March Industry News Round Up

Two Major Google Updates Over February

At the beginning of February Google rolled out a new algorithm update which had an effect on their processing of backlinks. Some webmasters reported a high fluctuation in search rankings for their sites,  with some sites benefiting massively from the update and some losing rankings.

One week after this on the 7th of February, a larger algorithm update occurred. This time reports speculate that this part of the update was aimed at content and user experience signals (UI/UX). This update caused further inconsistency in search rankings for a lot of sites.

Google Updates Adverts

Also in February Google changed the colors of its “Ad” tags used on paid search adverts white, with a green outline. This replaces the solid green colour of the previous “Ad” tags.

The new colour blends the “Ad” tag even more into the links which they are placed next to. Google has changed the colour of the tag twice in the previous year, from solid yellow to solid green, then to this variant.

Changes like this are often experimental initially then rolled out on a wider scale if the data proves that it makes the ads perform better. This change makes the adverts look less like as ads, therefore they may get more clicks.

Ad Tag Changes

Search results now support emojis

Also in search news, Google have confirmed that emojis are back in the search results. Emojis have also been recently observed in some AdWords results:

Emojis search results

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