Industry News

Cal Newport writes about some recent research on the impact of social media followers/traffic in Can You Tweet Your Way to Impact? The tl;dr is that audience != impact:

In this narrow look at social media and science a more general lesson about this technology emerges. Maintaining an aggressive presence in these online spaces can increase the number of people who temporarily encounter you or your work. But these encounters are often ephemeral, rarely leading to more serious engagement....

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Google Web Stories do show up in Google Image search, Google posted a correction...

This week we covered that Google is now testing SGE in the wild for a small subset of US users. Google is begging SEOs to stop doing SEO for Google...

Google Ads has not posted a new feature announcement in its new features & announcements help document in all of March 2024 (I know March is not over yet, but it almost is).

In February, Google told us that they stopped showing Web Stories in Google Image search results. Well, last night, Google issued a correction saying Google has been showing Web Stories in Google Images but the Web Stories icon does not show. To make things worse, Search Console had a bug where it was not reporting these impressions or clicks.

Google seems to have added a new feature to allow businesses to add an amenity or amenities from their Google Business Profiles to their website. The new card when you search for [my business] says, "Add amenity map to your website, show nearby amenities to help customers explore your area."

You can now see Microsoft Copilot, formerly Bing Chat, referrer data in your Google Analytics reports. Himanshu Sharma posted about this on X yesterday, he said, "Copilot has started sending referrer data to GA4."

Google Search has this "recommendation" for businesses to sign up for Google Business Profiles directly in the search results. It says "Google can help you stand out." It directs you to set up a free account on Google Business Profiles.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

Google has released the 2023 Google Ads safety report sharing that Google has removed 5.5 billion ads, suspended 12.7 million advertiser accounts and restricted ads from showing up on 2.1 billion publisher pages. That is about 6% more ads removed, 90% more suspended advertiser accounts and 40% more ads removed from publisher pages.