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Top SEO News (July-August)

• Instagram launches tags for sponsored posts June 17 Instagram added a new feature to mark the paid posts with the "Sponsor of publication" label with the indication of the partner company. This information was reported by the service press. In the coming weeks, the new label will begin to appear in advertisements and bloggers’ “stories” all around the world. When you click on it, users will be able to go to their business partner account. The content creator and its partner will have access to statistics for each publication when the label is used. This will help them understand how subscribers interact with similar materials. Content creators will see this information in the Statistics section in Instagram, as well as their partners on their Facebook page. Instagram authorities believe that the innovation will strengthen the atmosphere of trust inside the service. To date, a new feature is only available for a small number of companies and content authors. In the coming months, developers are planning to launch it for a wide audience along with official rules and guidelines.

• Cyber attack that took place on May 12 affected 200,000 users from 150 countries July 11 The victims of the mass cyberattack that occurred on May 12 were 200 thousand users from 150 countries. This information was stated by the press-secretary of the European police department (Europol) Jen Ohn Jen Hurt. According to him, there are many affected companies, including large corporations. He also noted that the cyber attack may continue on May 15, when people come to work and turn on their computers. The virus, called WannaCry blocks access to files and requires affected users to pay $ 300 ransom in bitcoins. Unless the price is paid in three days, hackers threaten to double this amount, and after 7 they remove all files from the computer. The first reports of cyber attacks appeared in the media and social networks on Friday, May 12. According to Europol, the malware was launched from the National Health Service of England. Then it affected networks in other countries. The virus infected computer networks of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Megafon and other organizations in Russia. Proofpoint specialist Darien Hass and author of the MalwareTech blog managed to stop the spread of the virus using code to access a meaningless domain on May 13. However, the WannaCry creators released a new version of the virus, which no longer refers to this domain name. It is noted in Europol that the motivation of hackers is not fully understood. Typically, this type of attack is revenue-oriented. However, in this case, the amount of the repurchase is small. According to the ministry, only a few companies and individuals agreed to pay $ 300 to attackers, following the recommendations of law enforcement agencies. According to The Guardian, the accounts of the creators of the extortion virus received $ 42,000 from approximately 100 people. The intruders have not been revealed yet.

• Google adds tags for recipes, videos and products in the image search Aug 03 Google added tags for recipes, videos, products and GIF to the image search results. Now when searching for images, users will immediately see which type of content the individual results are related to. The Google rep commented on the new feature saying the following: "These badges will help you find those images that involve additional actions or contain more detailed information." To display a label on a website page, appropriate marking of structured data should be added: for recipes, goods or video. GIF-images Google algorithms will recognize and mark automatically, thus, markup is not needed for them. New badges will not always be displayed just like extended snippets. Filling in the fields for the recommended properties of the markup increases the chances of getting them. Google also updated its structured data verification tool. Now it processes markups for images. It should be recalled that Google started showing videos and recipes in the search results for pictures starting from last month.

• Google intends to improve the interaction of a person with AI July 25 Google announced the launch of a new research project, which goal is to study and improve the interaction between artificial intelligence (AI) and human beings. The phenomenon was named PAIR. At the moment, the program involves 12 people who will work together with Google employees in different product groups. The project also involves external experts: Brendan Meade, a professor of Harvard University and, Hol Abelson, a professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The research that will be carried out within the framework of the project is aimed at improving the user interface of "smart" components in Google services. Scientists will study the problems affecting all participants in the supply chain: starting from programmers creating algorithms to professionals who use (or will soon be using) specialized AI tools. Google wants to make AI-solutions user-friendly and understandable to them. As part of the project, Google also opened the source code for two tools: Facets Overview and Facets Dive. Programmers will be able to check the data sets for machine learning for possible problems using the tools mentioned. For instance, an insufficient sample size.

• 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.

• How Google processes pages with the Canonical and noindex attributes Aug 14 During the last video conference with webmasters, John Mueller answered the interesting question: how does the search engine process pages that both contain the Canonical and Noindex attribute? The question to Mueller was: "I once was at a seminar where I was told that if you use rel = canonical and Noindex on a page, then Canonical will transmit the Noindex canonicalized page. Is that true?". Answer: "Hmm. I don’t know. We discussed this issue for a long time, at least inside the team. In particular, what should we do in this case. Using Canonical, you are telling that two pages should be processes identically. Noindex reports that the page that contains it must be removed from the search. Therefore theoretically our algorithms can get confused and decide that you need to delete both pages. Correct? Or they can process them in different ways, taking into account Noindex attribute. As a matter of actual practice, it is most likely that algorithms will decide that the rel = canonical attribute was added by mistake."