Good morning search marketers, do you want to modify your snippets?
Google announced new snippet settings that allow site owners to control the way their listings appear in Search. The new meta tags — max-snippet, max-video-preview, max-image-preview — can be used alone or in combination to tell Google how you want your snippets to look. Support for the new meta tags begins in mid-to-late October. It's not clear how much demand there is/will be for this functionality, and it bears repeating that how you use these tags has no effect on your rankings.
Here we go again. Google says it will not pay French publishers copyright licensing fees to include their content in its search results. To comply with an EU Copyright Directive passed last year, Google will instead show links and "very short" blurbs of news stories rather than pay to show longer excerpts. We've seen this play out before in Germany and Spain where search traffic to publishers sank when their snippets all but disappeared. Publishers are "faced with a relatively stark choice: demand licensing fees, see only skeletal content in search and watch their traffic dwindle," reports Greg Sterling.
As Amazon's ad business grows, so does the tool ecosystem to support it. Out of beta this week, Sidecar's latest e-commerce advertising solution, Sidecar for Amazon, aims to streamline management, optimization and reporting for sponsored products, sponsored brand and product display campaigns.
And a quick note for users of the popular browser add-on Keywords Everywhere. It is switching to a (nominally) paid model due to a deluge of bots, the developer tells us. It won't break the bank, costing most users just a few bucks a month.
Read on for a look at using RSAs for small accounts by contributor Amalia Fowler and more.
Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief