Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots: February 2020, Week 4

Greetings and welcome to another episode of Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots – a weekly digest wherein we assemble and write about the most interesting and often disruptive events and pieces of news that took place within the digital marketing landscape over the past 7 days (or so). 

In this “February 2020: Week 4” edition, our readers can find out details about the following events: 

• Facebook Launches “Creator Studio” App to Help Content Creators Manage Pages On the Go
• The 2nd Part of Google’s Nofollow Update is Starting March 1st, 2020
• Google to Start Highlighting Image Licensing Information in Image Search Results
• New Google Local SERP Update
• It’s Now Much Easier to Share Audience Lists Across Google Ads Accounts…

…and more. 

Let’s get down to business!

 

Facebook Launches “Creator Studio” App to Help Content Creators Manage Pages On the Go

The social media giant is rolling out an interesting app called the “Creator Studio,” available for both Android and iOS. As the name suggests, the app will come in handy to those Facebook users who are looking for a platform via which they can easily manage page content and monitoring page performance.

In their official announcement, the team behind this social media platform had this to say:

“The app is an evolution of and mobile complement to Creator Studio, the desktop hub dedicated to helping creators and publishers manage their content, track performance, and connect meaningfully with their audiences on Facebook. The new experience offers the same actionable insights and meaningful engagement metrics, all from the ease of a mobile device.”

Below is a screenshot taken from their Creator Studio blog post:

(Source: Facebook)

It appears that the Creator Studio mobile app won’t have all the features that are available via its desktop version, but it does offer numerous handy traits to those who need to manage pages on the go.

 

The 2nd Part of Google’s Nofollow Update is Starting March 1st, 2020

The SEO landscape was forever-altered in late 2019 when Google announced a two-part update regarding the way it treats nofollow links. The first ranking-related update took place in November last year, while the second update that will influence the way nofollow links are crawled and indexed will come into effect on March 1, 2020.

Basically, Google will start treating nofollow links “as a hint” for the purposes of crawling and indexing.

As for whether (and to what extent) this update will impact rankings, certain rules might soon surface according to which Google will choose what pages to crawl and index. 

According to SEJ: “It’s not far fetched that Google will choose not to index low-quality pages.” 

We will see how this plays out. 

 

Google to Start Highlighting Image Licensing Information in Image Search Results

Google is currently testing a new, badge-based way of displaying image licensing information within Google image search results. It will provide websites a way to highlight this type of data about the images that appear on their page. 

Currently, when you google images, you have to go to Tools and then Usage Rights tab. The new update will obviate these steps by displaying a small badge indicating particular images as “licensable.” 

The user will be able to click on the image, expand it, and then have insight into where Google deems that particular visualization usable. 

“When you specify license information for the images on your website, the image can display with a Licensable badge on image thumbnails in Google Images,” as was stated at developers.google.com. “This tells people that license information is available for the image, and provides a link to the license in the Image Viewer, which offers more detail on how someone can use the image.”

 

New Google Search Local SERP Update: Branded Directory Buttons Being Displayed Above the Map

About a year ago, Google tested a local SERP feature highlighting alternative directory sources for the same query, and now it appears that there’s an updated version of the SERP that offers branded directory buttons. 

The update seems to be live in the UK, Belgium, Spain, Greece, and France, so far. 

@rustybrick do you know anything about this “find results on” field? It shows results from directory sites. First seen today for Belgium and Greece. Some SEOs from Spain & France say this is available for some months now. Do you think it can be related to the EU antitrust fine? pic.twitter.com/Zk1jwAbahC

— Michalis Logothetis (@Michalis_log) February 21, 2020

According to SEL, this new SERP change is a result of “Google’s continuing effort to comply with the European Commission’s antitrust decision in shopping search. It’s also an attempt by the company to preempt a separate antitrust action in local search.”

 

GSC Is Launching New Tools to Assist With Website Moves

Google is about to roll out new Google Search Console features within the Change of Address tool that will come in handy to those in need of a domain change. 

The update will allow website owners to notify Google when their site has been transferred from one domain or subdomain to another, and thus prompt Google to start prioritizing crawling/indexing of the new domain or subdomain, as well as make Google forward signals from the old domain or subdomain to the new address.  

New improvements to the Google Search Console Change of Address tool 🎊
✔️ Redirect validation for top 5 URLs of the moving domain.
✔️ Reminders on top of both the moving domain and the destination domain.
📖 Learn more about the tool https://t.co/RJxiJeQRjl pic.twitter.com/FEfNS9VUhd

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) February 18, 2020

Additional new features include Redirect Validation and On-Screen Reminders. More on these new Change of Address tool features here. 

 

It’s Now Much Easier to Share Audience Lists Across Google Ads Accounts

Google Ads rolled out a new way of sharing audience lists across all accounts, which should be quite useful a feature, especially for manager accounts. Prior to this change, sharing these lists from manager accounts to sub-accounts was an unnecessarily time-consuming process for advertisers and required multiple steps. 

The new feature is called Continuous Audience Sharing and it allows advertisers to quickly and easily opt-in via the settings panel. The users do, however, have to manually activate the feature within settings of their accounts. 

 

This is also the last piece of news we covered for this week’s edition of Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots. See you next week, until then, feel free to check out our previous edition!