Seven of the most interesting SEM news stories of the week
Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from around the world of search marketing and beyond.
Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from around the world of search marketing and beyond.
Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from around the world of search marketing and beyond.
This week we have a ton of updates from Google, who just can’t take a week off apparently, and a few interesting studies on content marketing and mobile search.
If you’ve been using a PageRank tool in your browser than I’m afraid I have some bad news. It’s probably already gone.
As confirmed by Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller, Google is removing PageRank from its Toolbar.
PageRank will still be used internally by Google, but as trends continue towards machine learning and user experience, it’s questionable for how long this particular ranking factor, that hasn’t been updated for years, will even be a thing.
Kenshoo has published new research revealing some early results from Google’s recent removal of Right Hand Side Ads.
Among the key revelations from the first week the change happened:
In a recent statement John Mueller announced that, “Google is moving its blogs to a new domain to help people recognize when they’re reading an official blog from Google.”
This basically means all the official Google blogs will be moving from blogspot.com to googleblog.com.
Mueller has assured that all redirects have been put in place, so your bookmarks and links will continue to work, however “as with a custom domain change in Blogger, the Google+ comments on the blogs have been reset.”
That last bit made me chuckle.
In a Think With Google post this week, Lisa Gevelber has offered up loads of juicy stats and guidance on where to begin with mobile search, particularly for luxury brands.
Here’s a quick run-down:
Brands are missing out when it comes to enabling deep linking in their apps, which allows Google to crawl its content beyond the mobile web.
According to Searchmetrics, in a study of the 100 most visible websites in Google US searches, it’s been found that although 84% offer an Android App, only 30% of these had implemented app-indexing.
And then of the 88% that offer an iOS app, just 19% were found to be support app-indexing.
As Chris Lake reported this week, a recent TrackMaven report has looked at the content marketing activity of almost 23,000 brands and their 50m published pieces of content.
It turns out that the average brand publishes more than 2,000 pieces of content a year, and in 2015 this increased by 35% compared to the previous year.
But there is only so much content people can consume.
Although there were a total of 75.7bn interactions, the average engagement actually decreased by 17%.
The chart below shows the widening attention gap, based on the volume of shares on social platforms vs response rates.
For more detailed analysis, check out the report.
A new YouGov survey commissioned by CitizenSafe, has revealed 81% of British people expect to be able to access key government services easily and securely online.
These include filing tax returns, managing pensions, claiming redundancy pay or viewing and sharing driving licence details.