Google’s iconic logo is changing in a big way

The company announced Tuesday it would be changing its iconic logo to one that “that reflects this reality and shows you when the Google magic is working for you, even on the tiniest screens,” according to a statement.

Though the Mountain View company’s logo has changed many times before, this update is the most significant change it has made yet. It uses an all-new sans serif font with thicker, more uniform, letters and slightly different colors.

The new custom typeface, which Google has dubbed Product Sans “takes cues from that same schoolbook letter-printing style, but adopts the neutral consistency we’ve all come to expect from a geometric sans serif,” Google writes on its Design blog.

Google showcased the new, flatter, logo in its Google Doodle Tuesday.

Facebook Dumps “Likes” In New CPC Calculation To Focus On Performance Outcomes

The once regaled Like is getting another kick in the shin. Facebook is changing up the way it calculates cost-per-click to an approach that moves past its roots as a place for brands to win popularity contests by garnering “likes” to one that puts business performance objectives first.

For advertisers that want to drive app installs or traffic to their websites, the cost-per-click (CPC) will no longer take into account engagement actions such as comments, likes and shares. The calculation will focus solely on so-called “link clicks”.

What counts as a link click?
These are the “link clicks”, which Facebook considers related to certain ad objectives that should impact advertisers’ bidding strategies and will be included in the new CPC definition:

Clicks to visit another website
Call-to-action button clicks that go to another website
Clicks on “Call Now” buttons in click-to-call ads
Clicks to install an app
Clicks to Facebook canvas apps, which are native to the site
Clicks to view a video on another website, such as YouTube (Clicks on a video uploaded to Facebook is still considered an engagement click.)
To be clear, marketers can still choose to target ads and bid for engagement clicks by choosing other optimization options, those actions just won’t be tracked in the new CPC calculation.

The blog post makes the shift in thinking clear, “It’s also important to remember that having lots of likes and shares on an ad or post is rarely an end unto itself. The most important factor for an ad’s success is bidding for the correct business objective.”

A More Precise View For Performance Advertisers
The move makes sense and was apparently advertiser-driven according to Facebook’s head of ads product marketing for interfaces and newsfeed Richard Sim by phone. Taking engagement actions out of the calculation makes it easier to evaluate performance-driven campaigns and set bids based on those desired outcomes.

“The new CPC will enable advertisers to be more specific about the types of ads they use and pay only for clicks that lead to their website if that’s the marketing objective they have in mind,” said Sim.

“If you think back, a lot of advertisers thought of Facebook only as a social platform and were strictly engagement focused. Over the past few years we’ve really been focused on driving business results. The transition to clicks being only link clicks is a big step in this transition.”

Twitter did something similar with its move to Objective-Based Campaigns last year, and Google’s Display Campaign builder in AdWords also walks advertisers through a particular campaign-creation path depending on the marketing objective they select.

Campaign Performance: Comparing Apples & Oranges
Once this new approach goes live, advertisers won’t be able to simply compare current campaign performance to historical performance.  Without the context of knowing when the change goes into effect, Facebook campaigns performance could appear to take a nosedive.

Campaigns will likely generate fewer clicks at higher CPCs once engagement clicks are removed from the equation. “The numerator is different,” as Sim explains.

But for performance advertisers, the new numbers should be a truer reflection of how their campaigns are meeting business performance objectives without being muddled by actions better associated with branding goals.

Back-End Targeting & Bidding Optimizations
Once an advertiser chooses an objective for a campaign, it drives a number of options for advertisers in ad creation. The system’s ad serving and optimization are then informed by campaign objectives.

“There is a lot of stuff on the backend that’s much more simple when we understand the objective,” explained Sim. “People that engage with an ad versus click on it are often very different.” Engagements are public actions that show others what you care about. Clicks, however, are private. Nobody knows whether you clicked on an article or an ad on Facebook.

When a campaign objective is selected, Facebook’s ad engine assesses every impression and makes a prediction on how likely a user is to engage or click, based on past behavior among other factors, to determine which ad should be served and at what CPC.

Roll-Out Timing
Wednesday’s announcement coincides with the new API release. Developers will have the usual 90 days to make adjustments and build for the new API. If you’re working with a Facebook Marketing Partner, check with them to find out when they’ll be implementing the new API.

The update to the interfaces — Power Editor and Ads Manager — is probably about a month away, said Sim. Messaging will be added to the interfaces about the change when it goes live. Sim also added that the SMB team will be doing outreach to help advertisers adjust reporting and expectations after the update.

SMB team will be doing outreach to help advertisers adjust reporting and expectations after the update.

Google releases a tool to track ad effectiveness across devices

The service from the search giant’s DoubleClick unit measures customer responses that may occur days later and on different gadgets.

(Bloomberg)—Google Inc. is making it easier to know when ads are effective, even if they spark sales days after they’re viewed and from different gadgets.

The company is rolling out tools that gauge how well advertisements work across smartphones, tablets and desktop computers, according to Neal Mohan, vice president for video and display advertising. The service can measure customer responses that, for example, start as an ad click on a mobile phone and end with a purchase from a personal computer.

“It’s not just one device—90% of consumers move from device to device throughout the course of the day,” Mohan said. “A consumer might see a video ad on a desktop at work, but they may not actually make a purchase until they’re at home on their laptop or tablet.”

The new service is available from Google’s DoubleClick unit, which serves ads on the Internet, though is available for marketing bought from other companies, as well. The service previously was available on Google’s AdWords feature, which businesses use to buy placements next to search results.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company is stepping up efforts to help marketers target users on mobile gadgets as consumers increasingly use smartphones or tablets to fire up apps or visit websites. Users in the U.S., Japan and other countries have shifted more than half their Internet searches to handheld devices from PCs, the company said last month.

Google on Wednesday also released a service to make it easier to sell so-called native ads—marketing meant to blend in particularly well with the content around it. The company also is making it easier to quickly buy and sell spots on premium websites.

Google Panda Update Coming In Upcoming Weeks

Google’s Gary Illyes says webmasters can expect a Panda refresh within the upcoming weeks.

At SMX Advanced, Google’s Gary Illyes announced that the next Panda update will happen in the upcoming weeks. He said maybe in the next two, or three, or four weeks. But the Panda algorithm will be updated in the near future. Gary said the algorithm isn’t necessarily changing but rather the data will be refreshed. So sites that have been suffering from this algorithm may see a recovery in the near future. However, not all sites will see a recovery, some may not recover, new sites may also be hit by this data refresh. When the data refresh is updated, we will make sure to notify you right here. Gary also explained that it is to Google’s best interest to keep this data fresh, so the they want to keep it updates as frequently as possible. But they do require manual updates and will currently not run by itself like some of their other algorithms.

Google just made YouTube ads shoppable

Google is introducing a new feature to its YouTube video ad offering that allows users to buy showcased products.

The new feature, called TrueView for shopping, will allow users to shop an ad by clicking on a banner in the video ad. It will also serve up a list of individual product cards beneath the video ad, which will direct viewers to a place where they can buy the item. The new feature integrates with existing ad products, according to a blog post from Google:

TrueView for shopping enables advertisers to scale the manual process of connecting individual products with individual videos. Thanks to the first-ever integration of the Google Merchant Center into video ads, advertisers need only connect their campaign with a Merchant Center feed to dynamically add products to their in-stream videos, customized for each user through contextual and audience signals like geography and demographic info.
Google senior vice president of ads and commerce, Sridhar Ramaswamy announced the feature at the Ad-Tech San Francisco conference, today.

Google first released its cards platform in April. The company originally launched the platform as a way for advertisers to include more information about a product or company outside of the actual advertisement using interactive cards. The idea was that users would be able to discover more content around a given advertisement. At the time Google had promised that the cards would be even more functional later this year.

Ad revenue has been slowing for the search giant in recent quarters, which means the company will need to build more value into its ad products going forward in order to keep its ad business growing.

The Quality Update: Google Confirms Changing How Quality Is Assessed, Resulting In Rankings Shake-Up

Earlier this month, many webmasters noticed significant Google ranking changes. Google has finally confirmed those ranking changes with us.

It’s not your imagination. Google’s results have changed since the beginning of this month, and Google’s officially confirmed to Search Engine Land that this is due to a change with how it assesses content quality. Call it “The Quality Update,” if you will.

Earlier this month, some publishers began noticing changes to Google’s search results. We had asked Google if this due to a Panda Update or any other type of update, but Google replied no. Since then, more reports came in, with the change even being dubbed the “Phantom Update” because something did seem to have happened, even if Google wasn’t acknowledging it.

Now Google has. After more follow-up this week, the company told Search Engine Land that while no spam-related update had happened, there were changes to its core ranking algorithm in terms of how it processes quality signals.

When we previously asked Google if there were any updates at all, this is the type of thing that would have been covered in our question. Even if it was an update to the core algorithm, rather than one of the filters like Panda or Penguin, it’s still an “update” in the sense of producing noticeable change. Now that it is confirmed, we’re dubbing it the Quality Update.

Google wouldn’t provide specifics about how quality is now assessed. We know from past statements by Google that quality for a particular page or site is determined by a wide range of individual factors. It could be that Google is now weighting some of those factors more and others less.

As usual with a major update, it’s those who have been harmed with less visibility by the update that have spoken up. Most notably, Hubpages did a post and suggested that Google was somehow targeting “How To” or informational sites.

However, even that post has examples of informational sites that have gained visibility. I’ve also seen reports from a wide array of sites such as credit loan and news sites that have reported by declining and gaining visibility.

That aligns with what Google also said. The update didn’t go after any particular class of sites or any particular sites. It was an update to the overall ranking algorithm itself.

If you’re trying to assess how to perhaps improve your quality, if you were hit, you might review Google’s post from 2011. While written for those impacted by the Panda Update, it actually covers quality in general. Google also shares a bit about quality here.

So, no – if you saw ranking changes earlier this month, you are not alone. Sadly, we don’t have any specific advice to give you outside of Google continues to make algorithmic changes to improve the quality of their search results. So keep focusing on building out a better web site, aimed at your users and overall quality.

What’s The State Of Link Building For SEO In 2015 & Beyond?

The rules regarding link building are seemingly always changing, so columnist Jayson DeMers lays out thoughts about what’s safe, what isn’t, and how you can hedge your bets.

Google’s webmaster trends analyst, John Mueller, answered a common question: “Is link building in any way good?”

His answer was somewhat surprising.

“In general, I’d try to avoid that,” he said, indicating that link building, long believed to be an essential process in SEO, is no longer advisable.

Mueller elaborated on his answer, saying that Google does take links into consideration as part of its ranking algorithm, but that building links directly isn’t the right way to go about it. He stated that your goal should be to make sure your content “stands on its own” and easy for your users to share on their own blogs and websites.

He also downplayed the importance of links, insisting that the ranking algorithm takes many factors into consideration, and building links might ultimately do more harm than good for your site.

Links Doing More Harm Than Good?

The short version of Mueller’s response is only somewhat surprising. Google, as a whole, has long viewed link building as a form of soft link manipulation.

Google’s job is to find the most relevant pages on the web for a user query and rank them based on quality and authority. Any inorganically gained signals of quality/authority (including links) could interfere with the accuracy of those rankings. For Mueller to dismiss link building is in line with that position.

The “Right” Way To Build Links

What John Mueller describes as the right way to build links actually is the right way. It’s the best, most efficient method you have of building links, but it takes some extra time and money to get the job done.

Google considers links valuable in its ranking algorithm because they’re an indication of trust, credibility, and authority. When another website links to yours, it means they found something valuable on your site, and that makes you more valuable by proxy.

Building links on your own mimics this status, but doesn’t convey any actual credibility because you’re the one building them — and Google doesn’t want you to be able to vote for yourself. Instead, work on developing high-quality content that is valuable and likely to be shared.

Costs, Risks & Benefits

Building links can, in fact, do more harm than good – but only if you do it wrong. To determine whether or not link building is actually worth pursuing, you have to understand the costs, risks, and benefits involved with either path forward.

Link building has changed over the last few years. It used to be considered a “best practice” to acquire keyword-rich links on article directories, website directories, social bookmarking sites, etc. Now, those same tactics will only devalue your site (or worse, land you a manual penalty).

These days, earning links through quality content publication — both on your site and off — gets you substantially more value with zero risk, but it also costs a lot more than link building tactics of the past few years. It takes substantially more time, money, and effort to accomplish successful link building than it did just a few years ago.

The Bottom Line

Link building isn’t dead, and it isn’t something you should avoid entirely – after all, Google does still value external links. However, you might want to consider updating your strategy.

Hedging your bets with a bit of traditional link building and a focus on earning links through quality content can get you the best of both worlds — you’ll get the value and low risk of content-based links, but the stability and predictability of lower-cost traditional links.

With that blend, you can stay comfortably within budget while incrementally and reliably building your authority; and, as long as you’re smart with your traditional link building practices, you’ll never have to worry about being penalized.