Welcome to our weekly roundup of major news and interesting reads in the digital space from 14th – 18th of September 2020
- GoogleBot to soon crawl over HTTP/2
Google announced it will soon start crawling some sites over HTTP/2. This forthcoming update was confirmed by Google in an announcement made today on the company blog. HTTP/2 is the next generation of HTTP, the protocol the internet uses for transferring data. It requires less open connections and thus can be more efficient on your server when crawling your web pages. HTTP/2 is an upgrade over HTTP, it is more efficient, robust and faster than HTTP.
Google says
“We expect this change to make crawling more efficient in terms of server resource usage. With h2, Googlebot is able to open a single TCP connection to the server and efficiently transfer multiple files over it in parallel, instead of requiring multiple connections. The fewer connections open, the fewer resources the server and Googlebot have to spend on crawling.”
This update is set to start in mid-November 2020. Click here for more information.
- Google Ads Performance Planner Supports Shopping Campaigns
The performance planner tool in Google Ads has now been upgraded to support shopping campaigns and smart shopping campaigns in Google Ads. This was announced by Google on Twitter. With this update, you can plan your Shopping campaigns with ease by using Performance Planner to your advantage.
Click here to learn more.
- Local businesses can highlight COVID-19 health & safety measures with Google My Business
Google recently introduced a new set of health & safety business attributes tied to COVID-19. The new attributes help provide clarity and reassurance to potential customers that safety protocols are in place. These attributes started appearing for some, in the Google My Business dashboard and hopefully will appear in search and maps too. The main aim of this feature is that local businesses using these attributes may see more engagement or an improved response from consumers who want to do business with them but want assurances that it will be safe.
Read more here.
- Twitter Officially Launches New ‘Quote Tweets’ Count on Main Tweet Display
Twitter has now officially launched out its new, separate count listing for ‘Quote Tweets’ on the main tweet display. Twitter has been working on making its platform easier to understand over the last few years after various feedback reports. Some suggested that tweeting was difficult to get a handle on and potentially had them from signing up for an account.
Now, Twitter has introduced the ‘Quote Tweets’, which is easy enough to understand. You can view a full tweet response activity at a glance, which could help provide more context – and a whole new tweet ratio consideration for related comments. This new feature makes it easier to see how people are reacting to each tweet, which could even spark more, similar engagement.
Read more here.
- Google now uses BERT to match stories with fact checks.
Google announced a lot of changes and updates they made to Google Search over the past year. This announcement covers changes to Google Search, Google News, autocomplete, fact-checking, through BERT and language processing. Google is aiming to provide search results that are not just as relevant as possible, but also as reliable as possible. Google is now leveraging BERT, one of its language AI models, to better understand if stories in the Google News full coverage area are reliable in terms of the facts on the web. So Google in a sense can see the connections between the articles and fact check database to better match fact checks with stories.
Also adding that Google can now detect breaking news queries within a few minutes of the news breaking. While in the past, it could take Google over 40 minutes. These types of breaking news queries in the past would sometimes surface inaccurate information. So now Google can detect breaking news queries much faster and thus turn up the lever on what types of sites it wants to show for those queries early on. Google is constantly tweaking Google Search to improve search quality, relevancy, reliability and accuracy. That means that you need to constantly improve your website to ensure you have the highest quality, more relevant, more reliable and accurate content and user experience.
Read more here.
Tune back next Friday for more news and interesting reads on the digital space from Wow Effect Communication.
