Friday, February 24, 2017

SearchCap: AMP in search, search pictures and more

searchcap-header-v2-scap

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

  • Links to AMP content are showing up outside of search results
    Feb 24, 2017 by Barb Palser

    With several popular distribution apps now linking to Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) content, columnist Barb Palser notes that the format is taking root outside of Google search — likely to provide an optimal experience for mobile users.

  • Search in Pics: Google cigar box guitar, branded airplane head covers & a skateboard
    Feb 24, 2017 by Barry Schwartz

    In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more. Google cigar box guitar: Source: Instagram Google Cloud umbrella: Source: Twitter Google building blocks: Source: Instagram […]

  • The 5 Pillars of Marketing Automation Success
    Feb 24, 2017 by Digital Marketing Depot

    Learn how agencies can use marketing automation to establish a strong foundation for their clients. By taking just a few easy steps, you can ensure they’ll get the most out of the platform from day one. In this white paper from Sharp Spring, you will learn: how to help your clients identify and acquire qualified […]

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Search News From Around The Web:

Industry

Link Building

SEO

SEM / Paid Search

Search Marketing

The post SearchCap: AMP in search, search pictures and more appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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The 5 Pillars of Marketing Automation Success

Learn how agencies can use marketing automation to establish a strong foundation for their clients. By taking just a few easy steps, you can ensure they’ll get the most out of the platform from day one.

In this white paper from Sharp Spring, you will learn:

  • how to help your clients identify and acquire qualified leads every day.
  • best practices for nurturing and communicating with leads.
  • tips for educating your clients’ sales reps on marketing automation.

Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download this white paper.

The post The 5 Pillars of Marketing Automation Success appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Links to AMP content are showing up outside of search results

The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) standard was designed to bring the fast-loading, clean experience of native apps to the open web. With most large publishers now producing AMP versions of their content, distribution platforms and other referrers are starting to experiment with AMP as an alternative to standard outbound links and app web views.

Publishers might see this trend in their AMP referral analytics. At Relay Media, we’ve tracked an increase in non-Google referrals to the AMP content we convert for publishers — beyond the usual traffic from users sharing AMP links on social media. Here are our top non-Google referral sources over the past five months:

Google Analytics weekly sessions, October 9, 2016 through February 18, 2017.

Google Analytics weekly sessions, October 9, 2016, through February 18, 2017

Google still represents about 80 percent of total AMP referral sessions to Relay Media’s platform, with another 8 percent categorized as “(direct) / (none)” in Google Analytics. Identifiable non-Google sources represent around 10 percent of total referral sessions. It’s a modest piece of the pie, but growing in number and volume.

At site level, non-Google sources can contribute a greater share of referrals to topical and niche news publishers. For example, one publisher is getting 25 percent of its AMP referrals from the LinkedIn app. Another sees 9 percent of its AMP referrals from Bleacher Report’s Team Stream app. Yet another is now getting 22 percent of AMP referrals from the Flipboard app, which suddenly appeared as a significant AMP referrer to Relay Media’s platform in early February.

(Pinterest is another big advocate of AMP. Pinterest generally doesn’t send a lot of traffic to news-focused publishers, but might appear as a top referrer for the type of lifestyle content that drives engagement on that platform.)

It’s easy for any referrer to surface AMP pages instead of standard mobile pages, since each AMP-enabled web page has a header tag pointing to its AMP URL. Instead of loading a potentially sluggish, jerky mobile web page with intrusive ads and pop-ups, apps can load the reliably fast and clean AMP version for a better overall user experience. Here’s how AMPs appear in LinkedIn’s app:

LinkedIn’s mobile app loads AMP articles when available.

LinkedIn’s mobile app loads AMP articles when available.

In this example, the LinkedIn app is displaying a Google-validated and cached AMP; note the cdn.ampproject.org URL in the viewer. LinkedIn uses a lightning bolt icon next to the publisher name on the linking post, so it’s easy to tell the link goes to an AMP if you know what to look for.

Other apps link to AMPs transparently, without any visual cues. A publisher would need to monitor their analytics — or notice that the linked page is AMP — to know it’s happening. Here’s the experience of clicking through an AMP link in Flipboard’s app:

Flipboard's app links to AMPs transparently.

Flipboard’s app links to AMPs transparently.

None of these companies has suggested that AMP content will be prioritized over non-AMP content; for now, it seems they’re simply looking to provide the best experience available for each piece of content.

In addition to distribution platforms, at least one publisher is using AMP to populate its own branded apps. In this recent AMP Project blog post, German news publisher Shz.de describes rebuilding its apps using AMP to reduce development and maintenance cost, with significant gains in performance and user engagement.

Meanwhile, web performance and security company Cloudflare launched its own AMP cache in January, along with a feature called Accelerated Mobile Links. Publishers on Cloudflare’s CDN can configure the service so that any outbound links on the publisher’s website will load the AMP version of the linked page (when available) in Cloudflare’s AMP viewer, which looks a lot like Google’s AMP viewer. This ensures an optimal experience with the linked content — and enables the user to easily close the viewer and return to the linking website. See Cloudflare’s demo here.

The common theme across these examples is that AMP can provide a new and much-needed level of quality assurance to cross-property linking. The goal is to make traversing the open web a more seamless experience for users, and “de-risk” external links in Google’s environments and everywhere else.

The takeaway for publishers is that distribution platforms and other referrers will probably continue to explore AMP as an efficient and user-friendly mobile content standard. This activity is still very nascent, but publishers should monitor analytics and ensure their AMPs are optimized for engagement and monetization. AMP was incubated by Google last year; 2017 could be the year it branches out.

The post Links to AMP content are showing up outside of search results appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Search in Pics: Google cigar box guitar, branded airplane head covers & a skateboard

In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more.

Google cigar box guitar:


Source: Instagram

Google Cloud umbrella:


Source: Twitter

Google building blocks:


Source: Instagram

Google skateboard wall art:


Source: Twitter

Google branded airplane seat head covers:


Source: Twitter

The post Search in Pics: Google cigar box guitar, branded airplane head covers & a skateboard appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Thursday, February 23, 2017

SearchCap: Google penalty, the KKK & Gboard

searchcap-header-v2-scap

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Search News From Around The Web:

Link Building

Searching

SEO

SEM / Paid Search

The post SearchCap: Google penalty, the KKK & Gboard appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Natural News was not banned from Google over fake news

Natural News, a controversial alternative medicine website according to Wikipedia, has been delisted from Google. The news site themselves confirmed being removed from Google and recently claimed Google banned them because the site was pro-Trump.

Google has confirmed the site was not removed for its political views but rather because of a webmaster guidelines violation. A Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land:

We don’t comment on individual sites, but if we find that a site violates one or more of our Webmaster Guidelines we may take manual action against it. For webmasters who have questions about their own sites, our Webmaster team provides support through platforms such as the Webmaster Forums. Once a site has remedied the problem, the webmaster can submit the site for reconsideration.

Natural News said in its post that “Google sent no warning whatsoever to our ‘webmaster tools’ email address on file with them,” but not all penalties will receive a notification via Google Search Console. More extreme and deceptive violations will not receive such notifications.

While some are suggesting the ban is related to Google’s interest in tackling the web’s “fake news” problem, Google has nothing in its webmaster guidelines about such sites. Google would not penalize or delist a web site for “fake news,” let alone being controversial. (Even some who dislike Natural News aren’t sure it qualifies as fake news.)

Google has many penalties that can result in a site like Natural News being demoted or delisted but, like we said above, fake news is not one of them.

The post Natural News was not banned from Google over fake news appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Four U.S. Presidents in the KKK? Google’s latest problem with featured answers

If you’re trying to research U.S. Presidents who may have been Ku Klux Klan members – don’t believe everything you see on Google. While there appears to be no conclusive evidence any actually were Klan members, Google lists four.

A Google search for “presidents in the klan” returns a featured answer listing four specific U.S. presidents. Technically called a “featured snippet,” this is where Google has so much confidence that the facts from a website are absolutely correct, it elevates the website’s content by displaying it in a special box above all other listings:

The site providing this answer actually took the content from another site that, in turn, appears to be using an article posted in various places across the web, making it difficult to know who, or what site, originally published the content.

Wikipedia — which isn’t perfect, but is under constant review by editors — dismisses the charges against presidents Warren G. Harding and Harry S. Truman. The other two, William McKinley  aren’t discussed.

The failed direct answer came to our attention via Peter Shulman, a professor at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, who tweeted about it after a student cited Google as a reference:

A related search for “presidents in the kkk” gives the same featured answer. A search for “presidents in the ku klux klan” also serves up a featured snippet, but with a slightly different list of U.S. Presidents pulled from a different source.

This isn’t the first time one of Google’s featured snippets led users astray. Three years ago, Google claimed Barack Obama was the King of the United States. In June of 2015, a featured snippet pointed users to a religious website for queries asking, “what happened to the dinosaurs.”

Last year, Google gave a one-sided answer to a political question, and elevated an answer for “are women evil” — which resulted in this embarrassment happening on Google Home:

While, technically, this is a different issue than Google’s fight to combat fake news, an argument can be made that Google’s failed featured answers play right into the larger problem around false news sources being widely circulated online.

The post Four U.S. Presidents in the KKK? Google’s latest problem with featured answers appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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