as it broke Thursday night but worth mentioning in our roundup of the past couple days. Google will be adding some interesting new functionality to remarketing enabling the remarketing to users across devices. That means if they start on one device they can be remarketed to on another. For example, if someone starts a query for a hotel on their phone that hotel will be able to remarket to them on their PC and can adjust ads and bids based on this. I have a hunch it’s going to be quite useful in some sectors.
How Does Your Continent Stack Up?
Reputation management used to just be a problem for companies and people. Thanks to a change over at Google the need to hire good PR now extends to continents as the open up the ability to rate and review them on Google Maps. You can also review and read reviews of oceans which, let me tell you, is a whale of a good time. 😉 Big thanks to Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal for covering the fun.
Mobile First Index By End Of The Year … Maybe
Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land covered the announcement at the Next10x Conference by Gary Illyes that the folks at Google are hoping to roll out the mobile-first index by the year’s end but having learned from him many incorrect predictions on Penguin 4 update he’s saying it might be 2018. To me that would make sense as the optimistic estimates would likely put it into the fourth quarter and that’s probably not the best time for a major update.
What Did The Change To Exact Match Really Do?
Regular readers will remember the announcement on March 17 that Google was changing how it treated exact match. I recommend reading up on it for more details in you’re involved with PPC at all. In light of the changes Aaron Levy pulled the data and wrote an excellent piece for Search Engine Land on how it impacted the bottom line. If you want to get a feel for what the change actually meant to your bottom line it’s an highly recommended reading. Here’s a teaser to entise you to read more …
Google 99.5% Effective In Killing Fake Map Listings
Google has put out some new research they’ve done on fake map listings. It turns out – they’re pretty good at weeding them out. In fact their research shows that only 0.5% of users clicking a map result will land on a fake listing. They credit machine learning to a good part of their success.
Siri Is Google’s Nearest Mobile Competitor
Greg Sterling covered the results of a survey from Fivesight Research for Search Engine Land. The survey focused on determining who has the alrgest share of mobile search and right after Google comes Siri with Yahoo and Bing coming in a distant 3rd and 4th. If you’re worries about what this means for your SEO efforts with all tha time you’ve been putting into Google don’t worry – they still have 84% of the mobile search marketshare.
Using Your Competitor’s Top Pages Data Against Them
Rand Fishkin did an interesting Whiteboard Friday outlining techniques to gather top page data on your competitors and what you can do with it. He covered a lot of different tools (hat tip Rand) and gave some helpful advice for those who’ve never done it and a good reminder of what’s there for folks like myself who’ve been using the tools for years and might forgot to use one of it’s functions. You can head over the to Moz blog to watch it or:
YouTube Blocking Ads On Channels With Less Than 10k Views
Techcrunch covered the story from Google that in their ongoing quest to help big brands avoid having their ads displayed on questionable content Google is blocking ads on channels with less than 10,000 views. While this obviously won’t eradicate the problem channels with over 10,000 views does have a certain Darwinian angle to it – the worst of the videos and channels will likely never see the light of day. Again, not perfect but certainly shows how serious they are.
Google has expanded it’s fact checked articles globally in hopes that the callouts will help searchers better make their own decisions. The announcement was covered by Danny Sullivan over on Search Engine Land and is (in my opinion) a big step forward. Of course the questions as to which organizations are trusted to verify facts will come into questions but if nothing else it will make us all at least think about what we’re looking up.
Women Earn Less Than Men At Google
The Wall Street Journal covered the unfortunate revelation by the Labor Department that Google has been found to systematically be paying their female employees less than their male counterparts. I’m not as surprised as I should be by this news but with everyone else, I’m obviously hoping that shedding light on the issue forces the solving of it.
And those are the top SEO and search stories. We’ll be back Monday with another update and in the meantime – have a great weekend !