This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
Facebook Changes How It Counts Organic Impressions for Pages
Facebook will finally start to count organic reach impressions only after a post actually appears on a person’s screen. Before, reach for a post was calculated based on how many times a post was loaded in the news feed, even if the user didn’t scroll down to see the post. This makes organic reach of Pages more consistent with how Facebook measures reach for ads. To give marketers time to get used to the new reporting, they will continue to provide the old metric in the Page Insights overview section. They are also redesigning the mobile version of their Page Insights analytics tool which will prioritize the most common measurements toward the top.
Source: Marketing Land
Google Announces New AdWords Policies Around Ticket Resellers
Google has recently begun to crack down on ticket resellers in the AdWords space, now requiring “all event ticket resellers to be certified and to radically increase their transparency.” In addition to this, other requirements state that ticket resellers may not imply that they are a primary marketplace and that they must disclose that the prices may be above face value. Google could potentially be cracking down on this as it may have recently become a bigger problem in paid search overall with some shady dealings. Commenter Bradley Shaw even noted that, “As a former ticket broker, the business is almost as dirty as SEO. Almost, but not quite.”
Source: Search Engine Roundtable, Bradley Shaw
Google Chrome will Mark All HTTP Sites as Not Secure
Google made an announcement that any web pages that are not HTTPS will be marked as not secure by Chrome starting in July of this year. This will only impact users on Chrome and sites will not be penalized in the Google search results. This will also roll out at the same time as Google’s Mobile Page Speed Update, which will be a ranking factor, and Chrome 68 which will display a prominent warning in the address bar indicating that a website is “Not secure.”
Source: SEO Roundtable
Google Testing Showing Other Shopping Search Engines in Carousel
A new test was spotted in the Shopping space of the UK search results for Google where links are displayed to the right of the product ads that take users to competitive shopping search engines. The particular test that was spotted showed a box with a “Visit” header containing links to Google, Shopping FM, and Kelkoo. The test appears to be rather limited as it will only show up on some browsers.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
New Format for Google Accelerated Mobile Pages
Google is releasing “AMP Stories” which are intended to be bite-sized, visually engaging content consisting primarily of photos and text. In mobile searches under “Top Stories,” there is a “Visual Stories” carousel that includes these AMP stories in your search. They are click-through stories like the ones Instagram and Snapchat feature. Google is encouraging publishers to create content exclusively for these stories because there could be canonical issues if they repurpose their existing content.
Source: Search Engine Land
Analysis
What You Need to Know About Google Chrome Ad Blocking
Ginny Marvin covers how Googles Chrome’s new ad blocking works and what advertisers can expect from this update. As of February 15, 2018 Google has begun to block “annoying” or intrusive ads by default within Chrome, even those served by Google. To determine what to block, Google is using the Coalition for Better Ads’ standards for determining whether an ad is considered obnoxious. This includes videos that play at full volume or flashing display ads. They will evaluate page samples from a publisher’s site and either give it a passing, warning, or failing grade based on how they meet the Better Ads Standards. If a publisher receives a failing grade, they can request a review from the Ad Experience Report after making changes on their non-compliant ads. But, it’s possible that the rollout of Chrome’s ad blocker will go unnoticed by users as Google stated that in an ongoing audit of 100,000 sites in the EU and US only about .9 percent would have their ads blocked.
Source: Ginny Marvin, Marketing Land
Checklist for Moving from One Site to Another
Contributor Aleyda Solis from Search Engine Land walks through what to monitor during a web migration including making sure the new pages are accessible and that the 301 redirects have been tested. She says to perform continuous crawls the days before to check that the redirects are consistent. Monitor that the new pages have been indexed and the old ones have been left out. Compare the keywords rankings in SEMRush from the old site, and then use Google Analytics to make sure the new page rankings are going up and that there are no gaps between mobile and desktop performance.
Source: Search Engine Land
