The new month is here, so let’s recap the most important news from last month.
Google News – October 2022
Chat in Google Shopping
Some images were surfing around Twitter revealing a new Google feature that might be a part of a new experiment. In Google Shopping apart from product and delivery info, there’s a new chat button. It’s yet another feature, that should bring customers and business closer.
It just a test, but it should probably appear if your Google Merchant Center and Google My Business are connected and you have the chat feature enabled.
Give it a try.
Source: SEO Roundtable
Google: More Seamless Implementation
Google is introducing a new Google tag for better and more quality data, which links Google products together without the need of code change. If you want to find out the coverage of gtag on your site, navigate to Google Ads, Google Analytics or you can find it in Google Tag Manager under Admin and Tag Coverage.
The Google tag should make the implementation easier with one centralized and unified process. This should guarantee faster and more seamless conversion setup.
Find out more about Google tag.
Source: Ads & Commerce Blog
Hello, Looker Studio
You might have noticed, but there’s been a business decision at Google. Our well-known analysis tool is changing its name from Data Studio to Looker Studio. The main reason behind this change is to unify Google’s business intelligence platform under one roof. Google acquired Looker platform back in 2019, since then it’s part of Google Cloud.
Apart from the name change, there are some other news. There will be a new version named Looker Pro, which will be paid and should offer extra support.
Find out more here.
Source: Google Cloud & Search Engine Land
Site Name Replacing SEO Title?
Google started showing site names instead of SEO titles when searching for brand queries on mobile. According to Google’s documentation, Google currently supports site name only on domain level and only for homepage.
The main reason behind this change is to help users easily recognize a brand’s website in Search. In addition to site name, the favicon is yet another feature to help with that. Google is still testing this feature, so sometimes it will show the site name and sometimes not.
The site name should be defined in your website’s structured data.
Find out more here.
Source: Google Search Central
How to Notify Google About New Content?
Google is regularly crawling your web (the regularity depends on often you publish new content) in order to feed its index with new pages. How can we help Google to index new content a little quicker?
John Mueller got a similar question on Twitter. The answer is sitemap and how you work with it. According to him, it’s not enough just adding your sitemap to robots.txt.
The best practice is to ping your sitemap whenever there’s new content in there if you want Google to notice it faster. Although, he doesn’t recommends pinging your sitemap if there’s no change to it.
As mentioned on the support page, Google checks the sitemap only the first time it comes across it.
So, how can you ping Google about your new content? Here’s a quick tutorial.
Source: Twitter @JohnMu & Google Search Central
Google Spam Update in Search
Here comes the first Google’s algorithm update this year, which focuses on spammy content. It is named after the month it’s released in – October 2022 Spam Update.
The last spam update was back in November 2021.
Google’s automatic systems can automatically detect spammy pages, but sometimes a helping hand is needed. That’s when algorithm updates like this come in.
If you experience a drop in traffic from organic search, you might have been hit by this update. Find out more here.
Source: Google Search Central
New Options in Performance Max Campaigns
Google is slowly, but surely preparing for the holiday season. That’s why they are releasing yet another update for PMax campaigns.
Google released a new tool called Performance Planner, which can predict the performance of your campaigns. It take into consideration various elements and signals. Using this tool, you can, for example, plan your campaign’s budget. Find out more here.
Another new feature is asset planning. Using automated rules, you can manage when your assets should run. Pretty neat, right?
But we are not stopping there. Here’s one more feature that can make a huge difference. Google is adding 10 more headlines (instead of 5) to PMax campaigns. This should give advertisers more space to experience with different headlines and give machine learning more data to work with.
Find out more here.
Source: Google Ads Help & Search Engine Land
Facebook & Instagram News – October 2022
Instagram News
Here’s a quick recap of news from Instagram in October:
- Instagram is testing a click-to-action button in organic posts.
- 60-seconds videos are here instead of 15-seconds. This should give users more space to experiment with their creativity.
- Public messages should help you easily engage with your followers by sending them a message in bulk for example about your new posts.
- Instagram Notes will let you post your status, how you feel – so basically like a Facebook status. There’s a difference though – the note can be only 60 characters long and will disappear after 24 hours.
Some of these features are not yet globally available.
Source: Social Media Today & Hootsuite