This Week in Search: Snapchat Supports Animated GIFS, & More

Pure SEO’s This Week In Search series takes a look at the top SEO and SEM news stories from the week.

This week Facebook Messenger, Snapchat and Bing Ads Editor announced new features, while Twitter brought out new policies and Google revealed it pulled out its support months ago.

Facebook Messenger Lets You Add People to Calls in Progress

Chatting to your mum and want to ‘cc’ in your sister? Now you can, with Facebook Messenger‘s new feature that allows users to invite additional people to a call in progress. Simply tap on the ‘add person’ icon to turn a twosome into a threesome. This feature is available with the latest update to Facebook Messenger on iOS and Android.

Twitter has New Rules to Prevent Automation & Use of Multiple Accounts

The blue bird has new rules in place to prevent applications and services from utilizing automation for the purposes of posting spam. Twitter is also making changes to its API which will limit users’ ability to perform coordinated actions across multiple accounts.

All users must comply with the new policies by 23 March, 2018. The new policies being put in place are as follows:

• An application or service must not permit users to simultaneously post identical or substantially similar content to multiple accounts.
• An application or service must not permit users to simultaneously perform actions such as Likes, Retweets, or follows from multiple accounts.
• An application or service must not permit users to use of any form of automation (including scheduling) to post identical or substantially similar content, or to perform actions such as Likes or Retweets, across multiple accounts.
• Users of TweetDeck will no longer be able to select multiple accounts through which to perform an action such as Tweeting, Retweeting, liking, or following.

Snapchat Supports Animated GIFs from GIPHY

Decorate your snap with an animated GIF! Snapchat has been updated with support for a new library of GIFs from GIPHY. They can be added as stickers, or choose a GIF and long-press on a video to attach the GIF to a specific person or object. Animated GIFs are now available in the latest Snapchat update on iOS and Android.

Bing Ads Editor has Labels for Dynamic Search Ads

A new update in Bing Ads Editor gives users the ability to organize dynamic search ads by adding shared labels. They can be created for anything, and one ad can have multiple labels. They can also be colour coded for easy reference. These labels are for the person(s) managing the Bing Ads account and don’t affect how the ad is shown to searchers.

Google Stops Supporting Meta News Keywords Tags

Sneaky Google only just revealed that it no longer supports the meta news keywords tag, and it hasn’t supported it for several months. It appears not many people were using it, which could be the reason why it was dropped. However, Google has not specifically stated a reason.