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Top SEO News (July-August)

• Publishers have found a way to beat Facebook's ranking algorithms July 25 The AdAge Edition noted that publishers have found a way to beat Facebook's ranking algorithms. They began to attach short videos in MP4 format instead of pictures; since videos re usually given priority in the users' tapes. New tactics are used by large publishers, such as BuzzFeed, and smaller ones, among them is ForShitsAndGiggles. For example, the 48-second "video" published by BuzzFeed has received more than 1.4 million views in just a couple of weeks: Other examples also include short videos that last only a few seconds. The Facebook representative in the AdAge commentary says that the social network does not prioritize the video before other types of publications in the news line. But if the user usually interacts with the video, he will often see posts of this format in his tape: "We are constantly improving the news line to show you the most relevant stories, and prevent attempts to deceive the system." Nevertheless, Russ Torres, the USA Today Network vice president of video content and strategy believes that in fact Facebook promotes the video in line. BuzzFeed and ForShitsAndGiggles have not yet commented on this aspect.

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• Google will keep in secret the number of search quality algorithms Aug 14 How many search quality algorithms does Google use? This question was put to the John Mueller, the company’s employee during the last video conference with webmasters. The question was: "When you mention Google's quality algorithm, how many algorithms do you use?" Mueller responded the following: "Usually we do not talk about how many algorithms we use. We publicly state that we have 200 factors when it comes to scanning, indexing and ranking. Generally, the number of algorithms is a casual number. For instance, one algorithm can be used to display a letter on the search results page. Therefore, we believe that counting the exact number of algorithms that Google uses is not something that is really useful [for optimizers]. From this point of view, I can’t tell you how many algorithms are involved in Google search."

• Google updates the guidelines for assessors third time this year Aug 05 It's third time this year that Google has updated the guidelines for assessors (experts assessing the quality of search results and the pages displayed in it). This time, the changes are even smaller than in the previous version of the document, which was published in May. The latest innovations will mainly be interested to SEO specialists who work with non-English pages. For instance, the pseudoscientific and fake content details have been clarified, comments displaying pornographic ads on websites that do not contain adult content have been removed, new examples of pages with the lowest quality have been introduced, as well as a completely new section on the display of results in English for non-English-speaking locales. There are changes that are purely of a natural style: for example, the selection of some words in italics has been removed. The section on using the Foreign Language label for pages in a foreign language like Ukrainian and Russian is replaced with an example of Catalan and Spanish. A complete guide for assessors Google is a 160 pages book. It should be recalled that the Google assessors guide has already been updated in March and May this year. The main changes aimed at combating dubious content in search results took place this March. The largest May updates affected the assessment of the quality of news websites, in particular the use of the "Upsetting-Offensive" label that was introduced in March.

• Google Image Search loses market share to Amazon and Facebook Aug 14 The share of Google in the search market grew from 58.84% in October last year to 64.8% in March. At the same time, the share of Google Image Search fell to 21.8% in favor of Amazon and Facebook. This information has come from analysts of the American company Jumpshot in partnership with co-founder Moz Rand Fishkin. During the research, they analyzed search data in Google Search, Images, Maps, YouTube, Yahoo, Bing, Amazon, Facebook, Reddit and Wikipedia for the period from October to May with a sole purpose to determine the resources that accounted for the largest number of search engines Sessions and traffic. Generally, at this period Amazon's share went up from 0.4% to 2.30%, and Facebook's 0.8% to 1.5%. Bing and Yahoo both showed growth of up to 2.4%, while Google Maps was ranked up to 1.2%. The activity of Google Search, Bing, Amazon and Facebook showed growth, while Google Images, YouTube, Yahoo and Google Maps lost their positions. The report also included data on search volumes and CTR in the US. The number of search sessions in Google has exceeded 30 billion a month (as of October). By May, the growth trend remained at the level of 10-15% compared to the previous year. The results of the organic search in went down to the bottom. In December they were ranked at 54% (despite the fact that in January and February of the same year their level was at 57% and 56%, respectively, and taking into account the traditional activity stop after the winter holidays). November gave the highest rates of search activity without clicks and was ranked at 45.5%. At the same time, the lowest indicator was in October, which is only 40.3%. According to Jumpshot, the largest traffic is generated by Google: about 63% in May, with about 60% in October. During this period, YouTube also showed better results and went up by 0.2%, while Amazon rose by 0.1%. Traffic from Facebook, Yahoo, Reddit, Imgur and Bing almost died, and that’s only Wikipedia that remained at the same level.

• Google does not consider a sticky footer as a violation of the rules Aug 04 In most cases Google does not penalize or lower websites for using a sticky footer. Thus, there is no need to worry about possible problems due to the use of this technique. This information was stated by the Google search representative Gary Illyes on Twitter. At the same time, Illyes advises to avoid obsession, so as not to cause irritation among users when sticking the footer. Nah, I would not worry about that, but do not try to make them as less obtrusive as possible. You really do not want to annoy your users. - Gary "鯨 理" Illyes (@methode) July 28 It should be recalled that in April the search rep, John Mueller, said that Google does not punish websites for posting end-to-end text and links into the footer of the page. The content of this block is not regarded by the search engine as the main page on the website. Earlier this month it became known that the location of internal links on the page does not affect their weight.

• Google uses ccTLD for geotargeting and Search Console settings July 25 John Mueller, Google spokesman described the way the search engine targets search results for users living in different regions of the globe. According to Mueller, geographic targeting uses factors such as ccTLDs or Search Console settings. For geotargeting we use mostly the ccTLD or search console setting, so place the server. — John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) July 7 Earlier Google analyzed the server location determining the region where the website should be ranked best. Apparently, now this factor is not counted.