🔍 Google to test "great page experience" indicators in search results

Nov 11, 2020

Good morning, Search Marketer, we have a date.

The Google Page Experience update is set to go live in May 2021. That gives everyone several more months to prepare for the update's potential impact on rankings. Further, Google is going to start testing labels on search result listings to indicate those that "have great page experience" over the coming months, ahead of the update.

While many SEOs think the Page Experience update won't have a big effect on rankings, the visual queues bring a new dimension to the update — much as "mobile-friendly" and other labels have to past updates. The indicators will be used to identify pages that "have met all of the page experience criteria," says Google. Get caught up with our Guide to Core Web Vitals.

Amazon. Just as many sellers are ensuring they're stocked up at Amazon's warehouses ahead of Black Friday, the EU is fixing its antitrust sights on the company. The potential conflict of interest of Amazon operating as both retailer and marketplace is at the heart of a new antitrust charge by the European Commission. Specifically, the EC argues that Amazon looks at sales data of third-party products to inform its own products and offers "to the detriment of the other marketplace sellers."

You may recall this also came up in the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust hearings this summer. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos could not "guarantee" that the company hasn't used third-party seller data to make decisions on products launched under its own private label business. There are numerous stories of Amazon essentially copying a fast-selling, relatively commoditizable product and offering it under its own label at a lower price. I've seen this happen to manufacturers first-hand. The company could face significant fines. "The EC would also potentially force the company to change business practices in the near term," says Greg Sterling.

Ginny Marvin,
Editor-in-Chief

Social Short

TikTok could reach 1.2 billion users next year

TikTok's monthly active users (MAU) are estimated to hit 1.2 billion in 2021, according to mobile analytics firm App Annie. The short-form video app's hot streak has continued, with its user base having tripled since 2018, TechCrunch reported. Further, its growing advertising business and sales of virtual gifts for tipping creators made TikTok the number two non-gaming app by consumer spending in the third quarter of this year.

Why we care. It's been a chaotic 2020 for TikTok. It's fate in the U.S. is still up in the air with the Trump administration's ban blocked in federal court and the proposed deal for Oracle and Walmart to take ownership stakes in a new TikTok Global entity still under review. And yet, TikTok's popularity with creators, users and advertisers shows no signs of slowing.

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Search Shorts

Googlebot being socially distant?

Video on Google search quality evaluators. Google released a short and to the point video on what Google search quality raters do and how that information is used in Google Search.

XML sitemaps. Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that "making a sitemap file automatically seems like a minimal baseline for any serious website."

Googlebot socially distant. Mueller also said there is no issue with Googlebot crawling sites now. He quipped, "Are you saying Googlebot is being too socially distant? I'm not aware of any specific issues with indexing."

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How Autodesk overhauled its marketing to align for better performance management

Sponsored by Allocadia

Autodesk faced a challenge with which many marketers are familiar. Teams that were expert in their various disciplines — channel marketing, regional marketing, industry marketing, etc. — had diverged into silos in the absence of a strong marketing performance management program. There was no unified view of how marketing spend affected program goals across all of these initiatives.

"Without breaking down those silos, you can't get to a point where you're tracking spend in a unified way across campaigns," said Autodesk's Zoe Marquardt, the company's consultant on marketing performance management (MPM). "You can't even develop unified campaigns across the company."

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