Page speed is a major factor in mobile search rankings. Google has named this “Speed Update” and has officially stated that it is now launching the update across the world. The major goal of the update is to remove the slowest pages from the internet, i.e the ones in which a user needs to wait for quite a few seconds for content to be loaded on a mobile. Google has mentioned it will have an impact on a “small percentage of queries.”
Google My Business is a launching a fresh report in the console’s Insight section. This report has been specifically designed for enabling businesses to see how people are looking for their local listings in Google Search or Google Maps. This report is known as “queries used to find your business” report. It displays the most popular queries of a business by exclusive users within a particular time frame. Google confirmed that the new report will be launched widely. A snapshot of the report is given below:-
A new update to Google Search Console will enable users to check when a particular URL was last crawled. This new URL inspection tool will enable detailed crawl, index, and serve information about pages. Data is pulled directly from Google index. Google states this new tool aims to offer some of the commonly requested new features.
“One of our most common user requests in Search Console is for more details on how Google Search sees a specific URL. We listened, and today we’ve started launching a new tool, “URL inspection,” to provide these details so Search becomes more transparent.”
Once they log into Search Console, users can enter a URL which they own and Google will return the last crawl date and status, any indexing or crawling errors, and the canonical URL for the specific page. In case the URL is indexed successfully, users will also be able to view status and information about any improvements found on the page. Improvements include things like a linked AMP version or rich results like jobs and recipes.
Google has released a statistics series which show how they fought web spam last year. The statistics comprise a part of Google’s annual Webspam Report.
This report includes details about the most common webspam tactics used throughout the year and the extent to which Google has tackled the efforts of people who do spam.
Google announced rebranding the name of their years old successful brand, AdWords, to Google Ads. Google AdWords was launched almost 18 years ago to make it easier for people to connect online with businesses and was the driving force behind Google’s profits and power. Google decided to change the name from AdWords to Google Ads to make it easier for end users to understand its purpose.
“From July 24, 2018, you will begin to see the new Google Ads brand, including the new name and logo. The URL that you use to access your account with will be changed from” adwords.google.com” to “ads.google.com”, and the help center will be changed from “support.google.com/adwords” to “support.google.com/google-ads”.”
Google announced the launch of Smart campaigns this Wednesday, under the newly renamed brand “Google Ads”, to help small businesses reach out to masses easily. With Smart campaigns, it gets easier to promote special offers, get calls through ads and run your business successfully.
Smart campaign targets the customers who are most likely to be interested in what your business has to offer and so are likely to call, visit your store, or make a purchase on your website. The campaigns are designed for small and local businesses that do not have an efficient marketing team or may not even have a website of their own.
Smart Campaigns will be the default campaign type for new advertisers in Google Ads. According to Kim Spalding, a former small business owner herself and a leader of Small Business Ads at Google, two-thirds of small businesses use digital marketing but they struggle and so are searching for easy solutions.
Google is launching a redesign of Google Account to offers clearer access to both their privacy controls and settings. Jan Hannemann, Google Account’s product manager announced updates on Google’s blog on Thursday. Only Android users will be able to view straight away. Web and iOS users will be able to see the new interface in the later part of this year.
The updates are being launched a month following after General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR)went in full swing. European law governs the management and handling of EU members and offers users with better data protection.
Bing Ads has launched an update to its user interface which enables users to manage targeting settings in bulk. Ad schedule targeting, location targeting, and device targeting settings can be changed from the same place due to this update. Earlier, if advertisers wanted to adjust these campaigns for multiple campaigns, they would have to wait for visiting the settings tab for every individual campaign and make changes in an individual manner.
Google has increased the amount of accessible data by Search Console Search Analytics API. Users will now gain access to 16 months of data offered by web UI. Google Search Console’s web version has enabled users to view data of the last 16 months of data as the all-new Search Console was introduced in January. Around 6 months after launch of historical data in the user interface of Google Search Console, it has now come to API.
As Google rolls out Mobile-First indexing, it is also trying to clear confusions that are arising. So they tweeted to clarify some points.
URLs in Search: If you have different URL versions for mobile and desktop, Google will show mobile version to the mobile visitors and desktop version to the the desktop visitors. However in both cases mobile version will be indexed.
