There were quite a few interesting items that came up during the week of September 20th. Here are just a few ,,,
Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox browser, is testing a swap of the default search engine to Bing, according to a piece on Search Engine Roundtable. This is an interesting development considering that Mozilla and Google signed a 3-year deal for Google to be the default search engine on Firefox just last year. As Barry points out in the article, it makes sense for them to test things.
Google announced a new type of ad unit called “Things to Do.” This is specifically meant to connect people with events in their area. Interestingly enough, there is also a free option for this. If you’re doing events or have a venue people can visit, this is certainly worth checking out. Learn more about this new ad unit from Search Engine Journal.
Search Engine Journal also reported a vulnerability in the NinjaForms WordPress plugin. This vulnerability can allow an attacker to completely take over a website. It’s critical to log into your website on a frequent basis and run updates. Too many website owners/managers fail to do this and have no idea the problems it is causing their online presence.
Last week, we reported about some Google automotive information in search results that were causing several digital marketers in that space quite a bit of concern. One thing people were concerned about was the appearance that Google was scraping content and displaying it without attribution. This week, prompted by a question from Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz, Googler Danny Sullivan tweeted that Google licensed the information they were showing. That may alleviate some distress about the source of the data, but not the issue with lost traffic due to people getting all the information directly from the search results.
