Daily Minute Master Series – July 8, 2019

Marketing

Google’s Algorithm Adjusts Itself When a Real World Crisis is Occurring

A Google engineer tells The Guardian changes have been made to the search algorithm in response to real-life crises. While the said event is taking place, Google will increase the weight of ‘authority’ signals in an effort to surface the most accurate information about the crisis. When Pandu Nayak, a senior search engineer at Google, says  Google increases the weight of authority signals he’s referring to authority as defined in the search quality evaluator guidelines. Google aims to reduce the spread of misinformation, as opposed to outright removing it from search results. Going forward, when searching for information about a crisis that’s unfolding, Google will serve results from the most authoritative sources as determined by its quality raters.

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Google is Bringing Search Console Data to Third-Party Content Platforms

Google’s Martin Splitt revealed the company is working on ways of bringing Search Console data to third-party platforms. Some of Google’s future plans involve bringing more search engine data to where people already are. Splitt was careful not to get too specific, but he strongly hinted at plans to bring Search Console data to the web’s largest content management systems. Google wants to reduce the need for site owners to go directly into Search Console to retrieve data. The solution is still in the early stages of being worked on, but Splitt confidently states it will roll out eventually.

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Amazon’s Alexa.com Now Offers Free Competitive Insights

Alexa.com, an Amazon-owned competitive analysis company, released several new tools that give small and midsize businesses free competitive tools typically available only to large companies with dedicated analytics teams. This supports search data gathered from Google and Bing. Relevant data about the site, its audience and keyword gaps, as well as the same data about competing sites, are part of the package. These services were not previously available through the 20-year-old platform. Now brands are getting all this keyword and search engine optimization data for free. The company also offers a paid service for SEO and paid search. The insights are collected through a panel of millions of internet users who contribute browsing and clickstream data anonymously, so no one can use the data to determine the contributors to the panel.

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Advertising

Microsoft Advertising says it’s keeping average position reporting

Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads) has added the position-based impression share metrics that Google introduced last fall. Now called prominence metrics, rather than share of voice, in Microsoft Advertising, the set of six new stats are available at the campaign, ad group and keyword levels. Google announced in February that it will be retiring average position later this year. The news came a few months after it introduced the position metrics Microsoft Advertising added this week. Google’s reasoning for removing average position is that it’s no longer a great indicator for where your ads actually appear since position one may actually be at the bottom of the page on some search results. Microsoft is bucking this decision, but we’ll see how long it sticks around if advertisers get comfortable not having it in Google Ads.

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