Here are some items of note from the digital marketing world we spotted during the week of October 4, 2021 …
Google announced an experiment in which more “persistent” search results appear in the browser. One of these, called “Side Panel Search” keeps recent search results visible in the browser window. If someone clicks on a search result, links to other pages will stay visible. This makes it easier for users to click through to another site … potentially a competitor’s site. Experiments like these may not ever become true features, but it’s still good to keep an eye on what’s happening.
I doubt it escaped anyone’s notice that Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were down for most of the day on Monday. What happened? Well, there was a massive mistake made that basically broke off all communication between Facebook’s data centers and the internet. The BBC has a very nice explanation of what happened to Facebook web properties that day.
WrightIMC CEO, Tony Wright, was featured in the “Ask an SEO” section of Search Engine Journal this week. In the article, Tony shared some great information about how to optimize images to rank better in Google Image Search. One key: make sure images are described in text. Even though the search engines are getting better at recognizing and understanding images, they still handle text a lot better.
Tony was also a guest on the “Suds & Search” podcast, hosted by Mark Bealin of SearchLab. During the conversation, Tony and Mark talked about proactive online reputation management, paid search, being on the Moz Recommended List, and more. It’s a great conversation … please listen in!
