November 2021 –  SEO and Marketing News

Nov 26, 2021 by
November 2021 –  SEO and Marketing News

We’re living through some very interesting times indeed. With the media seeming to have briefly forgotten about COVID thanks to some good old fashioned “Tory sleaze” and Christmas already finding its way into our homes and retail establishments, there’s certainly a lot to keep us entertained at the moment.

But when it comes to the world of online marketing, the big news is the latest Google core update, which is the first piece of news we’ll be covering this month.

Google core update rolling out right now

The third Google core update of 2021 has just rolled out. It is a bit surreal to see Google roll out this major update during the biggest online holiday shopping season and with Black Friday and Cyber Monday less than two weeks away. But according to Google’s Danny Sullivan, while he “gets the concern some might have about an update at this time of year” the reality is that core updates don’t really represent a major change for most users. Well, Danny, that remains to be seen.

Snowden calls out Google over search engine’s privacy

Edward Snowden, the individual responsible for one of the most significant information leaks in US history, decided on Tuesday that it was time to call out Google’s search engine. He posted, “Is it just me, or have search results become absolute garbage for basically every site? It’s nearly impossible to discover useful information these days” on Twitter earlier this week. Snowden’s biggest gripe, it seemed, was with Google’s search engine being “inaccessible to anyone who cares about privacy.” He called it “hostile” since some scripts required captchas and because of page redirects for mandatory, scripts-required cookies for ad tracking and user tracking. You could ask yourself “does he know something we don’t?” But when Google’s Danny Sullivan (making his second appearance this month) asked him for examples, Snowden was stumped.

Facebook/Meta launches new groups features

The other big piece of news this month has been Facebook’s rebranding as a part of Mark Zuckerberg’s bizarre “metaverse.” To help prepare users for this shift, the company has launched new features for Facebook Groups to improve communication between members, strengthen communities, and give admins more ways to customise their experiences.

Twitter Blue launches in the US

While it doesn’t hold quite the same marketing acumen as Facebook, Twitter is still a social media platform that thousands of advertisers use to promote their wares. This is why it should perhaps concern them slightly that a new subscription service has launched that completely erases paid ads from a user’s Twitter feed. Twitter Blue is a premium service that launched in the US earlier this month but, honestly, we can’t see it catching on as the premium features offered (ad-free articles, customisation options and early access to beta features) don’t feel like much to write home about.

Facebook shuts down facial recognition

Facebook recently announced it is shutting down its facial recognition technology company-wide within weeks. The social media giant cited general concern by individuals about the use of facial recognition and a lack of agreed-up regulations and standards as one reason they chose to do away with the use of facial recognition. This means people will no longer be able to turn on face recognition for suggested tagging or see a suggested tag with their name in photos and videos they may appear in. A godsend for those of us that prefer to remain as anonymous as possible on social media.

Google launches new version of PageSpeed Insights

Google is launching a new version of PageSpeed Insights that aims to address many of the challenges of the existing version. That version has remained largely unchanged for years and still uses 10-year-old code. With the update rolling out later this year, Google hopes to make interpreting the report easier for developers so they can quickly act on the insights included in it.