Welcome back from the weekend and I hope you had a good one as I have a hunch it’s going to be a big week in search and SEO and it was certainly off to a big start. So let’s jump right in with what’s been going on over the past 72 hours.
Google & Bing Battle With Pirates
In what’s being referred to as a landmark agreement Google and Bing have agreed to work to reduce the visibility of pirated material in their search results. According to Google there likely won’t be any significant changes to their algorithms for this specific agreement. It seems they think they’re doing a pretty darn good job as it is. So as far as landmark agreements go it’s pretty lackluster and seems mainly to be a “we’ll keep doing what we’re doing” type thing. I’m not sure it’s a victory for anyone but hey … they all seem to feel good about it so …
YouTube Killing The Unskippable 30-second Ad
In an announcement that will bring relief to many – YouTube has said they will be doing away with the unskippable 30-second video ads. While this is great for us as we watch the videos (and who doesn’t) we also need to ask … who’s paying for it? Danny Goodwin over at Search Engine Journal in his covered brought up the fact that 76 percent of us are trained to click the skip button as soon as we can. That basically means we’re not paying attention to the ad itself so where’s the profit? Fortunately for advertisers they still have the unskippable 6 second ad format to play with.
Local Pack Showing Time From You
Barry Schwartz over on Search Engine Roundtable reported on an interesting find by Sergey Alakov. When you run a query Google is now taking into account where you were previously. Here’s the example Sergey used:
You can see that it includes results based on where Sergey was 12 minutes earlier. It also includes a new link directly to the map. Personally I think the refresh option is the most handy feature as when i’m looking us places to go I tend to care about where they are relative to my current location not to where I once was.
And to close out the day …
Elon Musk and the SpaceX team took Launch Complex 39A where it had never been before … hosting a commercial flight into space. The SpaceX rocket took off with cargo for the space station and returned to Earth safely just minutes later. It was a successful launch and brings forth a new era in space travel. NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39A is now home to SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Admittedly I’m excited for the future though I wish NASA had the budget the deserve to keep it themselves. After all … they’re one of the very few governmental agencies that actually turns a profit. But today I’ll save those annoyances and simply be happy that folks like Elon are picking up the slack. 🙂
And that’s it for this day in search and SEO. I’ll be skipping doing tomorrow’s but will be back Wednesday with a new update on all you need to know that’s going on in the industry.