Instagram Rolls Out Its Algorithmic Timeline Next Month

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The algorithmic timeline is starting to take over.

For the longest time, the algorithmic timeline was a defining characteristic of Facebook, while sites like Twitter and Instagram used chronologic timelines to keep people up to date as things happened in real time. However, Twitter made the controversial decision to implement an algorithmic timeline earlier this year and Instagram has officially announced they will be making the change next month.

Of course, this isn’t a total surprise. The Facebook-owned platform was bound to implement the algorithmic timeline sooner or later. In March, Instagram started testing an algorithmic which sorts user’s feed based on their interests and activity instead of sorting feeds by the most recent posts.

The announcement of the algorithm tests prompted a collective panic attack among many who bemoaned the loss of one of Instagram’s defining features and worried their posts would be seen by fewer people. However, Instagram says switching to an algorithmic timeline will actually increase exposure for posts, especially from influencers and brands.

According to the photo-and-video social platform, people miss 70% of the posts from people they follow when they use a chronologic timeline. The company says their tests showed the new timeline increases exposure and engagement, which is a win-win for users and brands.

“We found that people are liking photos more, commenting more and generally engaging with the community in a more active way,” Instagram wrote in a company blog post announcing the official rollout.

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Google Confirms Page Speed Will Be A Mobile Ranking Signal

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While loading speed is a crucial issue for most mobile internet users, Google’s “Mobile-Friendly Algorithm” isn’t currently using it as a ranking factor for mobile pages. However, that is likely to change when Google releases their next mobile-friendly update.

According to reports from the recent Search Marketing Summit in Sydney this week, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes confirmed Google would be including page speed as a factor in the next mobile update. But, it may be months until that update arrives.

The inclusion of page speed seems like common sense. The majority of mobile users are likely to leave a page if it doesn’t load within five seconds, and some are even more impatient. From Google’s perspective, including page speed as a factor means they are more likely to help users find a site they will be happy with on the first click as often as possible.

It also makes sense considering Google introduced their version of Accelerated Mobile Pages recently.

Want to know how your site stacks up in terms of page speed or other mobile friendly factors? Google has also released updated versions of their mobile-friendliness and page speed tests for both desktop and mobile in one place.

The new tool, available here, combines all the free site evaluation tools Google offers in one easy-to-read report. You can also get a more extensive report emailed to you for deeper analysis.

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How To Guarantee Your Brand Is A Hit On Facebook [Infographic]

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Facebook has made itself an absolute necessity for businesses looking to build a following, increase their visibility, engage with their fans, and even find new qualified leads. To get the most out of the most popular social network, however, you need to take advantage of all the newest tools and features Facebook is always rolling out – such as call-to-action buttons on business pages and letting you share company milestones on your profile.

Taking advantage of all these great little tricks and tools not only shows your audience that you are active on Facebook, it shows you care about making sure your fans can always contact you for questions, problems, or to share how much they like your products or services.

So how can you be sure you’re getting the most out of the largest social platform in the world? The tips in this infographic from Cafe Quill will help you get started by showing all the different ways you can be using Facebook to improve your branding and exposure while keeping your fans engaged and invested in your brand.

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Learn The Language of Google Analytics With This Handy Guide

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Google Analytics is an essential tool for making sure your website is performing as you would like and making improvements to keep growing, whether you are a high-level marketer or a business owner who just launched their site.

If you aren’t familiar with Analytics, however, or the technical jargon that fills your reports, it can be difficult to make sense of the huge amount of information available. That can make it hard for someone new to running a website for their business to make sense of the huge amount of information available in Google Analytics.

Thankfully, you don’t have to depend on analysts, marketers, or your company’s “computer guy”, to understand how your site is performing with Google Analytics. Search Engine Watch has put together an easy-to-understand glossary for all the jargon and confusing labels that you will come across, making it simple for you to know exactly what your reports are saying about your site.

You can see the handy guide from Search Engine Watch here.

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Google Explains Recent Penalties Targeted ‘Links For Products’ Schemes

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Yesterday, we reported that a significant number of websites had been hit with Google penalties over the weekend for “unnatural outbound links.” Since then, Google has clarified that the manual penalties issued this weekend were specifically related to bloggers giving links to websites in exchange for free products or services.

Google had issued a warning a few weeks ago urging bloggers to disclose free product reviews and nofollow links in their blog posts related to these products. Now, they’ve taken action against sites who ignored the warning.

In the warning, Google told bloggers to “nofollow the link, if you decide to link to the company’s site, the company’s social media accounts, an online merchant’s page that sells the product, a review service’s page featuring reviews of the product or the company’s mobile app in an app store.”

As Barry Schwartz reports, John Mueller from Google explained the penalties in several threads on the Google support forums, telling people to look at the warning Google published recently named Best practices for bloggers reviewing free products they receive from companies. In one comment, Mueller went on to say:

In particular, if a post was made because of a free product (or free service, or just paid, etc.), then any links placed there because of that need to have a rel=nofollow attached to them. This includes links to the product itself, any sales pages (such as on Amazon), affiliate links, social media profiles, etc. that are associated with that post. Additionally, I imagine your readers would also appreciate it if those posts were labeled appropriately. It’s fine to keep these kinds of posts up, sometimes there’s a lot of useful information in them! However, the links in those posts specifically need to be modified so that they don’t pass PageRank (by using the rel=nofollow).

Once these links are cleaned up appropriately, feel free to submit a reconsideration request, so that the webspam team can double-check and remove the manual action.

If you are a blogger or company who has participated in an agreement to give free products to reviews, be sure to check your Google Search Console messages to see if you’ve been hit by the latest round of manual penalties.

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Instagram Unveils New 60 Second Videos

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Instagram is breaking away from the model it helped pioneer by extending videos from the standard 15-second length to a full 60 seconds. The company made its name by taking advantage of the trend for micro-length videos similar to Vine’s 7-second length, but it is now stretching its legs with longer videos.

Instagram says it is making the change in order to “bring you fun, flexible and creative ways to create and watch video on Instagram.”

Of course, the new video length limits won’t be turning Instagram into YouTube all of a sudden. The extended limit simply allows people to latch onto longer and more diverse stories.

The longer clips will hopefully spur increased engagement for the company who is currently seeing record low levels of user engagement. Despite this drop in engagement, Instagram says the amount of time spent watching videos on the platform has increased over 40% over the past 6 months.

Along with the change to video lengths, Instagram also announced that iOS users are once again able to create videos out of multiple clips from the camera roll. Both new features have already begun rolling out for users and will be available for everyone in the coming months.

Of course, along with longer videos comes longer ads on Instagram, which should make marketers and businesses who use the platform happy. Longer ads translate into more opportunities to tell engaging stories and catch the attention of your audience.

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Google Is Not a Search Engine Says The EU

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Is Google a search engine? The answer might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised to find out that Google is in fact not a search engine. At least, according to a recent piece of legislation adopted by the European Union it isn’t. The same goes for Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, or any other site currently in existence.

After two years of negotiation, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union agreed upon the final text of the Network and Information Security (NIS) Directive in December 2015. The goal of the legislation was to lay out the first set of EU-wide cyber security rules, but the initiative has received strong criticism already from many industries.

While digital technologies, social network platforms, and financial institutions have plenty of reason to take grievance over the legislation, search engines have the biggest bone to pick. The directive establishes a firm and specific definition for ‘online search engines,’ however that definition rules out any currently existing site. In fact, to be within the terms set by the EU, a website would have to break several other laws set by the European Union.

Here is the definition of a search engine according to the new directive:

“‘Online search engine’ is a digital service that allows users to perform searches of in principle all websites in a particular language, on the basis of a query on any subject in the form of a keyword, phrase or other input; and returns links in which information related to the requested content can be found.”

The primary issue with the definition is the key phase ‘in principle all websites’. Google, as well as Bing, Yahoo, and others, all index the vast majority of websites online, but they have a few boundaries. Google refuses to index any websites from the dark web or Tor websites, follows directions from robots.txt files to not be indexed, and complies with the European Right to be Forgotten ruling.

The Right to be Forgotten ruling allows users to request outdated, irrelevant, or embarrassing content be removing from Google’s listings. By following the orders of this ruling, as well as removing revenge porn and other objectionable content, Google and all other existing websites are ruled out as ‘search engines’ according to the new definition.

So what does this mean for Google and other sites which would be described by anyone other than politicians as ‘search engines’? Probably not much. Everyone will continue to call them search engines and any attempts from the EU to legally restrict Google from calling itself a search engine would most likely backfire.

If anything, it just goes to show that politicians aren’t the most in touch with modern technologies and platforms.

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Yahoo Predicts The Hottest Search Trends For Spring 2016

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Want to know what everyone will be searching for this spring ahead of time? Yahoo claims to have the answers in their newly revealed list of top search trends for this spring. Using search data from last year and recent months, Yahoo uncovered the top trends in search to keep an eye on this season.

These are the top search trends for spring 2016, according to Yahoo:

  • DIY: Spring is the season of house improvement projects, which means people are searching for “how to” tips for their new venture. January, March, and April are the peak months for “how to build” searches, especially in the Southeast. In particular, Yahoo says sheds, tree houses, decks, and raised garden beds are especially popular this year.
  • Painting: Along with DIY projects, searches for phrases like “what paint colors go with…” are going up. Putting a new paint of coat on living rooms and kitchens are the most popular projects for many searchers this year, according to Yahoo.
  • Organization: As people are making the switch from their winter clothes to their warm-weather wardrobe, there’s going to be a big increase searches for closet organization.
  • Outdoors: Searchers are also getting ready for the warm weather by searching for outdoor equipment and furniture like patio furniture, outdoor furniture, lawn mowers, and spring sets.
  • BBQs: Unsurprisingly, searches for “grills” go way, way up from March to May.
  • Chairs: Adirondack chairs are a big item this year, looking to peak in April. Interestingly, Yahoo says people searching for this style of chair are also 98% more likely to drive a luxury SUV.
  • Allergies: Allergy season is just getting started, but clearly people are already ready for it to be over. From February to June there is a large increase in searches asking “when do seasonal allergies end.”
  • Taxes: Up until Tax Day, this is going to be a popular topic for searchers every year. However, this year has some noteworthy changes from the past. Over a quarter of searches for “tax prep” are expected to come from mobile devices, and those looking for tax prep advice are skewing younger than 35 years-old with an annual income below $75k.

Yahoo is offering this information to help search marketers and seasonal businesses refine their content strategies and get ahead of the trends this year. If you act now, you can take advantage of the insight to make yourself the first choice as this year’s hot searches heat up.

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Google Finally Tells Us The Three Most Important Ranking Factors

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Google has always kept it search engine ranking algorithm a closely guarded secret, but it is finally letting webmasters and online marketers in on the three most important factors for ranking well. Google has confirmed the top three ranking factors are links, content, and RankBrain.

The news isn’t much of a surprise. Links have long been one of the most important signals for websites, and content has become an essential cornerstone of SEO in recent years.

Google said RankBrain was the third most important ranking signal last year, but its inclusion is still a little puzzling. RankBrain is technically a part of the Google algorithm, but it is hard to call it a search signal so much as an artificial intelligence system which informs Google’s main search algorithm.

Andrey Lipattsev, a Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, confirmed the top two are links and content during a Google hangout yesterday. Lipattsev was asked what the top search signals are, to which he told SEOs:

I can tell you what they are. It is content and links pointing to your site.

Of course, there are over 200 search signals and Lipattsev suggested “there is no order” to the most important search signals, so don’t expect a complete ordered list of search factors anytime soon.

You can see the video of the Google hangout below, with Lipattsev responding to the question around the 30:20 point.

 

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Google Amps Up The Impact of Mobile-Friendly Search Signals

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This week, Google announced it will be boosting “the effect of the ranking signals” for its mobile-friendly ranking algorithm. While this means mobile-friendly sites will be prioritized even further in search results “beginning in May,” don’t expect the second coming of “Mobilegeddon.”

As Google said, if your site is already mobile-friendly, you have no need to fear, because “you will not be impacted by this update.”

The update is going to roll out gradually, meaning its impact will be even less noticeable.  Since the mobile-friendly algorithm runs on a page-by-page basis, it could take some time for Google to re-index all affected pages.

Between the slow rollout and the limited expected impact, the update might not seem like much to get excited about. But, if your site isn’t mobile-friendly, it means you have even more motivation to make the change before May. Even if your audience isn’t particularly likely to convert on mobile, you could be missing out on leads and traffic that is going to your competitors instead.

You can use the Google mobile-friendly tool to make sure your site passes the bar and won’t be impacted by the coming update.

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