Flywheel News | January 2022 Hotel Digital Marketing News | GCommerce
- Google Business Profile 7 Day Manager Delay
Wondering why you can’t access all the features to the Google Business Profile page you just received access to? Well, Google is now making new owners or managers wait 7 days before they can manage all features of the profile. Please take this into account as you add new managers to your pages.
- Google Looking to Make Website Crawling More Efficient
Google announced that they are trying to find ways to make website crawling more efficient and environmentally friendly. One comment that stood out to our team here was Gary Illyes saying people change the last mod date in the XML sitemap when the URL has not changed and that they “are just not going to use it” due to misuse. Could this change best practices for XML sitemaps? We’ll be monitoring it to see. Read more and listen to the entire podcast here.
- Google Kills FLoC and Introduces An Alternative
When Google announced that Chrome will be removing support for 3rd party cookies sometime in 2023, everyone was eager to understand replacement technologies to help fill the gap in targeting. For a long time Google was positioning FLoC (Federated Learning Cohorts) as a viable solution. Google has announced that it will replaced FLoC with “a new interest-based targeting proposal called Topics”. According to Search Engine Land, “The Topics API will select topics of interest (based on the user’s browsing history), without involving external servers, and share those topics with participating sites”. Topics will be assigned to users based on their browsing history and can include topic segments such as Travel or Fitness. Time will tell if all browsers adopt this latest solution from Google but for now it’s in its infancy in testing, just within the Chrome browser. Learn more here.
- Google Testing Emojis In Search Ads?
And by emojis they mean favicons from websites. Google has toyed around with emojis in search ads multiple times in the past but it was never a permanent change to how advertisers can use symbols/characters within ad copy. This newest test pulls the website’s favicon into the search ad in a move that Google’s Ad Liaison calls “a series of small experiments to help users more easily identify the brand or advertiser associated with the Search ads”. Time will tell if this experiment sticks. Have you seen examples of these while browsing Google’s search results?
