Welcome to the new week, we’ve gathered five hot topics to watch out for this week. Twitter reportedly is seeing big advertisers come back after the initial fall out of Musk’s takeover; links have less impact on SEO results than before and Cyber Monday outstrips Black Friday performances.
Big advertisers return to Twitter
Twitter lost a significant amount of advertising revenue when Elon Musk first bought the platform. Many brands looked to protect their image and move away from any potential risks associated with the platform. However, Musk is now reporting that bigger brands such as Amazon and Apple are planning to return to the platform. It was estimated that Apple were spending up to £184k per week on Twitter before they apparently pulled spend.
It’s been a rocky start for the social network as both a social platform and an ads platform and it remains to be seen if its fortunes can be turned around.
Links have less impact on SEO rankings than before
Google have confirmed that links are less of a priority than they once were.
In the early days of Google Search, they relied heavily on links as a distinguishing factor for how they should rank websites. Overtime with updates, such as the Penguin algorithm update in 2012, Google have fought against link spam which came from this and are now able to identify and disregard low quality links without needing site owners to disavow them. Therefore, they have learnt that links are not necessarily the be all and end all factor.
Links do continue to be important for SEO though, for page discovery and site promotion, but less so for rankings than before.
What we learnt from Sky Media’s annual upfronts
Sky have been pushing their digital offerings over the last few years and with the launch of Sky Glass, they’re anticipating connected TVs to continue to become more popular in 2023. Their own numbers show an expected growth in streamed viewing of 140% by 2027 after they moved themselves into the 3rd biggest TV supplier slot in the UK.
The long term plan is a merging of Brand and performance marketing, Sky want to show advertisers that brand marketing does drive performance with initial data showing a 38% uplift in site visitors following brand exposure. With more measurable results coming from streaming, it was only a matter of time before these platforms pushed into performance marketing budgets.
Noindexed pages do not affect crawl budget
Google have reassured that there is no amount of noindexed pages that will negatively affect your website’s crawl budget and that crawl budget isn’t an issue for websites under 1 million pages.
When question on whether having an excessive number of noindexed pages would negatively affect how Google crawls and indexes the unrestricted parts of your site, Google answered that the noindex directive is a way for a site owner to keep certain content away from search engines and out of search results – therefore, there is no negative affect to using the noindex on any number of pages, as Google Isn’t looking at them anyway. They also reassured that there is no need to worry about crawl budget for websites under 1 million pages.
The only time noindexing could be a problem is if a page is wrongly marked as noindex when you actually do want it to be indexed and served to users in the SERPs.
Cyber Monday performance exceeds Black Friday
Cyber Monday is the new king of big shopping days as it eclipsed Black Friday again according Adobe Analytics. With consumer spending 5.8% higher than 2021 on Cyber Monday the day shows no signs of slowing down. Days of customers trampling each other to get the latest bargains have subsided with customers preferring to shop from their sofas with online sales growing by 14% compared to 12% in store. Though questions around inflation remain, it seems that when consumers are squeezed, it’s sales and discounts that see the benefit.
Want help strategising your socials, recruiting the right people or improving your paid media budgets? We can help. We offer a range of digital services to aid your digital marketing success. Feel free to drop us an email at team@modo25.com for a chat.
