We enter June by having a brief roundup of some of the recent hot topics within the world of search, whereby paid advertising seems to be very prominent….
Microsoft to pay YOU to use Bing Search Engine
In the battle to be “top dog” of search engines, Bing are still lagging some way behind Google. In a move designed to increase their market share in the sector, Microsoft have announced the incorporation of Bing searches into their “Microsoft Rewards” programme.
The roll out of this programme to the UK means that users can earn points for internet searches using Bing, and also for using their Microsoft’s “Edge” browser, which can then be redeemed against Microsoft purchases such as Xbox accessories and games.
Ultimately Microsoft’s aim is to gain a bigger slice of the lucrative ads business, revenue worth billions every year, which leads nicely onto our next snippet……
Google now facing high court action from Kelkoo, in addition to EU action
With the European Commission already in the process of taking action against Google, likely to be in the form of a hefty fine for anti-competitive practices, price comparison site Kelkoo are now launching their own legal action against the search giants.
Kelkoo are claiming that Google have exploited their dominance of the search market to manipulate shopping search results, for their own gains, consequently crippling competitive companies such as themselves.
Similarly, action already being undertaken by the European Commission revolves around the perception that Google’s own shopping service is dominating search results and therefore quashing competition.
What should we be doing? As it’s early days, with regards both stories, there is certainly no need to panic. However, the above issues both re-iterate that we should still be focussing very intensely on organic search performance, and tailoring our SEO activities towards multiple search engines.
Call Jan Klin & Associates, on 01690 760328 today, if you would like to discuss this further.
Google Ad Blocker imminent
Google’s recent announcement that an ad blocker will be introduced into their Chrome platform, may again see a redress in rankings performance.
Likely to be implemented in early 2018, Chrome’s ad blocker will reportedly be turned on by default, on desktop and mobile devices, with the aim of improving user experience.
It is believed that sites using various types of pop-up ads, for example full screen or autoplay pop-ups, will be hit hardest.
Google CEO Larry Page quoted in 2015 that; “The industry needs to do better at producing ads that are less annoying and that are quicker to load,” which sounds beneficial to user experience but has, again, led to theories that Google could manipulate rankings to benefit their own advertising platform.
We await to see the rollout and the effect it will take. Once again, this surely emphasises the importance of ensuring relevant good quality content to aid organic search results for your business.
You can read more on this topic across the web, including in this easy-to-read article published, a few days ago, by The Independent newspaper;
DMOZ directory closure
One thing that we, at Jan Klin & Associates, did notice recently was the closure of the DMoz directory, which will no longer be maintained.
For many years this high equity open-source directory was an early starting point for link building campaigns, with the data being used to populate numerous lesser directories which may have been seen as easy links into your site.
In addition to this, Google have now confirmed that they will no longer be using DMOZ titles and descriptions as snippets in search results when short on resources from a website’s meta description or site content.
You can read more detail on this from various sources, including the following article from Search Engine Land;
http://searchengineland.com/google-officially-stops-using-dmoz-source-search-results-snippets-276205
Although this will not have any major effect on your rankings, it could be argued that meta data is still relevant in your website’s “onsite SEO”, and that quality, descriptive, content is certainly key to Google being able to return relevant results at the top of searches.
We hope that you find this brief news update useful.
As always should you wish to discuss any of the above, or your site’s SEO in general, please feel free to contact us at Jan Klin & Associates on 01690 760328 or from our contact page.
