Good morning, Search Marketer, SEOs and PPCs or whatever titles you may have today.
I mean, we all know we are tasked with a lot and sometimes it involves not just us fixing title tags or doing keyword research but other times it involves coding, graphic design and even a little tax law. We do it all. Okay, enough about professional titles…
Today's theme of the newsletter is, "Is that new?" As some of you may know, people ask me countless times a day, "Is this new?" The thing is, Google is always testing new interfaces, new designs, new features and releasing tweaks and changes to its ranking algorithm that are unconfirmed. Well, what is new is that Google launched passage ranking the other day in the U.S. search results in English, but what is not new is that Google made an update to the image search results algorithm to reduce duplicate results and improve search refinements.
Recently, Google has been testing a new dark theme appearance in the search results. In fact, Google started testing it in December but over the past few days more and more have been seeing this theme. The issue from a search marketing perspective with this new dark mode is that the ads are a bit harder to distinguish from the organic listings. I mean, this shouldn't surprise anyone, making the ads harder to distinguish has been a Google trend.
Oh and feel free to message me on Twitter @rustybrick if you think you spotted something new, I can try to let you know if it is … or not. :)
Barry Schwartz
"Is This New" Google Liaison