October 2021 – SEO and Marketing News

Oct 22, 2021 by
October 2021 – SEO and Marketing News

We’re only a week into the “spookiest month” of the year and there’s already lots to speak about. The Pandora Papers have got MPs and billionaires flustered as they scramble to hide their dirty laundry and Facebook and Instagram being down for a quarter of a day apparently sent the world into something of a tailspin. Then there’s the whistleblower hearing that has everybody in the world of social media and digital marketing hanging on every word. But there’s a lot of less controversial stuff to get through this month too. So, without further ado…

Mum’s the word

Google recently announced a complete redesign of its search engine that integrates the new MUM algorithm into the mix. The results page is undergoing changes that will introduce new ways to discover and explore topics for certain searches. This new way of searching expands on the old way of searching for answers and introduces a more intuitive way to explore topics. Google will guide users down topic paths in a redesigned search experience for some searches that will apparently be “more visual.”

MUM (short for Multitask Unified Model) is a new algorithm that’s able to search across languages and images to find answers to complex questions. Users currently search Google for answers but this new way of searching will help users explore more complex tasks while also introducing an entirely different way of presenting answers, particularly with images.

Google end support for Internet Explorer

It was always going to happen sooner or later but this month, Google officially announced it was ending support for Microsoft’s long-suffering Internet Explorer. Google will still be accessible through the browser but will only return basic results. Given that only around 1% of the market actually uses Internet Explorer these days, there will be few people mourning this loss.

Facebook explain October 4 downtime

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently apologised for a six-hour-long outage that took services offline for six hours on Monday, October 4 for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. To make matters worse, many of Facebook’s internal tools and communication systems couldn’t be accessed while the network was down. Fortunately for the businesses and advertisers that depend on Facebook, the outage wasn’t nearly as bad as the one in 2019 that crippled all three services for over 24 hours.

The interruption is said to be caused by configuration changes on the routers that coordinate traffic between the data centres. Disruption of network traffic had a cascading effect on the way Facebook’s data centres communicate, which brought all services to a halt. How much of this is true and is it merely a coincidence that the outage happened on the eve of Frances Haugen’s testimony? We’ll probably never know.

Google officially the top keyword on Bing

Rather amusingly, it was recently reported that “Google” is reportedly the top query in competitor search engine Bing, at least according to a document submitted to EU’s General Court. Bloomberg reports that the evidence was submitted as Google seeks to overturn a 2018 antitrust order that resulted in a $5 billion fine. Google is accused of using its Android operating system to gain an unfair advantage over rival search engines. Evidence that “Google” is the most searched term on Bing was presented to the court to back up the company’s argument. Touché!

YouTube introduce ‘Typical Audience Retention’ data

YouTube is changing the way it reports on audience retention to make it easier for creators to understand what’s working and what’s not. This new audience retention section of YouTube Analytics reports on “key moments” in videos that audiences responded to and is designed to help YouTube creators find out what is resonating with their viewers and what’s working in terms of their content.

Since launching the key moments for audience retention report, channels have had a chance to review the data and apply the findings to their content creation strategies. One of the main pieces of feedback YouTube has heard is that it would be useful to know what’s good and what’s bad for audience retention. YouTube is responding to the feedback by adding a new segment of data called typical audience retention. This data will appear across various charts in YouTube Analytics in the form of a grey band, which makes it easy to compare actual performance to typical performance.

Google Ads budget report tracks daily campaign spend

Google Ads is introducing a new budget report that’s designed to help advertisers understand their daily and monthly spending behaviour. A current pain point with advertisers is the ability to figure out how their campaign budget is spent from day to day. The new report in Google Ads aims to remedy that while also highlighting how campaign performance was impacted by past budget changes. In the report, you can also find a projection of how much you’re likely to spend on Google Ads by the end of the month. This is something advertisers have wanted for ages and, to be honest, it’s about time!