[Ep91] – IndexNow Enables Data Sharing Between Bing And Yandex

[Introduction] – 00:00 

 Hey everyone, welcome back to the TWIMshow. This is episode 91 and your host Sajid Islam. Today, I’ll be going over the notable news and updates from the week of January 10 – 15, 2022. First of all, this seems to be a relatively quiet cool week. I guess people are or businesses are still returning from their holiday mode and they still haven’t like you know, really released a lot of stuff with that. Let’s dive in. 

[Update 1 – Open Enrollment For The Microsoft Advertising Partner Program Has Begun!] – 00:29

First of all, just a quick update from anyone who is in the Microsoft Bing world or Advertisers and Microsoft Bing. Or if you’re a listener who wants to become a Microsoft Advertising partner, then this is the update for you. Microsoft has opened up an open enrollment and usually the open enrollment runs from January to March 31 where you can apply to become a partner for Microsoft Advertising. And obviously, if you become a partner and depending on how much you spend, they give you different levels, and based on that level you get access to different programs. Now if you ask me or if you follow us, which is marketANDgrow, you know how I feel about these partnership programs and we are not partner of any company or with any company. Why is that? So number one is just something I think we have our duty towards our customers, not towards this company. It’s like imagine if your doctor has a partnership with XYZ Pharmaceuticals. You would be questioning every time
your doctor is giving you prescribing a medicine specially from that pharmaceutical. Do you want that doctor to be not have any affiliation of any pharmaceutical company. Similarly, I don’t want us to become like either a
partner of Google or partner of Microsoft only because the partnership there is a minimum required ad spend. We have to spend a certain amount of money and I don’t want to really go deep into it. However, if you become a partner, it does help you to become visible to potential customers who are looking through Microsoft certified partners. It’s a double-edged sword. Use it whichever way you like it. For us, it doesn’t make any sense because we want to remain platform agnostic and do what is best for our clients. With that, let’s move on to the next update.

[Update 2 – Google Ads Allows Sports Gambling Ads In New York Now] – 02:37

The next update is from Google Ads, a very short one which is Google Ads is now allowing you to run sports betting/gambling ads in New York State. The only caveat to that is that you have to have a company that is certified and state licensed entity. The reason why Google Ads changed that program is
because New York State approved on mobile gambling or online gambling last year because they want to add some more revenue to their State. So with that. So in the past if your ad was disapproved and if you’ve been following us, I think two episodes back we talked about how Google Ads will now flag previously disapproved ads as eligible to run ads. So this is one of those things updates that’s going to help you from the past. With that, let’s move on to the next update.

[Update 3 – 4 New Messaging Features From Snapchat] – 03:37

The next update is from Snapchat. Well, this is the only update this week from
a platform and they have updated and they have rolled out four things in their messaging. One is chat replies, Bitmoji reactions, polls and revamped audio and calling interface. First of all, the polls stickers allows you to create emoji focus polls that you can share in snaps and stories. This is something your friends can comment on it and you get to see who not comment, but vote on it and you get to see who voted what snaps like the second update, they’re also allowing you to reply to individual messages in a group chat. Microsoft, Microsoft Facebook Messenger since 2019. So this platform is copying it. And the third one is they’re rolling out Bitmoji reactions, which are similar to reactions options in other social apps. You can just reply with icon or emoji saying oh wow, cool and things like that. The fourth and the final update is this. Snap has updated the video and audio calling interface in order to make live conversations more fun. The one thing I like about it is that they’re just making it easier to add lens in video calls. So if you’re in a video call you can add a lens and you can look like something else. I think it’s fun, especially snaps. Target demographics are usually younger people, so they like to have some fun. So I think this is really good. With that, let’s move on to the next update, which is on SEO and from Google.

[Update 4 – Google: Nofollow Is Not A Substitute For Noindex] – 05:19

So someone asked Google’s John Mueller during his office hours, hey is nofollow substitute for noindex? Now what are no follow and no index?
Just very quickly is nofollow is basically thing that you put in it’s a command that you put in your HTML that tells hey, Google, do not follow this link and transfer the page rank. And the other one is noindex. So what Google’s John Mueller is saying that hey, you need to be careful. Nofollow is just treated as a hint for the Google bot or Google web crawler to say you don’t want the crawler to follow but it will eventually follow it depending on how it decides. And noindex is basically you’re strictly telling the Google crawler that please do not index the page that is linked here. So how does this help you on your business? Well, number one is if you have guest authors and they are posting and commenting on your blog, usually people tend to use nofollow and they say you know what, do not. And that’s a way to keep that link of the other page that the guest post is referring to not going to get the SEO credit. Well that doesn’t really happen. So if you want to do that, then use noindex. But if you want to be kind of give Google the ability to decide as they see fit, then use nofollow. That’s all there is.

 

[Update 5 – Google Has Two Types Of Crawling – Discovery & Refresh] – 07:04

Okay. The next update on the SEO front is that Google has two types of crawling, discovery and refresh. And this was a question again asked to Google John Mueller during his office hours. I see from a Google search console report that the crawler is coming in at various times of the week and sometimes it crawls the whole website. Sometimes it just only crawls my home page. And John Mueller says, you know what? Look, we crawled for two reasons. One is discovery, which is like there are new sites and new pages that were not crawled before and we’re going to update and add it to our index. And the other one is we have a page in our index and we need to refresh it. Depending on how we determine which page gets refreshed, how often we come back and we can probably just reindex that page. So if your homepage was changing a whole lot, or if you have a blog page and it just updates every week, like for us, our URL is marketandgrow.com/twim The TWIM page changes every week. So Google bot will probably crawl that page more often and refresh their index because it changes every week versus a home page, which is fairly static and doesn’t change. I think it changes only once every six months. And it’s going to change again in the near future because as we are changing our website as we speak, I mean, we are working behind the scenes, we are on the drawing board. But I hope this helps you to understand what the two differences are with that.

[Update 6 – YouTube Launches Understanding Performance Trends by Highlighting Similar Videos] – 08:37

The next update is from YouTube. Youtube has launched a new thing. It’s called Understanding Performance Trends by highlighting similar videos. And you’ll find this inside the Advanced Analytics Elements in YouTube studio with that. What this does is you can now view a scatter plot of all your videos and their comparative performance on variable timelines. This new element enables you to select show videos with similar topics from the plot display, which will then switch the graph to a specific listing of uploads on the same subject. What this means is that you’re getting a better comparison of video performance as you’re comparing more like for like clips as opposed to measuring each video against every other video. This could be a very good way for you to contextualize video engagement while also helps you to highlight the specific topics that are resonating over time. Okay, I hope you go check it out and you try it out because this is something a very cool feature. Youtube analytics has a lot of stuff and if you are on YouTube, which you should all be on YouTube, this is something that’s going to help you kind of find. Ok, what are the videos that are doing? Well, what should I be doing next? What should I be creating next? Things like that while talking about YouTube and organic search results. I think this is the last update that is really, really helpful for you and we covered this in our last episode, episode 90 and it shows up again on episode 91. Is that

[Update 7 – IndexNow Enables Data Sharing Between Bing And Yandex] – 10:19

IndexNow, which was covered last week and I even did a video and it should be on our channel. How to use IndexNow, IndexNow actually now when you submit a new URL through IndexNow, it helps you with your index shows up to Yandex or vice versa. So currently only Microsoft Bing and Yandex. The two search engine supports IndexNow. Google as a search engine is testing it out to see if they will support it or not. What Microsoft came out with an announcement. If you submit through either Microsoft IndexNow or through Yandex or through the IndexNow endpoint, basically it’s going to go to all the search engines as part of IndexNow, which is obviously right now Bing ans Yandex now, why does it matter? It matters because unless you like to pay for new traffic and you love running ads and spending money, you should be focused on organic search results as well. And this is a great way to get started on your organic journey because you don’t have to submit to each individual search engines. Obviously, it’s going to be amazing if Google joins the game and it also submits to Google. But nevertheless, for now, Bing is good. Even if you get like two sales from Bing a month and if your average sale is $1,000, that’s $2,000. I would take the $2,000 any day for taking ten minutes of my time to set up something like IndexNow I don’t know about you, but that’s just me. Free traffic is free traffic. Why would I going to pay for something and run ads and add those two sales things like that? Because it’s something one of those things that you can set up and forget. So I hope this is helpful. Again, do follow our page. Whether you are on YouTube or whether you are on Instagram because I will be doing an updated IndexNow tutorial to show about the third option, which is the IndexNow endpoint so that you don’t have to go through either a Bing plugin or a Yandex plugin and you just want to go to IndexNow endpoint. You could do either or. It doesn’t matter. But I just want to show it out. So follow us.

[Announcement] – 12:02

So hope this is helpful. Again, do follow our page. Whether you are on YouTube or whether you are on Instagram because I will be doing an updated IndexNow tutorial to show about the third option, which is the index now endpoint so that you don’t have to go through either a Bing plugin or a Yandex plugin and you just wanna go to IndexNow endpoint. I mean you could do either or, it doesn’t matter, but I just want to show it out. So follow us.

 [Closing] – 12:31

Ok with that folks, that’s it for This Week In Marketing. Now you know everything to be in the know. Once again this is your host Sajid Islam signing off until next week. Take care bye-bye.