Technology News and Industry Knowledge

Microsoft Bing will upgrade Bing Webmaster Tools to add reporting and tools around the new Bing Chat feature and a new index coverage report. This was announced by Fabrice Canel, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Bing, this morning in a keynote given at PubCon Austin. Bing Chat in Webmaster Tools. Bing Webmaster Tools should be adding Bing chat integration to allow publishers, content creators and site owners to see how much traffic the chat feature is sending their sites. It will be part of the Bing performance report and show impressions, clicks, click through rate and more. Here is a photo of this report from Jennifer Slegg on Twitter : Index coverage report. In addition, Fabrice also announced a new index coverage report coming to Bing Webmaster Tools. This report will show how your pages on your site are being indexed by Bing Search. If pages are being excluded or if pages are having issues being indexed. Here is a photo of this report from Patrick Stox on Twitter : ...

The virtual ambassador, named May, will help launch the Falsies Surreal Extensions Mascara and support future metaverse activations. source https://www.marketingdive.com/news/maybelline-digital-avatar-mascara-metaverse-marketing/643667/

Don’t get it twisted. The machines are taking over. It’s only a matter of time until we’re all serving aluminum overlords’ every beck and call. Fortunately for all of us simple humans, that day is not today. Despite being a regurgitating raconteur , AI is still a glorified mansplainer – like the Wizard of Oz, minus the fancy haberdashery. It kinda sucks at basic math .  It can’t wrap its dumb little head around anything subjective. It’s eye-wateringly expensive to run . Orders of magnitude more than Google Search. As if that weren’t bad enough, AI content also makes a mockery of E-E-A-T .  And its source material is probably (definitely) stolen , infringing on others’ copyrights and fair use intellectual property rights. Promising? Sure. Ready for prime time? Not quite.  So don’t fire your whole writing team just yet ( unless they already sucked to begin with ). There are still a few things AI can’t do and won’t be able to do for years to come. 1. Google has...

As an advertiser or SEO professional, it’s essential to recognize that with the growing popularity of online shopping, customers’ safety and security have become a top priority for e-commerce platforms. In response to this, Google has implemented three ways to help customers shop safely and ensure that merchants’ stores meet these standards. Vetting stores through automation Store badges Automated and human merchant and listing reviews Automatically vetting product merchants. Before a product or merchant can list on Google, they must undergo a thorough safety review to ensure they meet standards. With the help of the Shopping Graph, a vast database of products and sellers, the systems can quickly evaluate the legitimacy of a business, ensure that the product information is accurate, and verify that the content adheres to Google policies. These policies cover all products displayed in shopping results, including those obtained from web crawling. By following these policies, Goog...

B2B marketing leaders voice similar concerns around paid search: “We’re not reaching the right people.”  “We need to attract more decision-makers.”  “We want to go up-market and target larger companies.”  “We need to close larger deals.”  These are just a few pain points keeping marketers up at night. Targeting the ideal customer is a challenging and can lead to budget waste and a high cost per qualified lead.  Compared LinkedIn targeting which offers options such as company size and job title, paid search requires more elbow grease.  Follow these best practices when running enterprise PPC campaigns for B2B brands. 1. Create the right content Decision makers at large companies think differently than those at an SMB. They have different needs and concerns, requiring specific messaging. Enterprise companies stress about security protocols and require social proof. They need to know that other significant brands trust your brand and that you have ...

Microsoft released version 96 of the Bing AI chat feature earlier this morning. This new update brings quality improvements such as a higher response rate to chats and also fewer “hallucinations,” Mikhail Parakhin, the CEO of Bing, wrote on Twitter. What is new. Mikhail said the two main improvements to Bing AI chat include: Significant reduction in cases where Bing refuses to reply for no apparent reason Reduction of instances of hallucination in answers Here are those tweets: Main two improvements you should see are: – Significant reduction in cases where Bing refuses to reply for no apparent reason – Reduced instances of hallucination in answers — Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin) February 28, 2023 As a reminder, Microsoft had to limit the number of chats due to these issues. Tone not live. Yesterday, Mike Davidson, Corporate Vice President, Design & Research at Microsoft, on  Twitter said the ability to pick a tone for Bing Chat was live for some, but Mi...

Google’s Search Ads Week kicked off with two new tools to help advertisers deliver faster creatives and better performance. Create new assets with Google’s AI  New customer acquisition goals A couple of Search Week product updates: Automatically created assets are now available to all advertisers in English as an open beta & the new customer acquisition goal is now fully rolled out for Search campaigns: — AdsLiaison (@adsliaison) February 27, 2023 Create new assets with Google’s AI. Google’s goal is to help advertisers deliver effective ads to their target audience by having a variety of relevant creative assets available. To achieve this, they now offer a setting called “automatically created assets” which generates new ad components based on an advertiser’s existing assets and landing page. This setting allows responsive search ads to show potential customers the best combination of assets. Now, the open beta for automatically generated assets is available to al...

The addition of the viral “hack” to its digital-only menu demonstrates the power of the brand-consumer dialogue on the platform. source https://www.marketingdive.com/news/chipotle-viral-tiktok-fajita-quesadilla-marketing/643602/

“I See Almonds” represents not only the brand’s first commercial in over a year, but also the first under Global CMO Kelly Solomon. source https://www.marketingdive.com/news/kind-snacks-tv-ad-campaign-purpose-marketing/643493/

Google Panda Update 3.3 and Venice In 2012, Google confirmed the Panda Update 3.3 as well as a noteworthy change to local search rankings. Panda 3.3 was a refresh of the Panda system, meaning none of the signals Panda looked at were new or had changed. While Google Panda got the headlines at the time, there was some other noteworthy news about improvements to local search results, which Google referred to as “Venice”: Improvements to ranking for local search results.  [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.  And also this: Improved local results.  We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user. This turned out to be a significant local search update. Google’s algorithm would essentially localize a user’s search results on br...

Keyword cannibalization happens when you have two or more pages ranking for the same keyword. It is generally considered undesirable.  This article will help you decide whether you have a keyword cannibalization problem and, if so, how to solve it. Is keyword cannibalization always problematic? Before fixing keyword cannibalization, check whether it is a real problem for your site. Sometimes, two pieces of content ranking can be favorable, especially with an indented SERPs. For Delish, these two pages ranking on page 1 are beneficial. In one search, they’ve got two pieces of content ranking. The indented SERP gives Delish more space in the page and increases their chances of a click. A quick browse of these two pages will show similarities in ranking keywords. For example, according to Semrush, both pages rank for: “quick easy healthy lunch” “easy healthy lunch ideas” “easy healthy lunch” “easy and healthy lunch ideas” You don’t have to take action on two pages rank...