Mobile-first indexing
Today we’re announcing that after a year and a half of careful experimentation and testing, we’ve started migrating sites that follow the best practices for mobile-first indexing.
To recap, our crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have typically used the desktop version of a page’s content, which may cause issues for mobile searchers when that version is vastly different from the mobile version. Mobile-first indexing means that we’ll use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking, to better help our – primarily mobile – users find what they’re looking for.
We continue to have one single index that we use for serving search results. We do not have a “mobile-first index” that’s separate from our main index. Historically, the desktop version was indexed, but increasingly, we will be using the mobile versions of content.
We are notifying sites that are migrating to mobile-first indexing via Search Console. Site owners will see significantly increased crawl rate from the Smartphone Googlebot. Additionally, Google will show the mobile version of pages in Search results and Google cached pages.
Not digital marketing, just marketing
Findings from the Gartner 2015-2016 Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Spend Survey clearly show that the term “digital marketing” is on the wane. The survey reports that many chief marketing officers are “done” with the term digital marketing – it’s just called marketing now. The report states that 98 per cent of marketers no longer make a clear distinction between marketing online and offline and say the disciplines are merging. However, only about a third those surveyed said that digital marketing techniques are fully incorporated into the overall marketing operation. While the term “digital marketing’ may feel overused, some marketing teams still have a learning curve ahead of them.
Fighting Engagement Bait on Facebook
People have told us that they dislike spammy posts on Facebook that goad them into interacting with likes, shares, comments, and other actions. For example, “LIKE this if you’re an Aries!” This tactic, known as “engagement bait,” seeks to take advantage of our News Feed algorithm by boosting engagement in order to get greater reach. So, starting this week, we will begin demoting individual posts from people and Pages that use engagement bait.
