Google is testing showing colorful dots, a blue, red, yellow and green set of dots, to help users understand different search result elements. When you click on the dots, it launched an “about this result” box to help you understand what that search feature does.
Valentin Pletzer posted this on Twitter and showed how this works, here is his screen shot:
As you can see, it launches this “learn how search works” box where you can learn more.
Note: This story was pre-written before the Rosh Hashanah holiday. I am currently offline for the holiday and unable to respond to comments on this site, social, media or other platforms.
Google’s John Mueller said that your site can rank fine with or without H1 tags. You don’t have to use any H1 tags, or you can use many, either way, it is not a critical issue specifically for Google search.
He did say it helps Google understand the structure of the page, just like it helps users understand the structure of the page.
He said this in a video this Friday at the 23:47 mark when he was asked if “it is mandatory to just have one h1 tag on a web page or can it be used multiple times?”
He responded:
So we we get this question multiple times as well. You can use h1 tags as often as you want on a page. There’s no limit. Neither upper nor lower bound. h1 elements are a great way to give more structure to a page so that users and search engines can understand which parts of a page are kind of under different headings. So I would use them in in the proper way on a page.
And especially with html5 having multiple h1 elements on a page is completely normal and kind of expected. So it’s not something that you need to worry about. And some SEO tools flag this as an issue and say like oh you don’t have any h1 tag or you have two h1 tags. From our point of view that’s not a critical issue. From a usability point of view, maybe it makes sense to improve that. So it’s not that I would completely ignore those suggestions but I wouldn’t see it as a critical issue.
Your site can do perfectly fine with no h1 tags or with five h1 tags.
Note: This story was pre-written before the Rosh Hashanah holiday. I am currently offline for the holiday and unable to respond to comments on this site, social, media or other platforms.
RankBrian launched in 2015 and is a way for Google to understand user queries better. Google has said you cannot optimize for it but you can work on making your site better. Gary Illyes from Google said basically making your content for users is accomplishing the same thing as making your content for RankBrain.
Gary Illyes said on Twitter “you optimize your content for users and thus for RankBrain.” “That hasn’t changed,” he added.
you optimize your content for users and thus for rankbrain. that hasn’t changed
Note: This story was pre-written before the Rosh Hashanah holiday. I am currently offline for the holiday and unable to respond to comments on this site, social, media or other platforms.
Netflix will announce its Q1 ’19 earnings on Tuesday – when we’ll know for sure if its subscription price hike was a good business move in the short term. Meanwhile, Disney announced Disney+, its new streaming service platform, will only cost $6.99/month and its stock shot up over 11% overnight.
This further complicates the pricing model debate for streaming services as Disney overshadows Apple, who had dominated the tech news cycle for weeks after announcing its competing OTT streaming services to Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and AppleTV+. With big names like Steven Speilberg and Oprah in attendance helping to buttress Apple’s credibility in the increasingly crowded OTT market, Apple sent a clear message that they, in the words of one executive, would “define the commitment to storytelling, on every screen in your life.” While it may have been tempting to be distracted by the cavalcade of celebrities that took to the stage inside Steve Jobs Theatre, Apple’s silence on one topic became deafening on the Twittersphere as everyone began to ask the core underlying question left unanswered: How much will this cost? Disney shared, why can’t you?
CNBC media reporter Alex Sherman, who attended the unveiling in person, tweeted “we got a half hour of actors talking about their shows without clips and zero details on Apple original content pricing or if channels services will be bundled for a discount. The general mood here is shock and mild annoyance among the people sitting around me.” Vox’s critic at large Todd VanDerWerff opined “Apple’s new streaming service is still mostly defined by what we don’t know.”
He’s right. The company chose to avoid addressing any specifics around pricing or the potential savings users could capture by bundling with other Apple services. What we do know is that Apple TV+ will be a subscription service free of advertising. This announcement kicked off an interesting debate about which revenue model – ad-supported or subscription – is most likely to attract large scale consumer audiences.
Apple and now Disney’s decision to forgo ads stands in stark contrast to recent reports from Google-owned YouTube, who instead is purported to be looking into expanding its ad-supported content while potentially deemphasizing subscription-based models as well as Viacom owned PlutoTV which is doubling down on its completely free ad-supported model. Google denies it will abandon its subscription model entirely as others later reported, but it is clear that the world’s largest advertising company sees significant opportunity in offering premium content for free in an ad-supported environment.
As the debate unfolds over ad-supported models vs. subscription-based revenue streams, the real question marketers and content platforms need to be asking is: “What do consumers want?” The answer is both.
To start, it’s important to level set by clarifying that OTT is now mainstream, and this is not a niche consumer audience. In partnership with the Harris Poll, OpenX conducted a nationwide study of OTT users released this week which found that the majority of US consumers now stream at least one OTT service, with most streamers subscribing to an average of three platforms. Within this growing group of streamers, there are very diverse opinions about preferred billing models that signal a broad opportunity for platforms to be creative with how they monetize their content.
The study found a nearly even split among those who want to pay a subscription fee in exchange for zero ads with a slight majority opting for some form of advertising to reduce or eliminate subscription fees. Forty-six percent of consumers prefer a service that costs $10/month with no ads. Interestingly, the survey also found that consumers would be willing to pay as much as $24/month for one primary subscription – nearly twice Netflix’s adjusted monthly rate of its most popular plan now $13/month (up from $12/month), showing there is clear upward pricing mobility for an ultra-premium provider in the subscription market. I expect the earnings call on Tuesday to report no significant hurt in sales because of this increase.
That said, there is a potentially missed opportunity by streaming providers, including Netflix and Apple, to be releasing a tiered pricing model that includes ad-supported, discounted and free subscription models.
Ofthe 2,002 U.S. consumers who answered The Harris Poll survey OpenX commissioned, 54 percent would opt for an ad-supported model; 29 percent of which prefer a service that costs around $5/month with 2-3 minutes of ads per hour, while the other 25 percent prefer a free service with up to 10 minutes of ads per hour. The clear message here is that there is room for multiple models, and a “one-size-fits-all approach” (or singular billing models) will likely be replaced by a menu of options tailored to consumer preferences. One guide to follow comes again from the nationwide survey of OTT users that uncovered the sweet spot of content and cost — what I would call the 15/100 rule of video. Consumers watch around 15 channels of cable TV today and if price weren’t an issue, they would be open to watching 15 different OTT services. For cost, whether it is OTT or cable/satellite, viewers are comfortable spending about $100/month to have access to the content they want to watch.
Consumers don’t want an unlimited number of choices and they don’t want to pay for channels they don’t watch. Just as demand for a variety of OTT providers increases, so too will the diversity of revenue models. Less than five percent of all television advertising dollars flow to OTT channels today. As the eyeballs continue to migrate to streaming platforms, OTT advertising dollars will quickly follow – and they are projected to outstrip the overall growth of all advertising by five times in 2019. Investments in content alone will not determine the winners from the losers in the OTT race. Whichever platforms get the pricing formula, content portfolio and user experience right will ultimately establish market leadership in the rapidly growing OTT market.
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
About The Author
Dallas Lawrence is currently the chief communications and brand officer at OpenX, the largest independent advertising exchange. Prior to joining OpenX, Dallas Lawrence served as the chief communications officer for Rubicon Project, led global communications and government affairs for Mattel and served as the chief global digital strategist for Burson-Marsteller. During more than a decade in Washington, DC, Dallas served as a press secretary on Capitol Hill prior to joining President Bush’s communications team, leading outreach efforts for the President’s signature domestic policy initiative No Child Left Behind. Dallas would later deploy to Baghdad, Iraq, on behalf of the White House to serve as a spokesperson for the Coalition. Upon returning from Baghdad, Dallas joined the communications team of Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld where he served as the Pentagon’s director of public liaison for both Rumsfeld and his predecessor Secretary Gates. He has been named both the “Crisis Manager of the Year” by PR News and “Social Media Professional of the Year.” In 2013, PR Week named him one of the 40 most influential leaders in PR. Dallas was previously a commissioned officer in the United States Navy and earned a BA in political science from the University of California at Berkeley and an MA in government from The Johns Hopkins University.
Hello, everyone. My name is Bartosz Góralewicz. I am the CEO of Onely and welcome to SEMrush Weekly Wisdom. Today we are going to talk about JavaScript SEO, and we are going to get a little bit geeky with this topic.
Let’s talk about the history of JavaScript SEO for a second. JavaScript SEO is a fairly new concept. It started getting popular around 2016 when we published our first experiment that showed that Google has a few problems indexing JavaScript-generated content properly. This experiment got very, very popular quickly because it basically showed that Google is not very good; it is not perfect. It is struggling with rendering JavaScript. So Google actually could render a little bit of JavaScript. It was basically and still is a little bit slow. But at that time, most of the other search engines didn’t even have the technology or the resources to index even a little bit of JavaScript content. Still, this showed a little bit of a problem, and that is what I want to talk about today.
HTML vs. JavaScript
Let’s start with what’s the main difference between HTML content and JavaScript content because this is something that we really need to differentiate somehow. We are all used to HTML and CSS-built websites, for years now. With an HTML website, you just look into the source code, and you can see most of the content that is going to be visible on the website when you open it. With JavaScript, in a lot of cases, it is not like that at all. When you look into the code of the JavaScript-powered website, in many cases you can just see a few lines of JavaScript script, and there is no content that is visible on the page at all.
So we can compare that very in a visual way that HTML is like a ready-to-go cake and that it is basically ready to be consumed by Googlebot and WRS (web rendering service). And JavaScript is just a lot of ingredients that still have to be processed by either your browser on your mobile, your desktop or by Googlebot and then the rendering service to create the final product or, in this comparison, final cake. So this is very resource-intensive, especially on the CPU of either your device or Google servers. And this is actually what makes JavaScript so difficult to work with, a little bit complex at the same time.
Let me tell you one thing before we move further. And a lot of SEOs will be claiming that JavaScript is evil. I can understand where it comes from. But working with JavaScript for quite a bit and working with a lot of enterprise companies, eCommerce platforms that are powered by JavaScript, we never had the problem with that once we understood the problem and we worked with developers to fix it. So I guess JavaScript is not really evil. It is just a little bit more complex than the HTML and CSS that we are all used to.
4-Step Process — Is Your Website Properly Crawled and Indexed?
Let’s go through a quick checklist of how to make sure that your website is properly crawled and indexed in Google and other search engines. With these steps, you can check if you have a JavaScript problem or maybe this is something that is not a problem for your website.
Step 1: Check How Your Site Works With Disabled JS
The first, amazingly simple step is basically going to your Chrome browser.Just download Quick JavaScript Switcher plugin. Switch off JavaScript and see if any of the content within your page is going to change. If you switch off JavaScript and you see that, for example, part of your article or your product description or images disappear, this means that Google may struggle to index these parts of your website. So that’s step number one.
Step 2: Google URL Inspection Tool
Go to the Google URL inspection tool and see if your website renders properly for Google. That is a very simple step, and you can see,= if the website renders properly. And you can only look into the code that was processed by Google, and you can see, okay, is that what we are looking for? Is that the content we are actually sending to the browsers? Is it the same content I see in my Chrome browser or whatever you are using?
Step 3: Indexing Check
Step number three is, and this is actually a little bit tricky, but this is the simplest way to check if your website relies on two waves of indexing. Go to google.com and see if Google indexed the content from the website or from the page that you published within the last few minutes or few hours. If you published a new article one hour ago and you can see, okay, the URL is indexed, make sure that every single piece of that article or that page is indexed in Google.
And this is where I have to introduce a new concept, which is partial indexing. It may happen that with JavaScript content, some of your content within that URL is indexed, some of the content isn’t. And this is where it gets a little bit tricky because the content that is not going to be indexed is content that relies on JavaScript. Make sure to check different parts of the page and see if they are appropriately indexed in Google.
Step 4: Code Comparison
Step four is if you are feeling geeky, if you want to dive a little bit deeper, go to your search console and check a few last crawled pages. Compare the code that you can see in the Google Search Console with what you are seeing in your browser and see, okay, are there any anomalies?
Conclusion
So those are the four steps that you have to take. But now what happens if you found some problems or some potential issues during those four steps? For example, you are seeing that Google is taking a little bit too long to index your content, or some of your content is never indexed in Google or other search engines.
If that happens, you need to consider some form of rendering your JavaScript for a search engine, especially, depending on your market, in most cases, for Google and Googlebot. This is something I am going to cover in the next episode of Weekly Wisdom with Bartosz, so make sure to subscribe. And I hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much.
Two new specs aimed at addressing ad fraud and increasing transparency from the buy-side of the digital advertising ecosystem are out for public comment from the IAB Tech Lab: Sellers.json and the OpenRTB SupplyChain object.
The 30-day public comment period ends May 10.
What is OpenRTB SupplyChain object? The SupplyChain object will show buyers all the parties involved in selling or reselling a given bid request. It consists of a set of nodes, with each node representing an entity participating in the bid request sale. The complete chain of entities involved in (and paid for part of) the sale are then discoverable to the buyer.
“This information can be important to buyers for any number of reasons including transparency of the supply chain, ensuring that all intermediaries are entities that the buyer wants to transact with and that inventory is purchased as directly as possible,” per the spec.
It can be used with OpenRTB 2.5 and OpenRTB 3.0.
What is Sellers.json? It’s a file that allows ad buyers (DSPs) to see and verify the final seller of a given bid request — as long as the seller is ads.txt authorized. It’s like an inverse companion to Ads.txt, which publishers post to their domain to list authorized sellers of their inventory.
It also makes visible the identities of all intermediaries that participated in the sale of a bid request. It allows publisher name and domain attributes to be looked up and cached offline rather than supplied with every bid request. Each seller has a seller_id, which is the same ID that appears in an ads.txt file, SupplyChain.nodes and typically in the Publisher.id property of an OpenRTB request.
Ad systems place the sellers.json file on their root domain and any relevant subdomains. For example, http://indexexchange.com/sellers.json. The IAB Tech Lab advises “Every advertising system listed in an ads.txt file and any advertising system that is referencedfrom a SupplyChain object node should also publish a Sellers.json file” on their domains.
Why we should care. These two technical specifications build on the ads.txt imitative that launched two years ago, and apps-ads.txt for app developers, to help combat invalid traffic, ad fraud and counterfeit inventory on open exchanges. With the trio of specs, there are now tools for the sell-side (SSPs), the buy-side (DSPs) and intermediaries.
“Growth in the global digital advertising ecosystem requires trust, and sellers.json and the SupplyChain object provide essential visibility into the supply chain, enabling buyers to curate media sources,” said Dennis Buchheim, senior vice president and general manager, IAB Tech Lab. “Used together, these technologies help enable a more transparent, more efficient advertising environment. I encourage everyone to provide feedback to the Tech Lab, and adopt as soon as the specs are finalized.”
This story first appeared on MarTech Today. For more on marketing technology, click here.
About The Author
Ginny Marvin is Third Door Media’s Editor-in-Chief, managing day-to-day editorial operations across all of our publications. Ginny writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, she has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.
