24th May 2021 - What articles you need to be reading
Here are the articles that are making waves in digital and search that you should be aware of because they are going to be game changers
Learning about SEO?
Common SPA crawling issues and how to fix them
Daniel Cartland from NOVOS has a nice post over on the deepcrawl blog focused on Single Page Applications (SPA) that make heavy use of JavaScript frameworks like ReactJS but often have a number of major SEO issues out of the box.
Not every page has a unique URL because of the use of #fragments
SPAs are often client-side rendered and slow to load
JavaScript is still often required to crawl key parts
Social Media
Linkedin offers better way to address career gaps
Linkedin has finally started to move forward to make their platform more suitable for their members taking career breaks due to parenting or caretaker roles. Soon if you use one of the new job titles like “stay-at-home parent” and set your employment type to “self-employed” you no longer are forced to define a employer. Later Linkedin will add new employment gap fields such as “family care”, “sabbatical” or “parental leave” to ensure your career is correctly reported.
AI drives 100% of Pinterest growth
It’s beginning… AI is starting to put growth hackers out of a job as Pinterest uses neural networks to find images and ads that will capture consumers attention. Their new neural network process has drawn in an extra 480 million people to Pinterest in Q1 2021 which is up +30% over Q1 2020. It will be interesting how Pinterest will continue to grow while protecting their users privacy.
Google Products
Google dermatology assist tool
Google announced a new AI powered dermatology tool that is focused on identification of skin, nail and hair conditions based on images patients upload. Their AI has been trained to recognise 288 skin conditions based on 3 years of research using a data based on 65,000 diagnosed conditions and millions of images. The tool is based on previous work done on detecting lung cancer in CT scans or diabetic eye disease. The creation of the tool was driven by the almost 10 billion Google searches focused on skin, hair and nail issues.
Media + Tech
Who is making money in the online slander industry?
What is the best way to learn about something new? Well Aaron Krolik and Kashmir Hill decided to dive in the deep end and create a nasty post about Aaron and see where it goes. The rabbit warren they go down shows that at times the person creating these slander websites are linked or closely linked to the services offering to remove this slander for a fee.
Ford is getting in-car ads ready for drivers
Ford has had a patent it filed in Dec 21st 2016 recently approved that is a billboard interface for in-vehicle displays. The patent was invented by Perry MacNeille a Ford research engineer who semi-retired back in 2019 so there is no clear indication that this will appear in a Ford automobile anytime soon.
Security, Data + Privacy
Zero-day discovery allows attacker to bypass Apple’s protections
Jamf has published a detailed overview of the new zero-day attack targeting MacOS that allows a malicious app to execute without prompting the user for approval. XCSSET malware was revealed in August 2020 by Trend Micro which was focused on infecting Mac developers Xcode projects. Jamf covers the topic in more detail but the main points are it steals Safari browser cookies and then bypasses prompts to install a developer version of Safari. The end result is that the malware can take screenshots or record the screen without needing confirmation from the user.
Domino’s India Data breach
Rajshekhar Rajaharia highlighted a few days ago that the 13 terabytes of employee files and 180 million customer orders have been leaked in April 2021 but now the hackers have made a search engine to search any mobile number to see the person’s past GPS locations with date & time information.
Sensor Tower acquires Pathmatics
One of the leading app marketing insight platforms Sensor Tower have expanded their platforms data by acquiring digital intelligence platform Pathmatics. The benefit to Sensor Tower customers is they can now offer a lot of new insights including Social Media, YouTube, Display ads & digital TV coverage. The benefit will be a better industry view of where app installs are coming from and where are brands spending digital budgets.
Jobs + Careers
Folksy - Head of Ecommerce + Operations - Folksy is a thriving ecommerce marketplace and craft community, used by hundreds of thousands of people every month. We’ve been established for more than a decade, supporting artists and makers all over the UK by offering them an online platform to sell their handmade work and connect with other like-minded people. We are small, lean team (just 5!), with rapid growth and exciting projects on our roadmap. Apply here directly