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.

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.

Google has removed PageRank from public view

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.

Early results of Google killing Right Hand Side Ads

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:

• A one penny (or roughly 1%) decrease in CPC
• Average position improved by 0.2, moving ads closer to the top of the page on average
• Click-through rate (CTR) increased by one tenth of a percent, which represents a 7% increase over the previous week
• Week-over-week changes to click and spend volume were ultimately within normal weekly variance, with a small increase in clicks and a smaller increase in spending due to the drop in average CPC

Google is migrating its blogs

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.

Google offers advice on building mobile-centric search strategy

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:

• Mobile makes up 88% of all ‘near me’ searches, with those mobile searches growing at 146% year over year.
• For automobiles, the most popular mobile-centric searches are for luxury car price enquiries. For instance ‘Tesla price’, ‘Maserati price’ and ‘Audi R8 cost’. These grew nearly 90% on mobile from 2014 to 2015.
• For jewellery, the most popular mobile search is for ‘promise rings’. These related mobile searches grew by 77% from 2014 to 2015 and tended to spike around the holidays and Valentine’s Day.
• For hotels, data from Hotels.com states that 74% of mobile bookings are made for same-day check-in. The most popular mobile-centric hotel search themes include ‘near me’, ‘cheap’ and ‘price’.

Only 20% of iOS apps and 30% of Android apps support app indexing

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.

‘Peak content’ has been reached for brands

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.

Four out of five people expect ‘online banking’ style government services

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.

• 80% of respondents have already used online banking outside of usual ‘office’ hours and expect no less from government services
• 52% said that verifying their identity online anywhere and at any time was the most convenient option for them
• 61% of full-time workers and 64% of full-time students agreed that verifying their identity online was the most convenient option for them

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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.

This week: Google begins experimenting with its PLAs, there are some stats on ad spend, we answer “what is the most trusted media source?” (I’ll give you one guess) and there’s a very tenuous time-frame for when Penguin is arriving.

How Google fought bad ads in 2015

Google has released a report on how it helped to clean up the bandit-populated wasteland we call the internet. Google has more than 1,000 sheriffs dedicated to taking down bad ads. In fact 780m ads were shot down from the top of saloon bar roofs on to the hay bails below or drowned in a horse trough.

Here are some of the black-hatted baddies Google busted in 2015:

• Counterfeiters: Google suspended more than 10,000 sites and 18,000 accounts for attempting to sell counterfeit goods.
• Pharmaceuticals: blocked more than 12.5 million ads that violated healthcare and medicines policy.
• Weight loss scams: suspended more than 30,000 sites for misleading claims.
• Phishing: stepped up efforts to fight phishing sites, blocking nearly 7,000 sites as a result.
• Unwanted software: disabled more than 10,000 sites offering unwanted software, and reduced unwanted downloads via Google ads by more than 99 percent.
• Trick to click: toughened up on ads designed to look like system warnings from your computer. Google rejected more than 17 million.

Social ad spend increased 50% year-over-year

New research from Kenshoo (gesundheit) suggests that spend on social advertising increased by 50% in the final quarter of 2015 with most of that growth helped along by the introduction of Facebook Dynamic Product Ads and Instagram ads.

Spend on search advertising increased by 8% thanks to a growth in retailers’ use of product-focused seasonal Product Listing Ads (PLAs), while mobile continues to be the biggest driver of growth in both search and social.

While there were fewer impressions for social ads in the quarter, the Click-through-Rate (CTR) went up by 64% YoY resulting in 30% more clicks and CPC went up 10% compared with the previous year.

Google adds AMP error report preview in Search Console

As Accelerated Mobile Pages become an increasingly important facet of mobile optimisation, Google has announced that it will provide a preview of error reports in Search Console, ready for the official launch of AMP in February.

This is direct from the source:

“The AMP error report gives an overview of the overall situation on your site, and then lets you drill down to specific error types and URLs. This process helps you quickly find the most common issues, so that you can systematically address them in your site’s AMP implementation (potentially just requiring tweaks in the templates or plugin used for these pages).”

Quora tops the list of UK sites gaining the highest increase in Google visibility

IndexWatch announced the sites that made the most ground in the battle of the Google SERPs in 2015, with the crowd-sourced question and answer site Quora.com coming first, with an improvement of +298.21% on the previous year. This was closely followed by Wilko.com, MentalFloss.com, Zomato.com and Wayfair.com.

There are more details and the full top 100 here.

Bye bye organic results! Hello MASSIVE PLAs!

As Chris Lake reported this week, Google has begun experimenting with an expandable mega layout for its product listing ads.

This new layout includes a clickable arrow icon that doubles the number of products and essentially takes over the entire SERP. Bad for organic results, good for retailers still struggling to rank highly for their products as it gives them a bigger playground to… uh… fill with ads.

Here’s a horrible vision of the future courtesy of Chris Lake…

Google is more trusted than actual news sources

The Edelman Trust Barometer has revealed that for the second year in a row, people trust search engines more than they trust the actual sources providing the news itself.

Search engines also beat social media, but that’s probably not as surprising.

Why do people trust search engines so much? Possibly because they see an appearance of an article ranking highly in the SERPs as a mark of trust, also it might be because Google News offers an array of different headlines from various sources, so it’s easy to make a comparison of them all.

Search Engine Watch’s own weekly SEM news round-up will patiently wait for next year’s results to see how it did. Sigh.

Google’s next Penguin roll-out to happen within weeks

This from Gary Illyes, Google’s Webmaster Trends analyst…

@mrjamiedodd I’ll go with weeks. We’re aiming for launching penguin this quarter, but we don’t have a more precise timeframe.

— Gary Illyes (@methode) January 19, 2016

You can decide for yourself whether this counts as ‘news’ or whether Illyes just got tired of all the pestering.

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