🔍 New test: Featured Snippets created by Google

Nov 30, 2020

Good morning, Search Marketer, may all your brands and retailers have a wildly successful Cyber Monday.

We'll be digging into the retail data throughout the week. We'd love to hear about your experiences: editors@searchengineland.com.

Meanwhile in the SERPs, there is a funky test happening in Google Featured Snippets. Google confirmed to us, last week, that it is testing showing multiple links and content sources in featured snippets.

Google highlights jargon or technical terms in a snippet to give users more context. Users can get the info by hovering over the linked words and choose to click through to the reference sites.

It's a small test and Google said it is going to keep working on the experience. For publishers, it makes the prospect of featured snippets more complicated by "adding links to sites that are not yours – links you did not add," writes Barry Schwartz.

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

Social Short

Snapchat promotes it's TikTok rival feed Spotlight on Twitter

Along with the announcement last week, Snapchat began promoting its new Spotlight feed on Twitter. Aimed squarely at TikTok, Snapchat's Spotlight promoted posts highlight the curation of "the best of Snapchat" for users and the potential monetary reward for creators whose videos are chosen. TikTok also is no stranger to advertising on Twitter.

Why we care. Snapchat is investing heavily in Spotlight to draw creator and user engagement in the face of TikTok's rapid growth. The strategy is to pay creators whose Spotlight videos catch on. Any user can submit videos for Spotlight consideration, regardless of following, for a chance at a share of the $1 million daily lottery.

Forecasting paid search spend and revenue for 2021

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Search Shorts

Did Google release a Thanksgiving search update?

Thanksgiving Google search update. There are some signs of a possible Google search ranking update this week, the week of Thanksgiving. The chatter is somewhat limited but the tools are mostly all showing big changes.

Private domain registration. Google's John Mueller said that using private domain name whois registration does not hurt your rankings in search.

URL prefix tool. Want to get some weird URLs out of Google Search? John Mueller from Google said "use URL or prefix-removal requests in Search Console to hide them."

How to ensure customers know you care

Sponsored by Pegasystems

It may be a hard truth for us best-intentioned marketers to swallow, but two-thirds of customers believe that marketers do not care about their needs.

That's according to a survey of 5,000 individuals by Pega. And when you look at what marketers face, it is easy to see how that kind of sentiment takes root.

"Think about the scale of your business," said Andrew LeClair, senior product marketing manager at Pegasystems. "You're trying to manage literally billions of interactions, with millions of customers, across hundreds and hundreds of programs, on dozens and dozens of channels — and that's a lot of complexity. And unfortunately, that complexity leaves us exposed. There's not a lot of chances for us to get it right, but there's a ton of opportunities for things to go wrong, and it only takes one poor experience and the customer is out the door."

Read More »

SMX kicks off next week!

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