Google is sending out an email that states that from 30/09/2020 the Google Publisher Policies will be updated to prohibit monetisation of web pages, sites or apps that are not primarily in one of their supported languages, or that do not contain content.

From 10/30/2020, they will not allow new sites to be monetised using AdSense, Ad Manager or AdMob in unsupported languages or where they do not contain content.

After 30/03/2020  (I am guessing this should read 03/03/2021) they will not allow any sites in unsupported languages to be monetised using AdSense, Ad Manager or AdMob.

There were multiple instances of complaints around Google de-indexing pages. It is hard to know exactly what is going on without being given access to the URLs in question, but there is a spike in complaints around indexing issues with Google as of this morning.

Had some key landing pages dropped out the index for no obvious reason today @sengineland @rustybrick – another bug?

— Michael James Field (Mikuss) (@Mikuss) September 30, 2020

Google have stated that an indexing issue has been fixed, but it doesn't appear to be a news-only problem.

We're seeing this morning a few issues where pages are being de-indexed – hopefully this will be fixed soon? @searchliaison

cc: @rustybrick #SEO https://t.co/SmS9yXvagr

— Fibre (@Fibre_Marketing) September 30, 2020

cc @rustybrick the issue above fixed it for me. Seen that others are having the same problem

— Sunny Matharu (@s_matharu) September 30, 2020

@JohnMu my company's home page just got de-indexed yesterday. how is it possible? no signs of trouble. Index issues again?

— bubble gum (@bubbleg34408153) September 30, 2020

Looks like Google is about to start rolling out their FREE listing for products in Shopping Tabs for countries across Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Currently, it’s only in a few countries like India, Indonesia and from April this year in the US.

Existing users of Merchant Center and Shopping ads don’t have to do anything to take advantage of the free listings.

I am not sure if this is new but it’s not something I have come across in the past.

Cloudflare Radar – is a great little dashboard with a lot of handy stats like trending domains, popular domains, mobile vs desktop traffic over time, etc

They also have a website insight tool: eg you can pull up the insight for tldrMarketign from this link.

Pinterest is introducing more places for retailers to promote Pins and showcase ads, this includes Pinterest Lens, which unlocks the power of visual search by allowing people to find similar results to what they capture through the Pinterest camera and in Pins. According to them, three of their most highly trafficked and visible places to shop – Lens, the shop tab in search, and shopping on Pins (coming soon) – can now include ads.

With new conversion insights in the U.S., Pinterest Verified Merchants and Shopify retailers can easily see the impact of both their paid and organic Pinterest content on their site visits and checkouts.

They are bringing shopping inspiration to the UK. With the launch of these features, UK Pinners will be able to shop within a home or fashion Pin, shop their search results, from their boards and shop the inspiration they see in the real world through Lens camera visual search. They’ll also be able to get inspiration from Shopping spotlights, which are expert-selected shoppable content curated with publishers and creators.

The People Also Ask (PAA) feature has become an important facet of SEO and content strategies over the past few years. The SEMrush study examined 1,000,000 keywords of US desktop results (random subset from the SEMrush US database) to provide unique insights into the changing landscape of Google search features, as well as an action plan for how you can implement an effective PAA strategy for your own SEO.

Key Findings

• PAA boxes are present in almost half of all searches within our 1,000,000 keyword dataset and are continuing to grow.
• Google is using PAA at least in part for query refinement, giving websites the opportunity for first-page visibility on search terms that were previously too broad to target.
• A PAA SEO strategy is applicable to almost all sectors (industry-specific breakdowns can give you a guide to how much of your overall effort should go into PAA optimization).
• There are opportunities and risks for big brands to control answers where PAA questions are shown on branded search terms.
• Unlike featured snippets, it is possible to both appear in a PAA box and hold a standard organic ranking on page 1 of Google.
• 75% of the time a PAA result appears, it is within the top 3 results in Google, providing a good chance of high visibility.
• Question terms on average will generate PAA 86% of the time.
• Google is mainly taking web text content for PAA results, with 48 % of all PAA boxes being exclusively from text in paragraphs.
• There are still untapped opportunities for video content within PAA boxes, where Google cannot find any suitable results.
• As with other types of rich results, brevity is key with paragraph results averaging only 41 words.

A nice little SEO tool to have in your SEO tool kit. The challenge in page title optimization is finding the right balance between the keywords you want to target, the message you want to convey, and the limitations on the overall page title length, this tool takes a lot of the guesswork out of the picture.

You can read about the science behind it here or just start using the tool here.

Chrome DevTools recently added support for emulating colour vision deficiencies, helping you better optimize your pages to be inclusive of users with differing levels of colour blindness.

To simulate a vision deficiency:

• Open the Rendering sub-panel by selecting the ... menu in the toolbar
• Select the More tools option and then Rendering
• Scroll to the Emulate vision deficiencies item and use the drop-down menu to display the options available for colour vision deficiency emulation.
• Select an option
• The current page should now display the colour vision deficiency emulated

Facebook is merging Messenger chat service with Instagram, Instagram’s old direct messaging service, Instagram Direct, has been replaced by Messenger, allowing users to send chats, photos and videos between the two platforms. They also announced a few other features like

• Watch Together: Enjoy watching videos on Facebook Watch, IGTV, Reels (coming soon!), TV shows, movies, and more with friends and family during a video call.
• Vanish Mode: Choose a mode where seen messages disappear after they’re seen or when you close the chat.
• Selfie Stickers: Create a series of boomerang stickers with your selfie to use in conversation.
• Chat Colors: Personalize your chats with fun color gradients.
• Custom Emoji Reactions: Create a shortcut of your favorite emojis to react quickly to messages from friends.
• Forwarding: Easily share great content with up to five friends or groups.
• Replies: Respond directly to a specific message in your chat and keep the conversation flowing.
• Animated Message Effects: Add visual flair to your message with animated send effects.
• Message Controls: Decide who can message you directly, and who can’t message you at all.
• Enhanced Reporting and Blocking Updates: Now you can report full conversations in addition to single messages on Instagram, and receive proactive blocking suggestions across Instagram and Messenger when you add your accounts in the new Accounts Center.

Google is testing showing the people also search for query expander feature not just in the search results but also directly in the Google search bar. I was not able to trigger bit but a few other users have seen it.