SEO Wash-up Monday 21st May

Google Updates

• Algorithm – It has been reported that Google’s algorithm changed recently with web sites fluctuating in the search results.
• Snippets – Google has confirmed that it will cut down the search results snippets length – although they increased the max characters shown in the search results snippets box to 320 characters a few months ago, they won’t give a number on the maximum or minimum length of the snippets. It seems that they have cut it down to 160 or less characters over the past week. The rich snippets are not impacted by this change
• News – Google News has dropped support for the stand out meta tag and Editors’ Pick feature. Their algorithm will write articles based on your content but will not be used in search
• Google Post video – Google Post’s new feature seems to be fully functioning properly and now you can add Google Posts with video messages in your Google My Business section of Google Posts.
• Chrome – They are making changes to how Chrome labels HTTPS and HTTP sites in the future. In September 2018, they will be removing the ‘secure’ wording and HTTPS scheme in Chrome version 69. In July the Chrome version 68 will mark all HTTP sites as not secure.

 Bing updates

• Hotel booking experience – You can now simply search for hotels in a desired location, and when you click on one of the options you’ll see a full-page experience which lists options by price, location, rating, and availability by date.
• Weather results – They’ve enhanced the weather results in Bing to help you plan your day even better as you can now see a live radar map for the city of your interest, as well as easily accessible links to your favourite weather sites.
• Homepage contest – Bing has recently launched the #AmplifyIngenuity Urban Photo Contest, this contest gives the Bing’s community of photography enthusiasts the opportunity to share their photos of amazing things in cities for a chance to be featured on the homepage.
• Intelligent Search Features – Bing has launched new intelligent search features. Some of the features include aggregated facts across multiple sources for a given topic. Bing will give you multiple answers for how-to question and they also upgraded their image search object detection zoom feature to add in top fashion categories.

Bing Ads are releasing some additional productivity and time-saving tools for their users to manage their campaigns via Bing Ads Editor. Below are a few of the tools;

• Labels management for Mac – This will help search marketers organize their accounts in ways that are more important for them so they can filter and pull results and make changes faster.
• Structured snippet management – Structured snippets function as an additional tool in text ads that allows advertisers to create lists of a category that is now a section in the Shared Library of Editor
• Bulk undo for any changes – if you have made several changes and need to do it in one go, there is now also an option to revert to the original version of what you had, effectively undoing all changes you’ve made to a campaign