In this weeks digital news to watch, our Senior Performance Marketing Manager, Tom, and Senior Performance Marketing Executive, Kylie, discuss updates from Google’s search quality guidelines, the launch of IndexNow, Google and Microsoft’s new partnerships, the rise of short-lived marketing and finally, Snapchats revenue drop.
Google updates search quality guidelines
Google released an updated version of its search quality guidelines last week, one year on since the last update. Although there have been around 1000 changes to the document in total, mainly to refresh and provide more clarity, the most significant of these are the updates to the YMYL Groups of People category and the section on lowest quality content.
Whilst the search quality evaluators do not directly impact your SEO rankings, they are helpful to provide some insight into how Google defines low quality content. You can review Google’s full guidance here.
Microsoft & Yandex launch IndexNow
Microsoft and Yandex launched a new initiative last week to enable site owners to have their pages and content instantly indexed by the search engine when it is created, updated or deleted. Currently it’s only Microsoft Bing and Yandex who are using this but any search engine is welcome to adopt this.
This is great news for us SEOs, it means we won’t have to wait for search engine bots to do an exploratory crawl of our websites to find new pages, but we can direct them straight to it. More detail on how to get started from Microsoft can be found here.
Google Ads partner with BigCommerce and Microsoft Ads partner with Shopify
Microsoft Advertising has announced a partnership with Shopify allowing you to integrate your products directly into Microsoft Ads. Shopify can plugin to most advertising platforms these days and already has relationships with Facebook and TikTok.
Google has also launched a partnership with Bigcommerce again allowing ads to be served straight from the Bigcommerce platform. The integrations are going to help get more people on board faster for both brands but without knowledge of the platforms it could lead to significant wasted budget.
Short-lived marketing is on the rise
Evergreen content has been king for a while, allowing it be reused and resurfaced whenever the need arises but more recently brands have been taking on short term content. The post it out, it does the job and then it’s deleted forever. Some of this content can be live for as little as 24 hours. In all likelihood most brands will likely need a mix of short and evergreen content to keep their brand fresh but also hold onto their positions as content sources for customers.
Snapchat sees stock prices plummet as they blame Apple for revenue drop
Snapchat revenue dropped massively last week as they announced their ad platform was struggling following the release of iOS14.5. As many retailers have been seeing with Facebook, any platforms that relied on iOS user data is struggling to see results with many brands reducing or cutting their budgets. Facebook will be reporting their numbers this week and it remains to be seen what the impact on their final revenue numbers look like but if Snap is anything to go by it could prove to be a big loss.
If you need any help with your digital marketing, please get in touch with our team of specialists at team@modo25.com
