DuckDuckGo is a search engine that was founded in 2008 with a focus on protecting searchers’ privacy, notably showing all searchers the same search results and refraining from building profiles of its users. Its search volume has risen steadily over the years, and in October 2020 was up to nearly 60 million queries daily. This…
On Nov. 17, Twitter ripped off the Stories feature that Snapchat popularized and Instagram popularized even further. Twitter’s version is called Fleets and unfortunately, it didn’t take long for people to find a way to subvert the 24-hour expiration timer. Twitter user donk_enby posted a thread that went viral over the weekend highlighting a bug…
Just days after Twitter premiered Fleets, its version of Stories, the company had to scale back on the roll-out to fix some bugs. But even in that short amount of time, one group in particular took advantage of the new feature: reply guys. While this isn’t wholly surprising, as reply guys have become just another…
Google has been making a big push of late with Local Services Ads, which includes its two underlying “trust certifications,” Google Guaranteed (home services) and Google Screened (professional services). And recently the company started making the Google Guaranteed badge available to businesses for a monthly fee, outside of participation in Local Services Ads (LSA). Badges in…
There are widespread reports that manual actions are disappearing from Google Search Console. If you had manual actions and they are not showing up this morning, you are not alone. Daniel Waisberg from Google said he is investigating these reports. What is a manual action? Google will issue a manual action against a site when…
Google unveiled the Page Experience update in May, coupling that announcement with a new set of metrics called Core Web Vitals and laying out its plan to remove the AMP restriction on its Top Stories carousel. Last week, the company revealed that the page experience signals in ranking will go live in May 2021. With…
Because sometimes getting ratioed isn’t explicit enough. Twitter is currently “exploring” adding a dislike button or some kind of downvoting system, presumably à la Reddit, announced the company’s product lead on Tuesday. The potential change, confirmed Twitter, is part of a larger effort to make Twitter a place amenable to more nuanced conversations. Notably,…
After what appears to be several years in development, Google has beta-launched a program for small businesses (SMBs) to help them become better marketers on Google. Called Small Business Advisors (SBA), the program offers 50-minute individualized consulting sessions on a range of products from Google My Business to Ads and Analytics to YouTube. No enterprises…
In January 2019, Google notified advertisers and agencies about a new program in which Google Ads would automatically make changes in ad accounts — unless the advertisers opted-out of the pilot program. It caused a big stir, but then nothing much seemed to happen. Then on Friday, I heard from Lior Krolewicz of Yael Consulting…
A year after officially closing down the old version of Google Search Console, Google announced that it has migrated the disavow link tool from the old Search Console to the new Search Console. Where is the disavow link tool? The new location for the disavow link tool is now at https://search.google.com/search-console/disavow-links. Previously it was located…