Each week the Croud SEO team collate the latest news from relevant sources around the web so you don’t have to. Read through the top SEO news stories for this week below and follow us on Twitter or sign up to our Newsletter.
Google drops mobile app properties from GSC, reminds site owners to remove G+ integrations
15/02/2019
Google has started sending out messages to webmasters to inform them that it is dropping mobile app properties from Google Search Console and that owners should also remove Google+ integrations such as Google+ buttons, follow buttons etc from sites. It would be advisable to export any mobile app data from GSC before it shuts down and additionally integrating apps with Google’s Firebase platform to enable more functionality and data than GSC.
Google may use different ranking weights for YMYL-type queries
19/02/2019
After Google published a White Paper on how it fights disinformation, it confirmed that it uses different weightings for its ranking signals across different query types. For “your money, your life” queries (terms that impact on future well being such as financial, physical, safety etc.) it uses the strictest standards, such giving more weight to EAT. This essentially means that successful SEO work done on one site isn’t necessarily going to achieve success on another site in a different industry.
The four most exciting areas of AI for marketers in 2019
20/02/2019
Econsultancy looks at upcoming applications of artificial intelligence that may be exciting for marketers. This includes computer vision (ability of computers to make sense of people and objects in images), natural language generation (ability to convert data into conversational-style language), conversational chatbots, personality insights (ability to profile personalities based on social media and blog posts) and combining these different abilities.
Facebook Study: What we learned looking at 105 million posts
13/02/2019
Quintly published it’s Facebook 2018 study based on 94,000 pages and 105 million posts. They found that the majority (55%) of post types were link shares with 29% being photo shares and 14% video shares. Despite being more popular, link posts generate 72% fewer interactions than video posts and interactions were higher overall on weekend compared to weekdays.
Closing the CX Gap: Customer Experience Trends Report
15/02/2019
According to research by Acquia, 76% of customers switch to a competitor after just one bad experience. This was in contrast to 50% saying that once they’re loyal to a brand, they’re loyal for life, indicating there’s a difference between what consumers say and what they actually do. In addition, 66% of consumers said that brands don’t do a good job of using their personal preference to predict their needs.
Detecting Link Manipulation and Spam with Domain Authority
18/02/2019
Moz released a guide to detecting link manipulation and spam using their Domain Authority score. The guide provides a methodology on how to spot link decay and spam and provides a more analytical way to identifying link spam, reducing the overall task time so any issues can be addressed swiftly.
Google Search Algorithm Updates Continue Through Weekend
18/02/2019
From around the 13th and across the weekend, there were fluctuations in the SERPs with a number of webmasters and tools registering a decrease in rankings.
