SEO Wash-up Monday 13th April

Google Updates

Google Ads enables audience sharing – Google has announced that you can now enable continuous audience sharing in your manager accounts. This means that you do not have to share them manually all the time, but rather just enable it and Google will continually share the audience lists across accounts.

They mention that whether your goal is to increase sales or build up brand awareness, remarketing to users who have already engaged with your website can actually help you grow your business. So with a manager account, before you share audience lists across accounts, usually it would have required multiple steps to set up. With the new audience sharing, it is easier to quickly share your audience lists, you can now enable continuous audience sharing in your manager accounts.

They also mention that if you opt in for the audience sharing, any remarketing lists that you have created in your manager account will be shared with all of your existing and future sub-accounts. With the accounts, you can receive lists from multiple manager accounts and you still have control over which lists are active.

Google’s change of address tool adds redirect validation – They have added new features to the change of address tool within the Google search console. There are two features; the first one that helps you validate your move with redirect validation and the second feature reminds you or another user who has access to search console that the site is moving.

• Redirect validation for top 5 URLs of the moving domain.             
• Reminders on top of both the moving domain and the destination domain.

Google testing huge images in search results – You may have noticed a few weeks back that Google had been testing this more open design. Well now it seems that they are back at it with testing huge images in search results.

Google posts supports multiple photos & videos – You can now upload multiple photos or videos to your Google posts in Google My Business. Whereas previously, you can only upload one image or video per Google Post but it seems that you can do up to ten.

Bing Updates

New Bing webmaster tools – They have mentioned that phase one of the new Bing webmaster tools is in the works at SMX West. With the refreshed portal, it is being built with key principles of – keeping the design cleaner and responsive with faster and more actionable tools.

They have updated the backend datastore to improve the data extraction and redesigned the user experience to make it more user friendly and intuitive. Keeping the need of users in mind, the portal has responsive design which provides the flexibility to the user to access it across devices.

The new portal will have 3 key features in the first phase;

• Backlinks – The Inbound Links report in the current portal is integrated with the Disavow links tool to become the new Backlinks report in the refreshed portal.
• Search performance – Page Traffic and Search Keywords reports are also integrated as one and are a part of the new Search Performance report.
• Sitemaps – The Sitemaps page is the refreshed Sitemaps page of the current portal