Reading Time: 3 minutesAs the first month of summer officially draws to a close, things are heating up – both outside, as well as in the world of digital marketing. While Google’s May 2020 Core Algorithm Update stole the show last month, there was plenty of activity in June for us to be aware of, too.
Here are the biggest news and updates our team here at Vizion Interactive has been tracking throughout June and into the month of July:
- An Update to Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines
- Updated Reports & Features within Bing Webmaster Tools
- Google is Reportedly Testing Analytics Data in Search Console “Insights”
- Microsoft Launches Free “Digital Marketing Center” Platform for SMBs
For each of the items above, our goal here is to introduce you to the relevant topics or updates, provide a brief summary of challenges or opportunities for each – and allow for you to continue your discovery through linked articles and content.
An Update to Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines
First made available to the public in 2012, Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines earned an overdue update at the end of June.
A good portion of the updated guidelines focus on new sections that discuss how Bing indexes web sites, how pages are understood, how content is considered for rankings – and finally – some examples of abusive tactics and practices that Bing frowns upon.
If you’re interested in learning more about the updates, we recommend these links:
- Bing Ranking Factors Revealed in Update to Webmaster Guidelines
- Bing updates its Webmaster Guidelines
- Bing supports rel=sponsored & rel=ugc
- Bing’s search ranking factors; relevance, quality & credibility, user engagement, freshness, location and page load time
And – here’s the official link to the new Bing Webmaster Guidelines, too.
Updated Reports & Features within Bing Webmaster Tools
Along with the newly updated Webmaster Guidelines, Bing also released some new features intended to help webmasters and site administrators who make use of the Bing Webmaster Tools platform.
First, Bing has released a new “Site Scan” feature intended to review your domain and report back the status against known SEO issues.
Bing introduced the tool by saying:
“Site Scan is an on-demand site audit tool which crawls your site and checks for common technical SEO issues. Fixing these issues will make your website search engine and user friendly. With this tool, you can improve your website performance not only on Bing but on other search engines as well.”
Operating in a similar fashion to industry tools, the scan feature produces a list of known issues, warnings and errors that can then be remediated.
Second, using a new feature titled “similar sites,” Bing allows for you to use the Webmaster Tools platform to compare your site’s link profile (as viewed through Bing’s data) against that of competing top level domains. The feature – at least for the time being – allows you to effectively use this to see any competitors’ link profiles without requiring authentication to the analyzed domains.
Barry Schwartz has a great write up explaining how to leverage this feature on Search Engine Land: Bing Webmaster Tools now gives you competitive link data
Google is Reportedly Testing Analytics Data in Search Console “Insights”
Reporting for Search Engine Land, Barry Schwartz posted on June 29th that Google is integrating Analytics data into Google Search Console. While there hasn’t been an official announcement yet, Barry notes that [Search Engine Land]…
has obtained information on this new feature from various sources. Users can get Google Analytics data right in Search Console, including:
- Pages views overall.
- Page views of individual pages.
- Average time spend on the site overall.
- Average time spend on individual pages.
- Traffic to your site from organic search versus social versus direct traffic.
- Top referring links from other web sites.
- Newest referring links from other web sites.
- Social media traffic broken down by each site, such as Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
For more on this, be sure to stay tuned to Google’s official blog for announcements – and read Barry’s full article: Google tests showing Analytics data in Search Console with ‘Insights’
Microsoft Launches Free “Digital Marketing Center” Platform for SMBs
The folks over at Microsoft have been busy, haven’t they? Next up in Microsoft related search news is a potentially powerful platform called “Digital Marketing Center.”
Microsoft Digital Marketing Center is the work product of a Garage initiative that leverages artificial intelligence to enable small businesses to better manage organic and paid search and social media efforts across Bing, Google, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter’s platforms.
The platform has been released on a trial basis, and you can request your access to the BETA release here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/digital-marketing-center
