All Script And Tols For Free: 🔍 Just how big was that algo update?

🔍 Just how big was that algo update?

Dec 08, 2020

Good morning, Search Marketer, it appears it was a big one.

The impact of Google's December 2020 core update was felt relatively quickly, say data companies we surveyed about the update which started Dec. 3. It appears to have been bigger than the last core update in May and was felt across nearly all verticals. Here's our look at the early impact of the December 2020 core update.

Of course, we'll be talking about the update today and tomorrow during SMX. You still have time to register here.

We've got yet more evidence of online commerce's rise in 2020: Retail search volume increased by 20% year-over-year between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, according to Microsoft Advertising. Search also drove more local shopping interest. BOPIS queries spiked in the two weeks leading up to Cyber Monday, increasing 330% over the same period last year.

A final interesting tidbit from the Microsoft Advertising data: Queries containing "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday" were down 36% and 6% from 2019.

This may be a reflection of sales starting weeks earlier. Microsoft notes the National Retail Federation's survey that found 53% of shoppers felt that the holiday weekend deals hadn't changed from the previous weeks. So perhaps they saw less need to qualify their queries.

An alternative theory: Perhaps consumers no longer feel the qualifiers are necessary to find deals in the search results.

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

Social Short

Facebook adds features for U.S. auto dealers

U.S.-based auto dealerships have new features to promote their businesses via their Facebook Pages. The updates include a new "Manage Inventory" tab on dealership Pages; a streamlined set-up process for automotive inventory ads; and a "Vehicles" tab for dealers to show their full inventory featured on their Pages for free.

Why we care. Facebook is building out its features to bolster its appeal as a marketing vehicle (pardon the pun) for auto dealers. The updates reduce the friction involved in getting catalog inventory set up and managed and increase exposure for dealers' inventory.

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Search Shorts

Bing video drag and drop playlists

Bing video search playlists. Did you know Bing Video search results lets you drag and drop videos into a playlist to watch later?

Google can read unsupported structured data. Google's John Mueller said despite what others have said, Google does read unsupported structured data, but I wouldn't expect much from it, outside of Google reading the content.

Google My Business phone support. During COVID, Google shut down a lot of the support methods for Google My Business, including phone support. But it now appears to be back.

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