28th June 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
Sorry for the break last week I took the evening off to unwind and sleep after my first Pfizer vaccine shot. As some people might be aware I have a massive needle phobia but I did it and got the 1st of 2 Coronavirus vaccinations.
In memory of Russ Jones
On the 24th June 2021 Russ Jones one of the smartest SEOs I know passed away in his sleep, if you want to learn a bit more about the man that encouraged other SEOs to be a better person you can visit Remembering Russ Jones.
Learning about SEO?
Regular Expressions (RegEx) in Google Search Console
Now that Google Search Console allows the use of RegEx it’s a perfect time for this post from JC Chouinard on using RegEx correctly. Be aware that of course Google doesn’t use the standard RegEx but a variation which is Re2 syntax because why stay consistent with other programming languages???
Google Search Central updates HTTPs status codes
Good news the top 20 status codes that Googlebot encounters when crawling the web have been updated over on the advanced SEO section. If you are working with developers and they keep asking you for Stack OverFlow links on status codes the good news is you can now provide some Google approved guidelines not a post from 10 years, 11 months ago just because it has 1.2 million views.
Googling stuff
Google gets NHS Coronavirus snippet wrong
Google UK users who type in search phrases such as “Do I need to self-isolate after contact tracing if I test negative?” are presented with a featured snippet answering the common question “Can I stop self-isolating if I test negative for Covid-19?”
The text of the answer, scraped from a gov.uk page, begins: “If your test is negative, you will no longer be required to self-isolate.” But that is not the complete answer and is the wrong advice, but that has now been fixed as you can see from the screenshot below.
Social Media
TikTok Jump is the mini-program to create interactive experiences
TikTok launched Jump which allows creators to quickly create more engaging and informative content on TikTok. The new feature allows creators to link within their videos to ensure the TikTok community have more dynamic experiences such as some of the early collaborators including Whisk that allow creators to natively link to the recipe shown in the video. The mini-programs seek to address the “last mile” which could be learning a new skill, making a reservation or learning more about the information discussed in the video. TikTok Jumps are meant to be easy for partners to build and deploy using HTML5 with minimal technical integration costs or worries.
AWS acquires encrypted message service Wickr
In an interesting push into securing more enterprise, military and government clicks Amazon’s AWS business has acquired Wickr. The communication platform is one of the few that has been vetted by the NSA which gives AWS some instant credibility in building a secure message platform for AWS clients.
Telegram launches group video calls
Telegram have rolled out a whole bunch of new features to bring them closer to WhatsApp + Zoom + Teams in a single update. Group video calls support up to 30 people but an unlimited amount of audio-only participants, but now you also have share your screen which makes it useful for companies using Telegram but also those looking to stream live game play. A welcome feature is noise suppression that Apple also launched in their recent iOS updates, but that wouldn’t be complete without tablet and desktop support that even WhatsApp struggles with…
Conversion Rate Optimisation
Turn page renderings into animated GIFs
Justin Briggs flagged a nice new tool to convert Chrome DevTools into animated GIFs to capture page rendering created by Serg Hospodarets. You can play with the tool here
Apple App Store will now allow product page optimisation
Flagged by Mortiz Daan it’s taken several years for Apple to finally catch-up with Google Play Store Experiments with their new custom product pages that allow developers to create additional versions of their standard App Store page. Apple will allow you to create new pages at any time independent of app updates but will need to be reviewed. You can now have up to 35 custom pages live at once with monitoring success of the page via App Analytics. You can measure impressions, downloads, conversion rates, retention rate and average proceeds in tests running up to 90 days.
Media + Tech
Android Apps coming to Windows 11 via Amazon Appstore
Microsoft & Amazon announced plans to bring the Amazon Appstore to Windows 11. With the upcoming release of Microsoft’s operating system, Windows customers will have access to Android apps on their Windows 11 devices, expanding the selection of apps for customers across multiple genres.
“Today we offer a broad selection of mobile apps in our Amazon Appstore, available across Fire TV, Fire Tablets, and Android devices that our customers use and enjoy every day,” said Palanidaran Chidambaram, Director of the Amazon Appstore and Cross-Screen Technology. “With this announcement, Amazon Appstore developers will now have the opportunity to make their Android apps available to hundreds of millions of Windows customers.”
Oculus virtual reality headsets to soon see Facebook ads
Under the banner of helping users find new favourites and “helping developers” soon you will see Facebook ads within Oculus. It will start with ads for Oculus content within their Oculus mobile app. But don’t worry Facebook is looking on more ways that advertisers can interact with customers… I mean people can interact with brands who are paying to be featured within your headset. Oculus have launched a page to help users manage what ads that they see on Oculus here.
Facebook engineers develop a way reverse-engineer deepfakes and discover their source
Xi Yin + Tal Hassner from Facebook AI research team published a blog post on how they are working to discover digital fingerprints that are left by each deepfake generation model. Part of the model can uncover the unique pattern each AI model creates when it generates a single deepfake image which can also uncover if the series of images used came from a single source. But they can now potentially uncover a coordinated disinformation or malicious campaign using deepfakes. Model parsing was developed in collaboration with Vishal Asnani and Xiaoming Liu from Michigan State University.
Ecommerce
Shopify to offer affiliate marketing publishers to their merchants
Shopify is starting to partner with publishers starting with BuzzFeed that allows their merchant products to show to their audience of 200 million readers. To enable this US merchants will need to add the BuzzFeed channel via the Shopify app store and BuzzFeed’s editors will then be able to discover your products and include them in relevant articles. The links can drive merchants more sales and BuzzFeed will receive a pre-agreed commission % after you have received the customers payment. There is no cost to merchants opting to use BuzzFeed as you only pay a commission when BuzzFeed makes you a sale.
Security, Data + Privacy
Taobao shopping service suffers a data breach over a billion data points
A Taobao affiliate created a crawler to extract usernames and phone numbers from Alibaba’s shopping platform Taobao. The activity happened over several months before Alibaba noticed and took action. It seems the data was only for affiliate marketing purposes and it wasn’t sold onto other parties, but 163.com that broke the story have now removed all references to it and now just return the 404 error page shown below.
Google delays the death of the cookie by 2 years
Google has confirmed that Chrome won’t start to phase out third-party cookies until mid-2023 and then will take until late 2023. The delay has come from the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) as it’s efforts to phase out the use of third-party cookies and other functions from Chrome raised concerns with a formal investigation into the original proposal.
The launch now subject to engagement with the CMA is to launch the phase out support with two stages
stage 1 - starts late 2022 lasting up to 9 months
stage 2 - starting mid 2023 lasting 3 months