Sean Walsh
Sean is a Director at Intelligency heading up our digital marketing and client services operations. Sean has 15+ years experiencing working both in-house and agency with brands including Lloyds, Alstom, Hitachi, Lufthansa, Viaplay, DFDS Seaways and Mercedes-Benz.
Welcome to the tenth Digital Weekly roundup, giving you the best news across the week on all happenings digital, this week offered more Google updates and quality of life features from Instagram.
Google roll out November core update
Google have rolled out yet another core update on Wednesday, dubbed the ‘November 2021 Core Update’ just in time for Black Friday, websites have seen their rankings drop and their traffic affected by the update but it’s too early to tell if rankings will stabilize or not.
Marketers and people who work in SEO have flocked to social media such as Twitter to complain about the timing of the update, stating that it will affect their potential sales to customers. Historically, Google took breaks from updating their search engine around the holiday period as a “gift to webmasters”, which was said by former Google employee Matt Cutts.
Danny Sullivan, the current Google ‘public search liaison’ has tweeted to address the concerns regarding the timing of the update:
Danny Sullivan did tweet later on in the day seeming to take on feedback regarding the timing:
If you are affected by this Google core update, unfortunately there isn’t too much you can do, however if the rankings are still low after a week or so you can look to Google’s guidance for site owners. They released a list of questions to ask yourself regarding web content which can be found here: What site owners should know about Google’s core updates
Twitter quietly announces they will stop sending users to AMP pages
Twitter have updated their AMP guidelines on their develop site to state that the site will stop sending users to AMP pages by the end of this year. Instead of sending users to AMP pages, twitter links will just send mobile users to the mobile version of a web page, which is why site owners may be seeing less traffic on any AMP pages they have.
Search engines and social media platforms are all seemingly phasing AMP out, Google also announced recently that you no longer have to have an AMP page for an article to be featured in the ‘top stories’ section of a SERP. These changes are leading site owners to ponder whether it’s still worth having an AMP version of a page, only time will tell if this hold true.
Instagram introduces the ability to delete single carousel posts
In a highly requested move, Instagram have finally allowed the ability for accounts to delete single posts within a carousel without deleting the whole post. Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, posted a video to his account on Thursday to explain the feature and how to carry it out, which can be found here:
It’s quite simple to delete a post within a carousel, just do the following:
1) Find the post where you want to delete an image, press the 3 dots in the right-hand corner and select “Edit”
2) Click the rubbish bin in the left-hand corner.
3) Confirm deletion and save your edit.
Google release the top 100 holiday products for 2021.
Google have released a document on Google Drive showing the top holiday products for 2021, divided into seven categories such as “Gaming” and “Kitchen Gear”
The guide may help shoppers decide what to get their loved ones this year, and may help businesses get some last minute popular gifts in to make some quick cash before the holiday season is over.
The list can be viewed here: Google Shopping – Holiday 100 – 2021
As always, thank you for reading this week’s digital roundup.
