Search News from the Future

Posted by Reinhart

Citizens of Moz, I come to you at a most desperate hour. I’ve just returned from London, Distilled’s international headquarters, and I’ve been patiently awaiting this moment to share some potentially niche-shattering news with you all.

I don’t quite know where to begin, so I’ll just say it: You see, the stories are all true. Will Critchlow is a wizard. I know, it’s common knowledge that nearly all Englishmen are wizards, I’ve seen Harry Potter too. But Mr. Critchlow is a wizard with a most peculiar and exciting gift: that of clairvoyance. He can see the future!

And no, I don’t mean in a Steve Jobs/Carl Sagan/George Orwell futurist kind of way either. I mean he quite literally has a translucent, viridian ball of crystal sitting on his desk that divines that which has yet to transpire! I wouldn’t have thought anything of the object upon first glance, but one night I came back to the office to grab my misplaced jacket to low mutterings, frantic typing, and wisps of smoke coming from the other side of the room. I dove into the bean bag room so as not to draw his attention and waited patiently, shaking with dread but with a fully piqued curiosity.

I couldn’t make out what he was chanting and I don’t think I would have been able to translate the Latin anyway. After about 30 minutes of this I heard him pack up his things and leave. I’m normally more of the craven type when it comes to adventure, but something that night pressed me to snoop around my boss’s desk for the truth.

The smoke and emerald glow dissipated as I shuffled some papers around. The smell of ozone lingered in the air. Nothing looked too out of the ordinary: the latest issue of Inc. Magazine, a Post-it note with a hastily scrawled and circled “Fire Phil Nottingham: Oct 31“… wait… this news clip read… 2016? Maybe he was just tired and mistak— 2020?! What was I looking at here?!

What I’m about to reveal may shock or even scare some readers, but I believe it is essential that the Moz community hear it nevertheless. I may lose my job—nay, I may be turned into a toad with a dreadful cockney accent—but it will have all been worth it to bring this knowledge to you all. My interpretations may be shaky at best, but the headlines were as clear as day: These are digital marketing news items from the future!

You may never get a better chance to peek behind the tapestries of time as you do now. So read on, friends, and be brave.

Term “mobile” removed from Analytics, Google’s vocabulary

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — April 14, 2015 — A term commonly used by webmasters, digital marketers and industry analysts may not be so common after today. Over the weekend, Google removed the term “mobile” from all of its web products, including Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and the company’s AdWords tool set.

“Mobile has been a deprecated term for some time now,” the search giant explained in a corresponding blog post. “The lines between where and when we view our various screens have been blurred beyond parsability. All web-based content can be viewed on any device these days and thus it makes little sense to refer to all non-traditional desktop visitors as ‘mobile.’ ”

The web is very close to becoming truly device-neutral largely thanks to thoughtful webmasters, CMS development teams and device manufacturers who have all come together to deal with the issue of rendering content from multiple angles. Data on device type, screen size, and other metrics is still readily available throughout Google’s suite of webmaster tools. [...]

Voice searches now constitute 28% of all queries

AUSTIN, TX — June 29, 2020 — Search engine corporations such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have traditionally held on tight to their data, offering limited info on global search trends, but a recent study conducted by the University of Texas has unearthed compelling evidence that shows almost a third of all search queries are now conducted via voice search.

The nation’s only “Professor of Search,” Dr. Pete Meyers of the University of Texas explains the results of his institution’s study:

“They called me mad back in 2013, but voice searches now constitute a huge chunk of the search pie. Several years ago we would have found it laughable to be walking down the street talking to our devices, let alone talking to our devices within our home. But with the advancement of voice recognition software and the nearly ubiquitous nature of the hardware to back it up, today we’re estimating that voice search makes up almost a third of all search queries, and that number seems to be on the rise.”

A few of the major contributing factors to the ascendancy of voice search include web-enabled automobiles, home appliances, [...]

Traditional television advertising revenues wane as new year begins; YouTube, Twitter and Facebook post record annual reports

NEW YORK, NY — January 1, 2019 — Google’s video platform, YouTube (GOOG) along with social networks Twitter (TWTR) and Facebook (FB), posted record gains in 2018 as social and video advertising revenues shattered forecasts and industry expectations. Analysts speculate that this was due in no small part to the transference of advertising spends on traditional television media. When FB and TWTR first hit the stock market, many buyers felt the social networks needed to prove themselves in the competitive world of media advertising, but as the multi-billion dollar industry of traditional television advertising continues to crumble amid stiff competition from a la carte alternatives like Netflix and Amazon, more marketing budgets are now trickling down to companies such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s AdWords platform.

“Television is evolving and has been for some time,” says Will Critchlow, founder and president of the world’s foremost digital marketing agency, Distilled International. “Companies want to get their products in front of consumers, and those consumers are now watching television online. They’re doing everything online.” [...]

Netflix introduces video, text advertisements for streaming content

LOS GATOS, CA — January 16, 2019 — Earlier this month we saw reports that television advertising revenues were waning in the new year. Today we can report that some of those dollars will most certainly be spent on Netflix’s streaming video platform. The company issued a press release this morning indicating that the company, for the first time in its history, will now display advertisements before many of their most popular original programs such as Arrested Development, Orange is the New Black, and the much-anticipated final season of House of Cards. Advertisements will be similar to those seen on YouTube, Hulu, and other video sites.

“With the amount of quality content and general media access we’re collecting, we have no choice but to find revenue from other sources if we want to remain at the $9.99 price point we set in 2015,” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said on an investor conference call yesterday. [...]

Google cracks down on fake, purchased +1s

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — February 1, 2017 — For the first several years of the social platform’s life, Google Plus seemed a joke to many. Comparisons were made to MySpace and other defunct social platforms, and G+ was often called “a graveyard” as it faced competition from the already-established Facebook. But since that time, the network has shown some real staying power with the full faith and credit of Google Inc. behind it. To that end, in late 2016 we reported on Google’s announcement that plus ones, Google’s own brand of “Likes,” would help determine the order in which documents appeared in its search engine results pages. This move forced webmasters everywhere, for big and small companies alike, to reconsider the social platform for conducting regular business. Since then, various scams have been created to generate fake or paid “+1s” for sites who want quick and easy exposure in Google’s search engine. While this practice has been effective for some, it is not sitting at all well with the search giant.

Today, Google announced a crack-down on those sites which it has determined to have been generating fake +1s. The process should be easy enough for Google as it has access to all of its users’ account data and history. One well known Google representative, speaking on condition of anonymity, cut straight to the point, asking “What were they thinking?” in reference to marketers who’ve been attempting to game Google’s algorithm. “As if we haven’t been aware of fake Google plus accounts since Plus’s inception?… [...]

Panda and Penguin now refresh daily

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — July 22, 2016 — Five years ago, Google launched a pair of systems designed to keep poor content out of its search engine’s results and combat questionable citation building tactics. The former is known as the “Panda” update and the latter, “Penguin.” Until this week, the two algorithms have been updated on unpredictable schedules based on when the massive amounts of data required to make proper determinations about the quality of a website and its internet-wide citations were parsed. This would result in periodic “refresh” days, where webmasters who engaged in deceptive marketing practices would brace themselves for potential losses of traffic to their webpages. These updates would traditionally occur four or five times per year. Last Monday, Google announced that they’ve dedicated additional resources to these systems and are now able to parse the same data sets many times faster than before, meaning that these updates will now essentially occur in real time.

“Our users don’t want clean and relevant answers three months from now, they need them immediately,” declared a Google representative at an industry conference in San Diego… [...]

Google removes “organic keywords” tab from analytics

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — October 31, 2020 — [...] and for those who don’t remember, Google used to give webmasters access to what was known as “keyword data,” allowing them to make better decisions about their sites’ development and what their users’ intent might be when visiting. In the fall of 2013, Google denied access to almost all of this organic data by encrypting all searches generated through Google.com. Today, Google took it a step further and completely removed the “Organic Keywords” tab from its popular web analytics program.

“We’ve been meaning to do this for some time now,” said a senior Google representative, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We’re very concerned about our users’ privacy, and that’s why we started to deny access to sensitive data such as search queries. We know our users don’t want webmasters knowing what they’re searching for, and we want to respect that.”

Later in the same conversation, the same Googler said with a grin and a chortle, “There’ll always be keyword data in AdWords.” Adopting a sing-song tone, one might have quoted Arrested Development‘s timeless one-liner, “There’s always money in the banana stand.”

In other news, Google added a new tab to analytics titled “ASL,” which includes less-sensitive data about users such as age, sex, location, weight, and sexual preference [...]

Cutts: Given today’s technology, page speed a “deprecated metric” for determining site quality

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — October 31, 2022 — For as long as there have been websites, there have been slow websites. In past generations, particularly in the 2000s and 2010s, internet users have been frustrated with delay times and unresponsive pages. Because of this, Google has made several attempts to help webmasters create more efficient sites, and has also taken measures to ensure that particularly slow sites do not register as frequently in their search results. But technology has come a long way since the days of 4G and 5G wireless networks.

Matt Cutts, the long-time head of Google’s anti-spam team, addressed a group of fledgling digital marketers this weekend at SMX 2022 saying, “Given the bandwidth speeds of today’s internet service providers, we’re no longer using page speed as an indicator of ‘site quality,’ as this metric is now almost completely deprecated. In the past it made sense to devalue a site that took 10 to 15 seconds to load, and thus provided a negative experience for Googlers. But with today’s 7G Quantum LTE-X technology, the difference between page load times are negligible, almost instant and ultimately irrelevant.

“Does anyone else remember 4G LTE? How about 2G? [Expletive], I’m old.”

So, there you have it. That’s all I found in Will’s office that fateful night. Leave a comment and wish me good tidings if you be so bold. Though as a soon-to-be-toad, I may have a difficult time responding to your queries.

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