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🔍 Microsoft + DuckDuckGo ads

Good morning, Search Marketer, did you know DuckDuckGo topped 60 million daily queries in October?

The privacy-oriented search engine DuckDuckGo has seen a surge in traffic in the past year. It remains dwarfed by Google, of course, but contributor Andy Taylor notes that it benefits from Google's sprawling advertiser base and the simple Google Ads campaign import function in Microsoft Advertising. Because DuckDuckGo is a Microsoft Advertising search partner, advertisers can simply import their Google Ads campaigns into Microsoft advertising and get DuckDuckGo bundled in with Bing, Yahoo and other networks in one fell swoop. 

Interestingly, earlier this year, I noticed DuckDuckGo showing what appeared to be Amazon product ads on some queries. Those ads no longer seem to be running. Instead, the ads — both text and Shopping — are served only by Microsoft Advertising. 

One quick note — For a few days last week, Google was not showing manual actions notices in Search Console. That's fixed now, so you might want to just take a quick peek in your account. 

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

 
 
 
Social Short
 

Snapchat puts the "Spotlight" on top Snaps and will pay creators

Snapchat has launched Spotlight to, you guessed it, spotlight the best videos on the platform. Creators whose videos are selected can "earn a share of more than $1 million that we're distributing to creators every day!," says the company. 

Creators can submit their videos to Spotlight. They must be at least 16 years old to be eligible for revenue sharing. Spotlight is first rolling out in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and France.

Why we care. It's perhaps ironic that this launch comes as TikTok announced its first creator, Charli D'amelio, to gain 100 million followers. Unlike TikTok, creator discovery has never been an integral feature of Snapchat, and Spotlight presents a big change. Spotlight will have a very TikTok feel, with the ability for users to swipe up through videos in the Spotlight feed. Paying users to make and promote their content on the app could help Snapchat maintain creator engagement on the app, rather than losing out to other platforms.

 

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Search Shorts
 

Faster server means faster and more frequent crawling.

Upgrade server. Gary Illyes from Google said that if you upgrade your server, Google knows. He said on Twitter "Fun fact: changing a site's underlaying infrastructure like servers, IPs, you name it, can change how fast and often Googlebot crawls from said site. That's because it actually detects that something changed which prompts it to relearn how fast and often it can crawl."

Canonicalization. John Mueller of Google said "we use a number of factors to determine canonicalization (such as internal/external links, sitemaps, rel-canonical, redirects, etc), and sometimes it takes a bit of time to settle down.

Bing shopping features. The holiday shopping season is here and Microsoft Bing highlighted some shopping features they have in search.

 

Beyond the relaunch: Evolve your web strategy toward regular iteration

Sponsored by Pantheon

At a time when so many people's interactions with businesses are conducted solely online, Josh Koenig, co-founder and head of product at WebOps platform Pantheon, urged his audience at the recent MarTech virtual event to step up to the challenge of delivering a great user experience.

"This is the primary, if not only, channel by which you're going to be able to reach people, certainly you don't want them to have a poor experience," he said. "I think we're going to see many, many more organizations really stepping up, taking this seriously and striving for excellence."

What that means, according to Koenig, is being able to respond to changes in circumstances quickly, so that your digital communications are always as effective as they can be. That involves adopting a product-oriented approach to web development called WebOps.  Read More>>

Read More »

 

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What We're Reading
 

We've curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader.

DIY SEO: 6 Steps That Anyone Can Follow to Get Results – SEM Rush

I Blogged Every Night for a Week. It Went Terribly. – SparkToro

Introducing Publisher Ads Audits for Lighthouse v1.3.0 – Google Ads Developer Blog

Music from the heart, with an AI assist – Google Blog

Nothing about us, without us – Microsoft Advertising

Optimize For Local Search With Google My Business – BrightEdge

Spike Google My Business Suspensions – Search Engine Roundtable

Sunset of deprecated Geo Region targeting options in Display & Video 360 API – Google Ads Developer Blog

The 10 Best Link Building Tools for 2020 – SEM Rush