Google Says Site Hacks Affected 32% More Websites In 2016

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As part of its #NoHacked campaign to raise awareness and prevent site hacking, Google released its latest annual review of hacked sites this week. As the data shows, site hacks will continue to be a major issue for webmasters for the foreseeable future.

From 2015 to 2016, the number of hacked sites grew by 32%. According to Google, hackers are becoming more aggressive but many webmasters are also letting down their guards. Instead of proactively keeping their site and security up to date, a significant number of webmasters are letting their sites become vulnerable and outdated. These sites are easy targets for hackers.

While the number of sites getting hacked is on the rise, Google is willing to show forgiveness to those affected. The company says it approved 84% of reconsiderations requests from webmasters who have cleaned up their site from any hacking. However, Google also says it was unable to inform over half (61%) of affected site owners because their sites were not verified in Search Console.

What To Do If Your Site Has Been Hacked

In addition to the report, Google has also released several new documents aimed at educating webmasters about what to do if your site gets hacked and how to protect yourself.

These new help documents recently released by Google include:

The company has also released help documents focused on specific types of common site hacks, such as Gibberish Hacks, Japanese Keyword Hacks, and Cloaked Keywords Hacks.

How To Prevent Site Hacks

As always, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Google’s top recommendation for facing the epidemic of site hacking is to avoid letting it happen in the first place. Specifically, they suggest keeping all software and plug-ins on your site up-to-date and keeping an eye on any announcements from your Content Management System (CMS) provider.

Also, be sure your site is verified in Search Console so Google can notify you in the event your website does get hacked.

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Google Makes “3 Updates in a Day” Says Gary Illyes

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With Google’s extensive personalization of search results for users, it has gotten harder and harder to tell when a major shakeup happens thanks to changes to Google’s algorithms. That hasn’t stopped people from guessing a major algorithm shift has occurred when they notice significant changes to how sites are performing across the board.

This happened last week when many major authorities in SEO speculated Google unleashed a major algorithm update. Of course, Google won’t confirm that any major changes happened, but Webmaster Trends Analyst for Google, John Mueller, did take the time to remind everyone “we make changes almost every day.”

Google’s Gary Illyes took the stance even further, tweeting “we have 3 updates in a day average. I think it’s pretty safe to assume there was one recently…”

The truth is, the days of the major Google algorithms like Penguin and Panda upending the search world overnight are largely over. Instead, Google has shifted to a model of constant evolution, tweaking and changing things perpetually.

When there is a new important algorithm, such as recent mobile-friendliness algorithms, the company tends to warn businesses ahead of time. Even then, these recent algorithm updates have been benign, only affecting a small number of websites.

The best plan isn’t to be on constant watch for unannounced shifts, and react. Instead, take a proactive stance by making sure your site follows all of Google’s latest best practices and provides value to searchers. If you do that, you should make it through any changes Google throws at you any time soon.

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Pinterest Adds Visual Search To Its Browser Extension

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Pinterest has made visual search a fundamental part of their service, letting users find products and objects based on similar photos. Now, it is bringing visual search to its Chrome browser extension, which lets you search for images without ever visiting Pinterest.

After installing the extension, all you have to do is hover over any image and click on the little magnifying glass that pops up in the corner. You can then highlight the specific area or object you want to search for.

You can also right-click on the background of any web page you visit to see visual results based on the images on that page.

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“You can even search for specific items inside an image, like that one interesting chair in the corner of a living room,” Kent Brewster, front-end engineer, Pinterest, wrote in a blog post. “Just resize the selected area to pinpoint the part of the image you want to search.”

Once you’ve selected the object you want to search for, you can then refine your search using related topics, such as sunglasses, eyewear, or frames in the image above.

“You can refine your results by topic using the Pinterest search guides,” Brewster noted. “To go even deeper into your search, click any result and pinpoint whatever part of the new image you want to explore.”

For now, Pinterest’s browser extension won’t include Buyable Pins or Promoted Pins in its search results. But, I would wager those will be integrated in the near future.

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How To Reach Millennials With Your Marketing [Infographic]

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Millenials

Every few weeks I hear an influential figure in marketing talk about some new, creative strategy for reaching millennials. “You need apps!” “You need to be on this social platform!” “Cat Pictures!” “Video!”

Sure, these can all work when done right, but it raises a question: Are millennials really that hard to market to?

As Thomas Sychterz, CEO of LaunchLeap, puts it, “[Millennials] get treated like some sort of hyperactive group of wild gorillas: powerful, unpredictable and difficult to pin down. The reality is quite different and simple.”

To show this, LaunchLeap, a Montreal-based consumer research startup, surveyed 18 – 35-year-olds about their internet and advertising preferences. The results definitely differ from what many would expect. Millennials aren’t as averse to more traditional forms of marketing as you’d think.

“Millennials are open to connecting with brands, drawn to bite-size content (paid or not) and intrigued by new information, product-wise. However, the main caveat is that it all needs to get done in an ergonomic, digestible and fluid manner.”

See the results of LaunchLeap’s survey in an infographic published on AdWeek below:

Millennial Marketing

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Get More Visibility On Facebook With Reactions

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Facebook Reactions

Remember when Facebook Likes meant everything when it came to getting exposure on the largest social network in the world? Well, these days it’s all about Loves. Or more specifically, Reactions.

Facebook has announced it is now giving more exposure to posts that get more Reactions – Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, or Angry – rather than those with more Likes. For now, all reactions are equally weighted, but they will boost the visibility more than the traditional blue thumbs-up.

“Over the past year we’ve found that if people leave a reaction on a post, it is an even stronger signal that they’d want to see that type of post than if they left a Like on the post,” according to Facebook. “So we are updating News Feed to weigh reactions a little more than Likes when taking into account how relevant the story is to each person.”

The decision makes sense. Compared to the variety of reactions available on Facebook, Liking a post is seemingly increasingly apathetic or neutral. All it takes is a simple click to show vague support of something you see on your wall. Meanwhile, users have to take the time to specifically select the reaction that more accurately reflects their feelings.

Reactions were launched by Facebook just over a year ago, but they’ve quickly become a big part of the platform. According to Facebook’s data, Reactions have been used more than 300 billion times by users since their release.

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One Year Later, Accelerated Mobile Pages are Catching On

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Accelerated Mobile Pages

The celebrate the one year anniversary of the rollout of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs), Adobe Analytics released data showing just how much the stripped-down ultrafast mobile pages have grown in use.

Accelerated mobile pages are designed to deliver content to viewers as quickly as possible. Instead of loading within full versions of the website (with all their ads, navigation, and extra content), AMPs use a stripped-down version of HTML to make speed the top priority.

According to the data, AMPs account for 7% of traffic to all top US publishers as of December 2016. While this may not sound that great, the report shows this is an 896% traffic increase to AMPs from April to November of last year. It also indicates the number of AMPs on the internet has spiked by 405%.

The report from Adobe Analytics is based on an analysis of over 1.7 trillion visits to over 16,000 mobile web pages from January 2014 to January 2017. The data on AMPs specifically is based on traffic to top US publishers between April 2016 to December 2016.

The unsteady growth of accelerated mobile pages is likely due to a disorganized rollout. While the technology first became available in February of last year, the pages were not included in organic search results on Google until September. During this time period, AMP was slow to catch on. However, once Google started indexing organic AMPs, the pages quickly rocketed up in use and traffic.

As AMP continues to be further integrated into organic search results, the pages are likely to continue to rise in prominence. I predict we will be seeing a lot more of them as the year progresses.

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Google to Shut Down Google Site Search By End of Year

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Do you have an on-site search engine to help visitors find the products and content they want? Do you rely on Google’s Site Search service for your search engine? If so, you should begin making plans for a replacement.

Google has confirmed it will be shutting down the Google Site Search product and discontinuing support by the fourth quarter of 2017.

Google Site Search powered internal search engines with Google’s own search technology, charging users based on monthly query volume for the product.

The paid site search product wasn’t Google’s only on-site search product. The company is directing consumers using the company to use either the ad-powered free custom search engine or cloud search product.

In a statement to Search Engine Land, a Google spokesperson said:

We are winding down the Google Site Search product over the next year, but will provide customer and technical support through the duration of license agreements. For GSS users whose contract expires between April 1st and June 30th, 2017, we are providing a free 3-month extension with additional query volume to allow more time for them to implement the necessary changes to their site. GSS customers may also take advantage of our Custom Search Engine solution, an ads-supported model that offers similar functionality. We continue to build out new functionality and invest in new technology that make enterprise search a great experience for our customers. Just recently, we introduced the general availability of Google Cloud Search for G Suite customers.

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YouTube Will Kill Off Unskippable 30-Second Ads in 2018

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Finding the right length for video ads can be a tricky balancing act. Too short and you can’t get your message across. Too long and you annoy or lose your viewers’ interest. Apparently, 30-second ads fail this tightrope walk, as YouTube has officially announced it will be doing away with 30-second unskippable ads starting next year.

In place of these ads, Google says it will focus on more interactive or user-based advertising.

“We’re committed to providing a better ads experience for users online. As part of that, we’ve decided to stop supporting 30-second unskippable ads as of 2018 and focus instead on formats that work well for both users and advertisers,” a YouTube spokesperson told AdWeek via email.

Of course, this doesn’t mean YouTube is ridding itself of all unskippable ads. The platform will still sell 15-second and 20-second ads that don’t give viewers the option to skip to their content. Additionally, viewers are likely to see an influx of six-second “bumper ads” instead of full-length ads that you can skip after five seconds.

Ultimately, 30-second unskippable ads lose too many viewers along the way. Some get distracted during the interval, while others entirely refuse to wait that long for their content. There is still plenty of time to make use of any ad campaigns you’ve been planning, but the decision to move away from this ad format underscores the ineffective nature of the format.

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YouTube Opens Mobile Live Streaming To More Creators

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YouTube has been teasing its plans to expand its live streaming services for over eight months, and that plan is finally coming to fruition. The video platform says it is bringing mobile live streaming to its biggest content creators, with plans to share the feature with everyone soon.

YouTube is also releasing a new chat tool known as Super Chat to help creators monetize live streams.

Mobile Live Streaming

YouTube has built mobile live streaming directly into its mobile app, with a single catch. You must have at least 10,000 subscribers to use it. If you happen to already have a sizable following, launching a mobile live stream is as simple as opening the app and tapping the capture button.

The company plans to bring the tool to everyone in the coming months, but there is currently no firm estimate of when to expect it.

In the announcement, YouTube says streamed videos will have all the features you expect from normal YouTube videos. Streamed videos will be:

  • Searchable.
  • Discoverable via recommendations and playlists.
  • Protected from unauthorized use (using Content ID).

Super Chat

To accompany the release of mobile live streaming YouTube has also launched Super Chat, aimed at monetizing live content.

Super Chat essentially lets any viewer purchase a chat message that will be especially prominent in the chat feed and can be pinned to the top of the chat window for up to five hours. Super Chat messages will also be highlighted with a color and other viewers can see the amount paid.

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Super Chat is now live to creators with 10,000 subscribers across 20 countries and viewers in over 40 countries.

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Bing Removed Over 130 Million “Bad Ads” in 2016

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It’s no secret that there are lots of bad people trying to operate scams online. Bing’s latest report on bad ads makes that crystal clear, as the search engine has removed over 130 million ads and banned 175,000 advertisers in just the last year.

Somewhat surprisingly, that number is actually 120 million fewer ads than in 2015. In comparison, both those ads combined are still dwarfed by Google’s 1.7 billion blocked ads in 2016.

As the Bing Ads’ Ad Quality in Review 2016 report explains, the ads were rejected for “direct policy compliance issues or intention to mislead users.” It continues:

“We introduced new policy around software download advertising that reduced unwanted and potentially malicious ads for many top free software programs. We ramped up systems that detect browser hijacking ads, phishing attempts, scareware ads, ads targeting the most common sites on the internet, and ads with multimedia content. We also enforced policies directed towards gender determination ads to comply with country specific regulations.”

The report specifically highlights six different types of bad ads it removed in 2016:

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  • Phishing: More than 5,000 advertisers and 7,000 sites were blocked for phishing.
  • Counterfeit: More than 1 million ads were blocked for selling counterfeit goods.
  • Tech Support Scams: More than 17 million ads were blocked for third-party tech support scams.
  • Download: More than 4 million ads were rejected for violating download-related guidelines.
  • Scareware: More than 300 advertisers were blocked for ads that highjack the browser or scare users that their PC is infected.
  • Misleading Ads: 7 million ads were blocked for misleading content. This is a huge drop compared to 2015, when Bing rejected 30 million ads.

Bing emphasized the scale of their efforts with a final comparison, saying “if one person took a minute to find and take down a bad ad or actor, it would take them nearly 500 years to remove the same number of bad ads or actors found by our automated methods in 2016.”

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