According to a recent study by GlobalWebIndex, personal sharing on social media has undergone a significant decline, even while sharing for non-personal (commercial or tangentially commercial) reasons has increased. Since 2014, the reasons people give for sharing on social media has seen a global 33% reduction for “staying in touch with friends” and “sharing my […]
Author Archives: Net Age
The speed at which your site loads, (or page speed) has been considered one of the more important ranking factors in Google for some time already. With Google’s focus on the user experience, a fast site is seen as being more user friendly, and therefore more deserving of a higher ranking. To help website owners […]
For a couple of years now, webmasters and online marketing agencies have been faced with a pernicious problem in Analytics. Referral spam. Referral spam was a technique of submitting fake requests to a website, using the URL of the site that spammers wished to promote. The idea behind it was that webmasters would click through […]
PageRank. The secret formula that Google used to decide how important any given web page was has finally been officially retired from public view. 16 years ago, Google made it possible for people to see an approximation of the PR (PageRank, named after co-founder Larry Page) for website pages. The higher the PR, the more […]
Recently Google made an unexpected change to how they’re laying out the Google Ads results in search. Instead of the old “3 ads at the top” and then a list of ads in the sidebar, they’ve done away with the sidebar entirely for what looks like most searches, and instead, are showing 4 ads at […]
In November of last year, Google began rolling out the Google Contributor program, designed to allow people to reduce the number of ads they see, on the sites they visit. Since they specifically say “on the sites you visit” this appears to target the Display Network. It’s also interesting that they’re not offering to show […]
In a surprising change, Google has rolled out a new ad display layout, that has significantly changed the ad real-estate landscape on search engine results pages. According to their spokesman, these are supposed to be for commercial and high value queries, but so far I’ve been seeing them for a quite a few queries that […]
Despite having told you in January that the long awaited penguin update was due “soon,” it now appears that it may not be rolling out in this quarter after all. The Penguin, or “webspam” update was originally rolled out nearly 4 years ago, and despite its importance, it has generated a lot of antipathy in […]
If you’ve been following the tech news recently, you’ll have noticed that there has been a lot of attention paid to the concept of “Deep Learning” in the last few months. Deep Learning is the new way of saying AI, or artificial intelligence, without actually going quite that far. For one thing, AI has strong […]
Earlier this month, Google released an update to their structured data which analysts suggest points to an ever increasing rise in the importance of user experience, and usability. Structured data markup is a way of applying “labels” to various parts of your content in order to make it easier for computers to understand what that […]