If you’ve spent much time trying to promote your business on Facebook, you’ve probably recognized the social platform isn’t exactly the best at transparency.

There are a lot of questions about what exactly you can and can’t post, which made it even more frustrating that there was no way to appeal the decision if Facebook decided to remove your content for violating its hidden guidelines.

That is beginning to change, however. Likely thanks to months of criticism and controversy due to Facebook’s lack of transparency and it’s reckless handling of users’ data, Facebook has been making several big changes to increase transparency and regain people’s trust.

The latest move in this direction is the release of Facebook’s entire Community Standards guidelines available to the public for the first time in the company’s history.

These guidelines have been used internally for years to moderate comments, messages, and images posted by users for inappropriate content. A portion of the Community Standards was also leaked last year by The Guardian.

The 27-page long set of guidelines covers a wide range of topics, including bullying, violent threats, self-harm, nudity, and many others.

“These are issues in the real world,” said Monika Bickert, head of global policy management at Facebook, told a room full of reporters. “The community we have using Facebook and other large social media mirrors the community we have in the real world. So we’re realistic about that. The vast majority of people who come to Facebook come for very good reasons. But we know there will always be people who will try to post abusive content or engage in abusive behavior. This is our way of saying these things are not tolerated. Report them to us, and we’ll remove them.”

The guidelines also apply to every country where Facebook is currently available. As such, the guidelines are available in more than 40 languages.

The rules also apply to Facebook’s sister services like Instagram, however, there are some tweaks across the different platforms. For example, Instagram does not require users to share their real name.

In addition to this release, Facebook is also introducing plans for an appeals process for takedowns made incorrectly. This will allow the company to address content that may be appropriate based on context surrounding the images.

If your content gets removed, Facebook will now personally notify you through your account. From there, you can choose to request a review, which will be conducted within 24 hours. If Facebook decides the takedown was enacted incorrectly, it will restore the post and notify you of the change.

One could argue social media has always been a popularity contest based on friend-counts and likes, but Pinterest is making it even more explicit thanks to some new changes to business profiles.

The most notable change is the addition of a monthly viewer statistic that can be seen by everyone, not just your account administrators. The feature will show the total number of people who saw your business’s pins over the past 30 days.

The addition of a view count is likely to provide a more reliable estimate of just how prominent a page is. While followers can easily be bought or acquired with bots, views are a little trickier to misrepresent.

However, many might say this gives an unfair advantage to businesses who advertise through promoted pins.

In addition to the view count, Pinterest is also introducing the ability for business profiles to include dynamic cover images that highlight specific content relevant to users. That can include individual pins or entire boards.

Pinterest says the changes will be rolling out over the next couple months, so keep your eyes out for more news about how monthly viewer statistics may affect your Pins.

Vides that automatically start playing with the sound cranked all the way up have long been the scourge of the internet. They’ve interrupted our listening to music, quiet browsing in public places, and they’ve even interrupted videos we actually want to watch!

This is why Google’s web browser, Chrome, is fighting back. The latest version for desktop devices will automatically disable the majority of videos from playing with sound automatically.

The only exception to Chrome’s new feature is videos that Google has reason to believe you are interested in. Specifically, this includes:

  • Videos you have played before
  • When you have clicked the screen at some point in your browsing session
  • Videos appearing on a site you have added to your home screen on mobile

It is notable that Google is not entirely blocking the videos that are designed to autoplay. Instead, it essentially pauses them until they are triggered manually.

Also, videos that autoplay without sound are still completely and totally okay with Google. They will continue to automatically begin playing, and may still be a viable advertising method if you include captions.

Menus aren’t just for restaurants on Google anymore. Google My Business has finally expanded their menu feature to allow businesses to create and share a service menu describing the various services you offer and their prices.

The process is very simple. You just select the “Info” tab in the Google My Business dashboard and get started adding your services. The menus can be organized by name, description, and price for each item. You can also group specific items into different sections.

Google’s Allyson Wright announced the news yesterday in the Google My Business Help forums, saying:

“Back in January we launched a new Menu editor for the food service industry. This month, we are excited to announce that we have expanded our menu editor to now include additional services.

“Businesses in health & beauty, and service businesses, such as plumbers and florists, now have the ability to add their menu of services directly to their listing through their Google My Business account. Same as the food establishment menu editor, this feature will only be available if the listing is not currently connected to a third party provider and for listings in English speaking locals. If your listing is currently displaying an incorrect menu, please see this help center link for more information on how to correct or remove the link.”

The expanded menu feature is only available to those who do not currently have their listing connected to a third-party menu provider and businesses in English speaking locations.

Days before Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is set to testify to Congress about the social network’s role in allowing Cambridge Analytica to exploit user data, Facebook is working to make it easy to see if your information was shared with the scandal-plagued analytics firm.

Facebook has published a new section within its help center called “How can I tell if my info was shared with Cambridge Analytica.” You can also quickly find the page by simply searching “Cambridge or Cambridge Analytica” in the Facebook search bar.

If you’re logged into your Facebook account, this page will automatically inform you whether your data was potentially breached by the “This is your digital life” app.

Since information has come to light about how Cambridge Analytica has been potentially misusing user data, the company’s relationship with Facebook has come under scrutiny. In response, the social network has taken several steps to attempt to re-win the public’s trust – such as launching this latest page. It has also introduced a data abuse bounty program that allows users to report app developers that may be misusing data.

Questions will likely remain long after Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony tomorrow, but at least you can now personally check to see whether your personal account details are safe or have been exploited.

Bing is changing up how ads appear in its search engine by increasing the number of ads present at the bottom of the page and removing text ads from the sidebar of search results for US users.

Specifically, Bing is increasing from 3 bottom-of-the-page ads to 4 ads and removing sidebar text ads in the United States. Product ads, on the other hand, will remain within the sidebar.

This change also means that Bing will no longer be allowing advertisers from the US to run sidebar text ads at all.

According to the announcement, Bing was motivated to remove sidebar text ads because bottom-of-the-page ads often include richer ad formats that provide more in-depth information that possible in the sidebar.

While these changes are currently limited to the United States and Bing Ads will continue offering sidebar text ads in other countries, the company says it will be considering removing the ad type in other counties in the future.

As the announcement says, “as part of the constant evolution of the Bing search engine results page (SERP) to provide more value for our users and our advertisers we are regularly evaluating performance and quality of our ads, including ad position on the SERPs.”

Based on their data, Bing says removing the sidebar text ads increases the overall clicks for advertisers, especially those running Mainline Text Ads and Product Ads.

Pinterest’s Shopping Ads, which create ads directly from your existing Pins and content, have officially moved out of testing and been made available to hundreds of advertisers across the country.

Shopping Ads launched to a handful of major brands last year, including Ulta Beauty, Venus, Overstock, and Lowe’s. The ad format pulled images from product feeds to instantly generate ads.

“With Shopping Ads, businesses can seamlessly turn their product catalog into visual, actionable ads,” writes Shounak Simlai on the Pinterest Business Blog. “Since Shopping Ads pull automatically from an existing product feed, they’re especially useful for brands that want to scale their Pinterest advertising.”

This is a boon for marketers, as Pinterest says 90% of users make purchases through the platform and 70% of users saying they use the service to find new products.

To sign up to be a part of the Shopping Ads program, businesses must complete a Pinterest Propel Program sign-up form. Once you’ve done this, Pinterest says it will contact your business directly.

In addition to expanding its Shopping Ads to a wider range of businesses, Pinterest says it is already testing new ad designs intended to create “more visual shopping cues” and expanding its Shop the Look program to a number of countries, including France, Germany, and the UK.

Google has released its latest “Bad Ads” report, which shows the search giant is cracking down harder than ever on ads that violate its advertising policies.

In total, the search engine and ad platform has removed over 3.2 billion ads in 2017, nearly doubling the 1.7 billion ads removed in 2016.

“That’s more than 100 bad ads per second!” writes Google’s director of sustainable ads, Scott Spencer.

The highlights from the report include:

  • 79 million ads were taken down for sending users to malware-laden sites.
  • 400,000 malware sites were blocked
  • 66 million “trick-to-click” ads were removed
  • 48 million ads that initiated unwanted software installation were banned

About a year ago, Google launched new brand safety controls for video and display ads. As such, they updated their policies to prohibit the monetization of inappropriate and controversial content. Reflecting these policy updates, Google reports it has removed 320,000 publishers that violate publisher policies, blacklisted 90,000 websites, and banned 700,000 mobile apps in 2017.

“After expanding our policy against dangerous and derogatory content in April 2017 to cover additional forms of discrimination and intolerance, we removed Google ads from 8,700 pages [that] violated the expanded policy,” writes Spencer.

Spencer says Google also recognizes that only a small number of publishers account for the vast majority of sites that misrepresent themselves or present themselves as another legitimate organization. Of the 11,000 websites reviewed for possible misrepresentation, 650 were blocked and 90 publishers were removed from Google’s ad network.

The report shows how Google’s latest policies have worked to cut-out ad fraud and policy breaking advertisements across their AdWords network, but they won’t be slowing down anytime soon. Search Engine Land reports that Google is poised to enact new restrictions for ads related to financial products later this year.

Twitter has shut down numerous accounts accused of artificially increasing the popularity of their posts using a method called “tweetdecking.”

Tweetdecking gets its name from the app TweetDeck, which can schedule posts ahead of time. Conspiring accounts were working together to retweet content in order to force it to go viral.

In this case, most of the accounts removed were using the technique to steal content (including memes and jokes) to make accounts more prominent. These accounts would then use their artificial popularity to promote other accounts or products for financial profit.

This practice blatantly violates Twitter’s spam policy. It is also just the latest instance of users and brands gaming the system to increase their online presence.

Since the earliest days of Google, brands and “black hat” users worked together to rig the search engine to ensure high visibility. Usually, this took the form of buying links to artificially appear authoritative to Google’s algorithm. The search engine has since worked to eradicate the practice, but similar tricks like buying “likes” or “retweets” have since sprung up on almost every other popular social platform.

Twitter’s latest bans are the most recent crackdown in a long-running game of whack-a-mole. Still, it provides a harsh reminder that brands who try to manipulate social networks or search engines in bad faith are nearly guaranteed to be eventually penalized or banned entirely.

If you operate a website that is frequently creating or changing pages – such as an e-retail or publishing site – you’ve probably noticed it can take Google a while to update the search engine with your new content.

This has led to widespread speculation about just how frequently Google indexes pages and why it seems like some types of websites get indexed more frequently than others.

In a recent Q&A video, Google’s John Mueller took the time to answer this directly. He explains how Google’s indexing bots prioritize specific types of pages that are more “important” and limit excessive stress on servers. But, in typical Google fashion, he isn’t giving away everything.

The question posed was:

“How often does Google re-index a website? It seems like it’s much less often than it used to be. We add or remove pages from our site, and it’s weeks before those changes are reflected in Google Search.”

Mueller starts by explaining that Google takes its time to crawl the entirety of a website, noting that if it were to continuously crawl entire sites in short periods of time it would lead to unnecessary strain on the server. Because of this, Googlebot actually has a limit on the number of pages it can crawl every day.

Instead, Googlebot focuses on pages that should be crawled more frequently like home pages or high-level category pages. These pages will get crawled at least every few days, but it sounds like less-important pages (like maybe blog posts) might take considerably longer to get crawled.

You can watch Mueller’s response below or read the quoted statement underneath.

“Looking at the whole website all at once, or even within a short period of time, can cause a significant load on a website. Googlebot tries to be polite and is limited to a certain number of pages every day. This number is automatically adjusted as we better recognize the limits of a website. Looking at portions of a website means that we have to prioritize how we crawl.

So how does this work? In general, Googlebot tries to crawl important pages more frequently to make sure that most critical pages are covered. Often this will be a websites home page or maybe higher-level category pages. New content is often mentioned and linked from there, so it’s a great place for us to start. We’ll re-crawl these pages frequently, maybe every few days. maybe even much more frequently depending on the website.”