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 back to your regularly scheduled Digital Weekly Roundup, this week’s news brings long-awaited Instagram features to light and offers some insight into URL slugs from John Mueller.
Google unveil the top searches of 2021
Google has announced the top ten trending searches of 2021 on their ‘Year in search’ mini-site featured on Google Trends and the results for the UK may surprise you. The top ten trending searches of the year across all terms are:
1) Euros
2) Premier League
3) Christian Eriksen
4) Covid vaccine
5) Prince Philip
6) Matt Hancock
7) Emma Raducanu
8) Sarah Everard
9) England vs Denmark
10) Sean Lock
They’ve also put together a video talking about the Year in Search here:
Instagram to bring back chronological feeds
Instagram announced via Twitter that they will bring back chronological feeds for accounts in 2022, stating they will offer the option to switch to chronological feeds or stick with the current algorithm-based feed. The full tweet reads:
“We want people to have meaningful control over their experience. We’ve been experimenting with Favorites, a way for you to decide whose posts you want to see higher up, and we’re working on another option to see posts from people you follow in chronological order.
We want to be clear that we’re creating new options — providing people with more choices so they can decide what works best for them — not switching everyone back to a chronological feed. You can expect more on this early next year!”
This was talked about in a recent senate meeting by the current head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, when he revealed this has been in development “for months” and that they will be “targetting the first quarter of next year”
Google update their Top Stories design for Desktop results
Google is currently rolling out an update for their Top Stories display, replacing the carousel design with an easier to read grouped design. A spokesperson for Google confirmed to Search Engine Land ” We’re always working to make it easier for people to dive into the most useful, timely articles available through Search to help them form a better understanding of the world and the topics they care about most,” The spokesperson also added “This newly launched feature is the desktop version of the Top stories experience you can already find on mobile”
Here’s a screenshot of the new look:
John Mueller speaks out about URL Slugs
Google’s SEO spokesman John Mueller has replied to a tweet asking how important it is to have a category/topic in the URL slug for a webpage. Mueller response is that it doesn’t affect your rankings. You can see the exchange here:
As always, thank you for reading this week’s Digital Roundup.
