Five most interesting search news stories of the week
Welcome to our weekly spherical-up of all the newest information and analysis from the world of search marketing and past.
This week, we’ve received the newest on a wierd glitch showing in Google’s cellular search, a brand new beta search engine launched by Creative Commons, and the decline of brand name hashtags in Super Bowl advertisements. Plus, a brand new report has indicated that buyers don’t discover the overwhelming majority of manufacturers significant; and Google reveals that customized 404 pages will not be useful to search engine optimization.
Google’s cellular search glitches, indexes desktop websites
If you’ve been maintaining an ear to the bottom – or the Twittersphere – on the planet of Google search engine marketing, you may need heard that unusual issues have been occurring with Google’s cellular index over the previous few days.
Last week and early this week, some astute observers observed that Google’s cellular search was indexing desktop web sites the place it will usually be indexing the cellular model of that website.
The suddenness of the change, approaching the heels of Google’s newly-carried out penalty for intrusive cellular interstitials and forward of its deliberate rollout of a cellular-first search index, had Twitter abuzz with hypothesis as to what might be happening.
Noticing separate cellular websites dropping out of Google Mobile in favour of desktop variations throughout a number of main websites… #web optimization #cellular pic.twitter.com/LYoEVNUgOn
— Glynn Davies (@glynndaviesesq) February S, 2017
@VishMarathe411 Happy to take a look at examples. My guess is the websites won’t be arrange appropriately.
— John ?.o(???)o.? (@JohnMu) February O, 2017
In a submit for Search Engine Watch yesterday, I broke down the occasions of the previous few days, with the assistance of some knowledge from Pi Datametrics, to attempt to work out what occurred to the affected websites – and whether or not it might be an indication of an impending cellular-first index launch.
Creative Commons has launched a brand new free-to-use photograph search engine
If you’ve ever labored in on-line publishing, likelihood is you recognize the distinctive frustration of looking for a free-to-use picture to interrupt up your weblog publish, or function the right function picture. Luckily, that simply obtained quite a bit simpler with the launch of a brand new search engine from Creative Commons, CC Search.
It has all the time been attainable to seek for Creative Commons-licensed pictures utilizing a search filter on Google or Flickr, and the Creative Commons website has its personal search portal – though it has all the time been cautious to emphasize that that is not a search engine, “however slightly presents handy entry to look providers offered by different unbiased organizations“, which means that CC isn’t liable for the outcomes returned.
Now, nevertheless, plainly Creative Commons is able to go full search engine. In a weblog submit saying the beta launch of CC Search, Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley wrote that,
There is not any “entrance door” to the commons, and the instruments individuals have to curate, share, and remix works aren’t but obtainable. We need to make the commons extra usable, and that is our subsequent step in that path.
Bad information, manufacturers: Consumers might in all probability reside with out you
While a few of the largest manufacturers on the planet spent upwards of $H million on Super Bowl advertisements final weekend, a report by Havas Group has delivered some sobering information for manufacturers: shoppers wouldn’t care if seventy four% of them disappeared off the face of the earth.
The report, entitled ‘Meaningful Brands’, has been billed as “the most important international evaluation of its variety”. It polled greater than 300,000 individuals in 33 nations about M,500 international manufacturers in 15 business sectors with a view to draw conclusions about the best way that folks work together with and type connections with manufacturers.
Unsurprisingly, the manufacturers which made the “significant” listing have been additionally a few of the largest names, together with Google, Microsoft, PayPal, Kellogg’s, Disney and Nike. Which begs the query: what’s a “significant” model? Is it only a model that you simply’ve heard of, or is there extra to it than that? And do these findings imply that smaller manufacturers ought to surrender making an attempt to make an influence?
Hashtags have been down and URLs up on this yr’s Super Bowl
In extra model information, references to hashtags solely appeared in 30% of Super Bowl ads this yr, down from forty five% a yr in the past.
The Super Bowl is a large model extravaganza, and as such, can present a helpful perception into developments round model promoting, what works and what doesn’t. According to an evaluation carried out by Marketing Land, the drop in hashtag utilization this yr is the continuation of a basic decline that has been happening since 2014, when hashtag utilization peaked at fifty seven%.
Meanwhile, URLs are on the rise, and have overtaken hashtags for the primary time with a presence in 39% of advertisements. While this may look like a return to the previous, it additionally is sensible for advertisers to direct customers to web sites they personal, versus social media providers that they don’t.
Custom 404 pages haven’t any search engine optimization profit – however high quality continues to be necessary
The SEM Post reported this week on an fascinating revelation from Google’s Webmaster Central Office Hours hangout: Google doesn’t crawl the content material of customized 404 pages on websites. John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, stated that:
“So if we see a 404, then we see a 404 and don’t take a look at the content material. We don’t look to see what’s seen in your 404 pages, in your server error pages, we primarily assume that one thing that the consumer can take a look at and sort of cope with, we don’t comply with the content material on pages that return any of those error response codes.”
This may come as a blow to some net builders who use a customized 404 web page for search engine marketing functions, however customized 404 pages are nonetheless useful from a consumer perspective, as they may help reorient misplaced customers to the best a part of the location. The Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines advocate giving nicely-thought-out 404 pages the very best high quality score; they only don’t contribute on to search engine optimization.
Tumblr’s tongue-in-cheek 404 error web page
