This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
Google’s Newest Update Puts the Smackdown on Intrusive Mobile Interstitials
Google officially rolled out its new search penalty for pages with interstitials that interferes with content accessibility. Popup and standalone interstitials that cover the majority of main content and require user interaction to close are the main targets of Google’s newest algorithm update. The update will also take into account a needed interstitial such as age verification and cookie usage notices. Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Automated Call Extensions for Mobile Ads to be Launched by Google
Google announced a new feature for mobile devices to be launched on February 6th known as automated call extensions. If an advertiser is sending mobile traffic to a “landing page that prominently features a phone number,” call extensions will automatically be added to the paid ad. Google did note that if there is a dynamic phone number on a website that they will not be added as an automatic call extension. Source: Search Engine Land
Bing Tests Local Listing Redesign
Bing has majorly overhauled its local listings in search results. Taking a page from Google, Bing has added popular times and days of the week, Foursquare Tips and OpenTable reservations to a second panel. The two panel local pack can be affected by shopping ads which auto-collapse the panel and doesn’t entice people to expand it which may create missed opportunities. Source: TheSEMPost
Ads Implemented into Instagram’s Stories Feature
To continue to boost its advertising revenue, Instagram will be implementing ads into its growing Instagram Stories feature. This feature allows users to post strings of photos and videos and now ads will begin to show intermittently between them. Instagram is currently testing these ads with more than 30 advertisers including Nike and Airbnb. Source: eNCA
Don’t Panic if Google Isn’t Indexing all the Pages on Your Site
The mighty Googlebot gets smarter with every update and it shows, especially when it doesn’t index all the pages on a submitted sitemap. When indexing, Google will interpret pages with the same or nearly the same content as identical and often filters out a page as a duplicate. A good way to check if the noindex pages are likely due to duplication is with a quick check of the percent of pages indexed versus not. If the majority of your sitemap is being indexed, the ones that are not shouldn’t drastically affect your search presence. Source: TheSEMPost
Additional Commentary
Valentine’s Day Trends for Paid Search on Bing
Ginny Marvin at Search Engine Land shares the love with some of Bing’s recently released insights on advertising performance during Valentine’s Day. According to these insights, women are much more active in their searches. When users searched for “Valentine’s Day gifts for…” 17% of these searches were for boyfriends, while only 4 percent were for girlfriends. Marvin also noted that, based on Bing’s data, clicks on ads rose significantly the week of Valentine’s Day due to those last minute shoppers. The author also notes that CPC’s tend to spike around February 11th when the last minute panic sets in. Source: Ginny Marvin, Search Engine Land
SEO Experts Share Their Best Practices for 2017
Compelling content and backlinks are considered the backbone of SEO, but Georgi Todorov gathered SEO experts for a SEMrush roundup of hacks to kick off 2017. All the experts agree that quality content should always be a main focus of your SEO pursuits, but small changes and extra steps may be the trick to getting the SERP result you’ve been striving for.
- Incorporating design and formatting can make your content stand out and potentially earn more links.
- “Content resurrection” gives SEOs a chance to update great, but old content for Google to re-crawl, rank and present as fresh to your market.
- Spread content to a wider audience using social media. Google may say that social has no impact on search rankings, but SEO professionals continually see better performance when combining content and social.
- And don’t forget to be mobile friendly! Mobile usage has been outranking desktop in the United States since mid-2014 and every year the gap grows.
Source: Georgi Todorov, SEMrush Blog
