SEO News Round-Up: New Google Mobile Formats, Older Content, and More
While sometimes there is just so much social news in a week that we need to do a round-up, such was the past week for search marketers as we round up Google’s new mobile formats, the SEO advantage of older content removal finally dispelled, and Europe’s antitrust measures against Google, amongst others.
First up, Google made the announcement that it will start to roll out new mobile features for Product Listing Ads (PLA), holiday booking filters, a YouTube TrueView shopping feature, and a new Showcase Shopping ad format. Details on these new features are still forthcoming.
Meanwhile, Google’s John Mueller’s Twitter account and Google hangouts are always great sources for staying on the cutting edge of SEO news and this past week he gave some useful insight as to what advantage, if any, removing older site content provides. While many SEOs, including this one currently writing, have long held that removing low-visited, high bounce rate content from a site will give you an advantage in the SERPs, Mueller dispelled this by saying “just removing old content doesn’t automatically cause a ranking advantage.” However, he did add that older content of a quality that doesn’t match up with your site’s current content quality will waste Google’s time in crawling your site and thus should be removed.
In other news, Google is once again in trouble with the European Commission, who sent two statements of objections to Google, accusing the search giant of the following:
-Google abusing its dominant position “by systematically favouring its comparison shopping service in its search result pages.”
-Abusing its position by ‘artificially restricting the possibility of third party websites to display search advertisements from Google’s competitors.’
Finally, there is chatter amongst search experts as to whether Google releases a search update in June that benefitted publishers. New York Post, for example, has seen it organic search traffic increase by 155% between May and June this year.
