Today in Digital Marketing - Why Google May Delete Your Web Site in Five Months

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, forget mobile-first indexing, it's mobile-only indexing, and Google may delete your brand's website from its index in a matter of months. A new WordPress feature might give your company's content more reach, but is it the right thing to do? Ipsos identifies five important trends you should know about going into a pandemic-laden holiday season, and your spreadsheet is about to get smarter pretty soon now. It's Thursday, October 15th, 2020. Happy National Pug Day.

Starting point is 00:00:30 I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. If you've been listening to this show for a while, you'll know that I've been warning you that mobile-first indexing is coming from Google. That's a big deal for some websites. What it means is that Google will only index the mobile version of your website. To be completely accurate, they've actually been using mobile first for more than a year

Starting point is 00:00:53 now, but only for sites new to their index. But we learned this week they're taking it a step further now. And if your brand's website serves different content to people on desktop than they do mobile, please listen. Because come March, not only will Google start indexing only mobile versions of your brand's webpages, they will actually delete your pages from the index which are only accessible via desktop. They'll also drop any images that are in a desktop version of a site. Remember, to be clear, nobody is deleting pages from your actual website. What we're talking about here is they are removing your pages from their index,

Starting point is 00:01:33 meaning your brand's website will no longer be findable on Google. This is the first time that they've said they're just going to straight up remove pages that aren't compliant. So if you have anything you want to be in Google, and I assume that's everything on your site, it needs to be available on mobile. And you have until March to do that, which is why I guess Google should really be calling this mobile-only indexing instead of mobile-first indexing. Google may be the dominant index, but they're not the only one. Microsoft's Bing is still there, and today they rolled out a new version of their Site Explorer tool. This is part of their Webmaster Tools platform.

Starting point is 00:02:15 It's more than a revamp, though. It's really quite a full overhaul. Site Explorer's job is to show you exactly how Bing's search bot sees your brand's website as it rolls around the web. Everything on your site it can touch, including redirects, broken links, and web pages that are being blocked by robots.txt. This is presented in a kind of file explorer interface. It'll also let you see backlink counts, and you can request manual indexing there as well. I completely dropped the ball on a story yesterday. I saw some news about WordPress integrating Twitter threads, and I thought, eh, yeah, whatever. Sure, you can make a WordPress blog post that embeds a bunch of tweets in a row. No big deal. Actually, it turns out I had it backwards.

Starting point is 00:02:56 And what it actually does might have some value for your content marketing. Rather than what I thought, which is embedding tweets in a blog post, it will actually turn a blog post into a Twitter thread. And every part of your post will go in, including images and videos. You'll need their Jetpack add-on for it. You basically click a few options, it previews where it'll break the piece up, then it'll tweet it all out. That could be a lot of tweets, depending on the length of your post, so,

Starting point is 00:03:22 you know, don't just do this for everything. And shy of manually deleting every single tweet in that storm, there's no undo. I'll be honest, I don't really know that there are that many use cases for this in the real world. Maybe if you write short posts, this is valuable. Always remember, just because it can be automated doesn't necessarily mean it should be. We are getting closer to the holiday season, and with the pandemic affecting everything, many digital marketers are getting a little anxious about what's to come this year.

Starting point is 00:03:55 Google and Ipsos has released some data from a study they did over the summer. It was all done in the US, so caveat emptor, fellow non-Americans. They found five trends that you should be aware of, quoting Google. A month-long Cyber Monday. 62% said that they will start holiday shopping earlier to avoid crowds. This means retailers will need to rethink the usual timelines for Cyber Monday and Cyber Week.

Starting point is 00:04:19 Digital newcomers are driving growth. 69% plan to shop online for the holidays more in previous years. And 77% of holiday shoppers intend to browse for gift ideas online, not in store. I don't think any of us can say we're surprised by that. But here's what I didn't expect. 66% of shoppers said they will shop more at local small businesses. I might interject to remind us all that what people tell a pollster they'll do and what they'll actually do

Starting point is 00:04:48 are often two different things. And finally, a third of shoppers reported purchasing from a brand that was new to them during COVID-19. A link to the full study is in the transcript of this episode. See the link in the notes. Snapchat has released a feature that lets users set their creations to music.

Starting point is 00:05:09 This is, of course, pretty much a direct copy from TikTok. You can add the music either before or after you shoot, and the licensing is in place for you to share it as you like. It wouldn't say exactly how many songs are in their catalog, other than the disappointingly vague millions. Like TikTok, users will be able to tap to view the song and artist's name. There's also a link to play the full song on any major streaming platform. Unlike TikTok, though, that tap will not show you other videos that use that sound.

Starting point is 00:05:35 In the U.S., Snapchat reaches 90%, 9-0, of all 13- to 24-year-olds, which is more than Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger combined. It's live on iOS right now, coming to Android later. Here's the story for my beloved data nerds out there. Google Sheets is adding something that we've all wanted for a while now, Smart Fill. This will learn patterns in your data between columns and try to auto-complete data entry. For example, said Google, if you have a column of full names, you may want to split it into a column with first names and a column with last names. As you start typing first names into

Starting point is 00:06:16 a column, Sheets will automatically look for patterns. If Sheets detects a pattern, it will generate the corresponding formula and then auto-complete the rest of the column for you, unquote. So that's cool. Also, starting today, you can use dark mode with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides on iOS devices. What's that, Android users? You're always getting shafted? No, actually, you had this before all the Apple people did.

Starting point is 00:06:46 Just a reminder that if you've got a marketing position you are trying to fill, or maybe you're looking for that next great gig, consider a classified ad right here. It's just 20 bucks. You can book it online. Link in this episode's description. Busy day at the agency today, so I will spare you the usual blah, blah blah blah. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Why Google May Delete Your Web Site in Five Months

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