The pre-Christmas rush brings plenty of new arrivals online too. Changes are coming to YouTube ads and to Google Merchant Center.
Claudia Blišťanová
Idea Team Leader & Social Media Consultant
3. December 2020
5 min
BeginnerThe pre-Christmas rush brings plenty of new arrivals online too.
Changes are coming to YouTube ads and to Google Merchant Center. Instagram arrives with an update allowing keyword search and is also testing new quick answers to frequently asked questions. Besides that, in the latest round-up you will learn how Google handles old domains and what is new in WordPress 5.6. Enjoy exploring.
New to YouTube are responsive ads, which generate several ad combinations in the most relevant formats, such as skippable in-stream and video discovery.
YouTube is gaining a new ad format: audio ads. These will run only when the user is not watching the video but has it playing in the background, as with podcasts. For now this is available only as a beta in selected accounts.
A new report called "local search terms" has been added to Google Ads. In it we can see which keywords competitors' ads appeared for, and in what percentage of cases, where ours did not.
Until now product promotions could be created only in the feed itself. From now on the option is built into Google Merchant directly, where we have several choices.
If until now you searched for something on Instagram, your results were limited to names, usernames, places and hashtags. That has now changed slightly. Instagram has announced an update letting users search for specific keywords.
After the update Instagram will show you every post containing your exact search term. That makes finding a wide range of content easier and helps brands trying to maximise their content's performance.
You will no longer necessarily have to use hashtags to raise your post's visibility. In many cases the words you use in the caption will be enough to get your content to people. There is one more catch, though. According to Instagram, keyword search will be limited to subjects of general interest that comply with the network's rules. Posts will be shown to you on the basis of algorithmic calculations, ranked by the most relevant matches for each individual user.
From now on you can browse your long-forgotten stories from travels or other important occasions clearly on a map showing where they were made.
The feature can show stories up to 3 years old. It also depends, though, on whether you added a location tag to the story. Only stories with a location tagged will appear. You can also browse stories by day in a calendar.
The option will sit directly in an account's feed and will let brands highlight common questions in the message window, which users can tap for quick answers. Companies will be able to set up four questions appearing at your first interaction with the message, giving brands a simple, automated way of handling the most common questions.
A similar feature works in Messenger. And since Facebook is slowly integrating its messaging features, it makes sense for the same thing to be added to Instagram. The option may help with e-commerce on Instagram as well.
Expired domains are a popular way for other sites to gain links. It is a practical trick as old as reciprocal link exchange. It is a considered tactic that keeps growing in popularity. People buy expired domains so they can make use of the links tied to other domains. It is an old practice Google is well aware of. What we cannot say for certain now, though, is whether Google is trying to reset those domains. Resetting backlinks would mean no longer using the ones already on the domain for ranking purposes.
Google's algorithms try to work out what an expired domain is being used for. Google acknowledges that re-registered expired domains are used entirely innocently and legitimately. So there is no particular factor Google should focus on. Which means it cannot tell whether anything untoward is happening with these domains.
People can revive expired domains and bring an old site back online. At other times websites pass from one owner to another, and the domain name changes hands as a result. These are ordinary situations. So it is hard for Google to spot the domains "up to mischief". There is no notification that an expired domain is being used abusively.
Small sites are at a disadvantage, because larger ones are crawled more often.
How does Google crawl sites? Links are part of the crawling process by Googlebot, which crawls links. It is possible that popular, better-linked sites are crawled more often than less popular ones with fewer links.
Crawling is independent of a site's size. Some large sites may have broken or needless URLs. Which means crawling smaller sites is more efficient.
If Google has not yet discovered some of your pages, a sitemap could help. But it may also point to deeper problems with the quality of your content or links. Some publishing platforms do not update their sitemaps automatically, though, so upgrading the platform is the simpler answer. Creating a sitemap seems, automatically, to be the minimum starting point for any serious site.
The new version of WordPress plans to add auto-updates. In certain cases that can certainly make maintaining a site easier for ordinary users and improve WordPress's overall health, but on the other hand it can bring no small amount of trouble. In version 5.7 it is planned to be added to the installation process as an opt-in, so do think carefully about whether it is a good choice for you. As a rule it still holds that without a backup and a test of the update somewhere on a development version we would not recommend it at all.
Among other things, an update to jQuery 3.5.1 awaits us, along with jQuery Migrate moving to version 3.3.2. It should stay that way throughout version 5.6. The final step will be switching jQuery Migrate off for version 3 as well.
Claudia Blišťanová
Idea Team Leader & Social Media Consultant
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