SEO Wash-up Monday 22nd January

SEO Wash-up Monday 22nd January

Stricter rules on YouTube that can carry ads

It has been announced by Google that they have rolled out a few changes to how it will be monetizing content streamed on YouTube. These changes have been implemented due to repeated advertiser backlash over the past year.

It was mentioned in a blog post that last year was a difficult year, having several issues affecting the YouTube community and advertising partners.

So what is the actual problem?

Well it is mostly the brand advertisements that are appearing on extremist, racist and other objectionable content as well as badly behaving YouTube stars whose channels are part of the Google Preferred premium advertising program. Also alarming content that is targeted to children, which largely stems from a lack of oversight, controls and transparency.

A new ranking algorithm designed for Google Mobile Search

Speed Update is a new ranking algorithm that is designed for mobile search. Google has announced that it will go live around July 2108, so webmasters have time to prepare their webpages. However, it will only impact a small percentage of queries, only pages that are the slowest to users will be impacted by the update.

It applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.

It is recommended by Google that you use the new updated Page Speed report and tools like LightHouse to measure page speed and make improvements.

However, the issue with the page speed Insights report is it doesn’t have enough data to reliably measure smaller sites, so the speed portion of the report is unavailable for those users.

Google said that the page speed was a ranking factor but it was focused on desktop searches back in 2010. But, in July 2018, Google will look at how fast your mobile pages are and use that as a ranking factor in mobile search. They has been promising to have a look at mobile page speed for years now and now it is finally coming.

Google has not been clear whether these ranking factors will be applied to desktop searches.

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