After a bit of a lull over the holidays, there were some interesting tidbits of news from the digital marketing world during the first week of 2022. Here are some items we found particularly interesting …
In New Year’s Eve webmaster hangout, Google John Mueller answered a question about multi-language websites. The discussion ended up covering website quality overall. The questioner looked to better understand how a low-quality translation of high-quality content would affect the site. Several lessons came out of the discussion:
- Google’s website quality evaluations consider the entire site. That means that low-quality content or a bad user experience in one section can negatively affect other parts of the site that are of higher quality
- Don’t use machine translations – if you have a limited budget, prioritize your content and have a qualified translator do as much as you can afford to do
- Use the “Human Test” – if real people find the experience bad or the content of poor quality for whatever reason, fix it
In Search Engine Journal, Tony Wright answered a question about dealing with competition in search results from different parts of the same company. You can read Tony’s answer in full, but the short version is: Work together for the common good. Some friendly competition between divisions of a company is good, but if taken too far, it can lead to a toxic environment.
Starting on January 18th, the popular WordPress SEO plugin, Yoast, will have a version available for Shopify. This will be a great help for anyone using Shopify as their e-commerce platform. According to the article, the Shopify version of Yoast will have much the same functionality as the WordPress version but is specifically tailored to e-commerce. Unlike the WordPress version that works off a freemium model, this version will cost around $30 per month. Still, the benefits could significantly outweigh the price.
There was an update for WordPress issued today that addresses multiple vulnerabilities. If you haven’t done so already, it is highly recommended that you immediately update to WordPress version 5.8.3. For those of you who are WrightIMC clients that host your websites with us, we have already updated your WordPress software for you.
