Hey folks, happy Wednesday. I hope all my fellow Americans had a wonderful 4th of July holiday, and that everyone else had a wonderful regular weekend. The holiday here in the States slowed down our SEO news a little, but there is still some good stuff, so let’s dive in!
Google News:
- Matt Cutts To Go On Leave – Google’s head of web spam, Matt Cutts, announced on his blog that he’s going to be taking something of a sabbatical. Apparently he’ll be taking off until roughly October. But he says not to worry: the spam team is “much better at spam fighting than I am.” We’ll miss his regular videos, but it’s good to know things on the web spam team at Google will be moving forward unabated.
- Companies Such As Yelp Join Fight Against EU “Right To Be Forgotten” Ruling – Recently, local search giant Yelp joined the growing chorus of voices set against the recent ruling in the EU court that allowed individuals and corporations to ask Google to have certain search engine results removed. Theirs is the latest voice among individuals and corporations alike calling to have the ruling revised to be tougher and more specific. Search Engine Land has a great follow up article on the ongoing results of the ruling, which have been tantamount to broadening censorship. We’ll bring you more as this develops.
- Google Adds Killer-Robots.txt File To Protect Page And Brin From Terminators – Google has a new file at http://www.google.com/killer-robots.txt that basically disallows user agents “T-800” and “T-1000” from indexing “/+LarryPage” and “/+SergeyBrin”. We’re not sure why this was added, but it’s pretty funny just the same.
- Possible Recent Google Update? – Barry Schwartz noted on Search Engine Roundtable that there was some severe SERP volatility around June 28th and July 5th, but isn’t sure if any kind of serious algorithm update occurred to cause it. While Google has stated they update their search engine algorithms pretty much weekly, those small changes usually don’t cause that kind of volatility. We’ll keep an eye on this for further developments.
- Report: YouTube Falling Short Of Its Own Internal Goals – According to a
![YouTube-300x109]()
report by The Information, internal goals at the video giant project that they will reach one billion hours of “watch time” each day by 2016. However, YouTube currently has less than 300 million watch time hours each day (although these numbers are up around 100 million from 2012). The report cites intensifying competition from video providers which now also produce content of their own, such as Netflix and Hulu, as one of the causes of this slow growth.
Other News:
- Report: Mobile Internet Usage Exceeds PC Usage For First Time Ever – According to a recent report from comScore, in early January of this year, mobile internet usage – which includes smartphones and tablets – overtook and exceeded desktop usage for the first time in history. The study also surveyed the time of day users engaged with these devices, and found that the majority of people accessed them during evenings, followed by workdays and weekends. Thankfully the amount of engagement during commutes was low. This shows, more than ever, the importance of having a viable and usable mobile site to complement your desktop site.
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