Facebook’s lead data regulator in Europe has opened another two probes into its business empire — both focused on how the Instagram platform processes children’s information.

Children who changed their Instagram account settings to a business account had their contact info (such as an email address and phone number) displayed unmasked via the platform — arguing that “millions” of children had had their contact information exposed as a result of how Instagram functions.

Facebook is saying it has always made it clear that contact info is displayed if people choose to switch to a business account on Instagram. It also does now let people opt-out of having their contact info displayed if they switch to a business account.

Nonetheless, its lead EU regulator has now said it has identified “potential concerns” relating to how Instagram processes children’s data.

Check out this SEO experiment for internal links from Pinterest. The post breaks down their testing methodologies and how they calculate success for these tests. They test three hypothesis

• A page linked from an internal link would have more traffic than if the page was not linked.
• Traffic increase from linking a new page should be larger than the traffic lost from unlinking an old page.
• Assuming that your new interlinking algorithm assigns scores to destination pages, linking to a page with a higher score should have a higher gain than linking to a page with a lower score.

What did they learn?

1. Pick the existing winners. If we are looking for maximum SEO sessions, picking destination pages that already do well in search results (thus driving good SEO traffic sessions) actually help boost more total traffic.
2. Existing SERP (search engine results pages) ranking is more sticky than you might think. As you might expect, when we point an internal link to a new page, the new page receives a boost of traffic from the search engines. We typically see this increase within 2 weeks. Surprisingly, when the internal link no longer points to an old page, the old page does not suffer much. (The metrics stay flat for 8 weeks.)
3. Expect fast results. We acknowledge that the time to impact for new internal links depends heavily on the domain, crawl rate, etc. With that said, we have seen the traffic shifts start as soon as within 4 days and stabilize as fast as approximately 2 weeks.

Facebook Watch is the go-to place to discover videos across Facebook from live events, to TV shows, sports, news or music videos. They are introducing some new features:

Topics in Watch:  in addition to following your favourite Pages and Profiles, you can now also follow topics. Topics let you personalize the videos that show up in your feed so it’s tailored to what you care about. Topics are available now in the US,  and only you will be able to see what topics you’ve selected.

What’s Happening and Featured sections: In the US and select markets, you’ll find What’s Happening and Featured sections in Watch. Videos in these sections are chosen by Facebook so you can catch up on timely and relevant moments, like the Television Academy’s annual Emmy Awards, MLB World Series highlights, etc.  Other sections include Most Haha’d This Week and Most Loved This Week so you can see the videos that other people are engaging with in Watch. In addition, you’ll see videos in your Watch feed based on what your friends are reacting to and what’s popular in your Groups.

Apple launches Apple Music TV, which is exactly what it sounds like: Apple Music on television. It’s a free, curated, 24-hour live stream of popular music videos (though it’s only available to US residents); you can watch it in the browse tabs of the Apple Music app and on the Apple TV app.

It seems like a direct shot at YouTube’s dominance of the music video space.

With the new desktop How-To treatment, it appears that Google has decided not to show rich results for the top spot. This is unlike all other rich results in Google Search, which have the ability to yield a rich result when occupying the top standard listing.

Similar to FAQ Schema, How-To Schema only has the ability to yield 3 rich results when ranking on the first page of Google Search. This applies to both the mobile and desktop How-To treatment.

A handy little tool to chack comparison of source & rendered HTML. You can pick a mobile or desktop view and gives you a quick way to see if there are differences in Title, description, robots tags canonical, content and internal links.

I haven’t had the chance to fully test it out, but the concept does sound quite handy. At the moment I use View Rendered Source for this.

Google’s John Mueller said that when it comes to Google measuring speed with the upcoming Google Page Experience and Core Web Vitals metrics, that sometimes individual slow URLs can potentially impact other faster URLs if Google cannot determine the speed of those faster URLs and those URL structures look similar.

Google test a three dots label that can trigger an “about this result” overlay in Google search. It shows you information like when google started indexing the site, if that site is secure, the URL and if the result is an ad or not, etc.

Google has pushed out a tweet stating that the canonical issue was effectively resolved last Wednesday, with about 99% of the URLs restored. And they expect the remaining edge cases will be restored within a week or two.

Google News Showcase announced in October is startign to roll out in Germany on the iOS app.

Facebook today announced its Messenger API has also been updated to allow businesses to manage their communications across Instagram, in addition to Messenger.

Before today, businesses could only respond to customer inquiries through the Instagram app and through Facebook’s unified business inbox. This could work for some smaller businesses, but for larger brands with a high volume of messages, it could be difficult to be efficient this way.

The update means businesses will be able to now also integrate Instagram messaging into the applications and workflows they’re already using in-house to manage their Facebook conversations.

The updated Messenger API is launching into beta testing with businesses like Adidas, Amaro, Glossier, H&M, MagazineLuiza, Michael Kors, Nars, Sephora and TechStyle Fashion Group, among other consumer brands. The beta is also open to a limited number of developer partners. Today, other businesses and developers can join a waitlist to request access to the API post-beta.

Ads Data Hub enables customized analysis of your Google ad campaigns to help you get more detailed insights from your campaigns across screens while also protecting user privacy. Changes include:

• improving the user experience for privacy checks in Ads Data Hub. These changes include an enhanced user interface and faster query execution times, and give you a more complete view of your data in Ads Data Hub, without compromising end-user privacy.
• improved the algorithms use to filter query results.
• ability to export query results  for visualization and manipulation in Data Studio and Google Sheets
• self-service account linking for Google Ads, Campaign Manager, and Display & Video 360, so you can more easily access Google ad campaign data across multiple products
• Shapley value and Markov chain analysis methods as native Ads Data Hub functions to assign credit to touchpoints along the consumer journey.  (available in beta today and will roll out to all marketers using Ads Data Hub by the end of the year)

Google clarifies that the Passage Indexing announcement has more to do with ranking than indexing. Google has not changed how it indexes when it comes to this, it still indexes the full page.

Google’s systems will consider the content and meaning of passages when determining what is most relevant versus previously they were largely looking at the page overall. So indexing really has not changed here. It is more of a ranking change, how Google ranks content, based on what it finds on your web page.

Social media is the driving force behind buying online for many consumers, with nearly a fifth of internet shoppers now making purchases online via an app.

According to new research from Visa(paywall) (survey of 2,000 UK consumers conducted by Opinium on behalf of Visa), one in four online purchases are now made as a result of interaction with a social media outlet.

Coined ‘Swipe Up Shopping’, the research revealed social media-fuelled purchases accounted for one in four (24%) online purchases in the past six months. Clothing and accessories are the most popular Swipe Up Shopping purchases (37%), followed by homeware (29%) and electronics (20%).

Well over half (57%) of those questioned said that they didn’t always check third-party reviews of the website they were using. A further 54% neglected to check refund and exchange polices before proceeding to buy goods.