Recent Headlines in Social Media & Search: June 2015
By Ashley on June 18, 2015 in Social Media
Services: Law Firm Website Design . SEO . Internet Marketing . Law Firm Marketing Guide . Content Marketing . PPC
Search News
- Yahoo Maps will completely shut down by the end of June. Yahoo local listings will still remain, but Yahoo will no longer support maps.yahoo.com. You can read the full reports here and additional details here.
- Search Engine Land reports Google will unverify your listing if you have not logged in for 6 months. They will first try contacting the managers of the account, but if unresponsive the listing will be need to be verified again.
- Marketing Land has announced an update on Mobilegeddon. There are many sites that have been hit hard from the mobile update, but some sites that aren’t mobile friendly have seemed to stay still. Last.fm, cars.com, autotrader.com, and Bloomberg.com were some of the sites that lost the most rankings in mobile search.
- Google confirms official name of “answer boxes” at the top of a search is a featured snippet. Two other internal names have been released: Knowledge cards and Live Results. All definitions are laid out in this article.
- New announcements have been made about Google’s algorithms Penguin and Panda. Penguin will soon run in real time, Panda will be refreshed soon, and both will run faster. Joh Mueller of Google would not clarify what “run faster” means exactly. See full details here.
- There have been reports of Google displaying knowledge graphs for tending news. The SEM Post uncovered this while doing a search for a missing woman by name. You can see the example here.
- Gary Illyes from Google mentioned they have plans to improve HTTPS and secure search will have a larger impact in the future. In the past he stated HTTPS was more of a tie breaker giving one site more leverage than another if they would otherwise rank the same. There has been no official announcement as to the details of this improvement to secure search.
- Yelp has started flagging review fraud. If they have found that certain businesses have solicited for reviews they will add an alert and include the evidence they found to justify it. See an example of an alert here.
- A few Google patent applications have surfaced. If enacted they photos taken of a business location could be used to determine if a business truly exists at this address or not. Potentially this could cause virtual offices to become targeted and removed from the web. See full details here.
Social News
- Facebook has introduced animated gifs in the news feed, but has not allowed this feature to be used for pages yet.
- Facebook has issued “Saved replies” to select business page owners allowing you to save a reply for later use and then search through this list.
- Facebook has been rolling out their response rate feature to more people. Your response rate is calculated based on how fast you reply to incoming messages. To receive a public response icon of “very responsive” on your page you must respond to 90% of your messages and maintain a median response time of 5 minutes for all replies you have sent. Here’s the full announcement from Facebook.
- Twitter now allows advertisers to target people on mobile devices based on their installed apps. There are different categories you can select from that will help you reach users who have downloaded similar apps.
Have you heard about any news that we didn’t include in this article? Let us know in the comments below.
