Nikki Gilliland says, “Last year, Google announced that it was using a system called RankBrain to help guide the development of its search algorithm.  Essentially, the aim was to provide better and more relevant search results to users. According to a new study by Searchmetrics, the move has paid off. Here’s a bit more info on RankBrain and what’s happened since it was introduced. What is RankBrain? RankBrain is an artificial intelligence system that uses machine learning to better understand exactly what people are looking for when they type a search query into Google. If RankBrain... [...]

Glenn Gabe says, “This fall was packed with announcements about Google’s mobile-first index. First, Gary Illyes gave a keynote at Pubcon and dropped a bomb that Google intended to roll out a mobile-first index in the near future. Sure, Google had been hinting about the mobile-first index for a while, but now we had real information from a Googler that it was indeed coming. Then on November 4, 2016, Google published a blog post officially stating its intention to roll out a mobile-first index and explaining why it wanted to do that. It was huge news, since the new approach is a 180 from... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Google My Business has added a new metric to the insights section of the Google My Business dashboard. The new metric is photos; you can see how often people view your photos and compare that to your competitors. The features page documented that “insights are now available for photos.” You can now “see how your photos perform compared to photos of businesses like yours,” Google added. The blue line represents your business photo views, and the red line represents views for businesses similar to you. It then summarizes how well or badly you have done at the bottom.... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “Google agreed to change its email scanning practice on Tuesday as part of a court settlement, The Verge first reported. The changes involve the way the company scans emails for ad serving purposes. With this agreement, Google will no longer scan emails to collect data used for ad targeting before emails hit users’ inboxes. In the class action suit — Matera v. Google, Case No. 5:15-cv-04062, filed in 2015 — plaintiffs argued that scanning emails before they are received by users violates the Wiretap Act and the California Information Privacy Act. The plaintiff represented... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “A new Google search rankings factors study released by Searchmetrics today shares that while content relevance is gaining in importance with Google, backlinks are a declining ranking signal. The full study can be downloaded over here, but here are the key takeaways from the study: The URLs with the highest content relevance are those on positions 3 to 6. Desktop content is around a third longer than mobile content. In 2016, just 53 percent of the top 20 URLs included the keyword in their title. The Time on Site for the top 10 URLs is 3 minutes and 10 seconds. The average... [...]

Danny Sullivan says, “One of the biggest disadvantages for publishers in using AMP — the accelerated mobile pages format — is that Google will not show a publisher’s actual URL when displaying AMP pages. Google says this is so AMP pages load quickly. However, using a publisher’s URL might hardly slow a page down. In fact, using Google’s URL might actually cause AMP pages to load more slowly. The Google cache: why AMP at Google uses Google URLs To understand the issue, consider this search for “google tag manager amp” on Google. You’ll see a Marketing Land article that appears,... [...]

Brian Ussery says, “Google’s new “Google Home” device may be one of the most popular holiday gifts this year, but some marketers are not going to be celebrating in 2017. For instance, if you ask Google Home, “What is Bing?” its response is, “Indicating a sudden event or action.” If you ask, “What is Yahoo?” its response is, “A rude, noisy, or violent person.” Interestingly enough, Google Home responses to the question, “What is Google?” with “search for information about (someone or something) on the Internet using the search engine Google.” Instead of treating... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Google has announced that the Google Search Console now has more reporting options for your property sets. Property sets is Google’s way of allowing you to combine different profiles in Google Search Console into one report. When it first launched several months ago, it basically let you view the Search Analytics report for all the properties you combine with the property set. But you couldn’t see many of the other reports within the Google Search Console. Now you can. With this update you can see mobile usability report, review your AMP implementation, double-check... [...]

Tom Bailey says, “Fancy hardware and ‘moonshots’ are all very well but it’s the seemingly small innovations that Google makes to its search results which are really exciting. 2016 has seen lots, especially on the mobile side, and this is a look at the impact of some of the tiny yet mighty updates Google has made this year. You may or may not have noticed them but they’ve changed how marketers, brands and ultimately users interact with the search giant. For example, earlier this year Google veered course from how it has historically served desktop ads. Right-hand ads were removed... [...]

Tim Peterson says, “If you’re running video campaigns on Google properties and have set ad rotations to Optimize for conversions or to Rotate evenly, you’ll want to take note that Google will be switching your rotation setting to Optimize for views — if it hasn’t already. Advertisers are seeing a notice in AdWords that Optimize for views is now the only ad rotation setting available for video campaigns and that all campaigns will be automatically changed to that setting in January. Under campaign settings for video campaigns, Optimize for conversions and Rotate evenly options are... [...]