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Pure SEO’s This Week In Search series takes a look at the top SEO and SEM news stories from the week.
This week Google introduced new features, extensions and updates, Firefox ditched Yahoo, and Facebook launched a refurbished app.
It’s undergone many changes this year, but now Google AdWords has rolled out promotion extensions in text ads. This will allow advertisers to display specific offers in their text ads without having to create new ones. Offers include a percentage off, a promotion code and an offer period.
Promotion extensions are available globally, in all languages and currencies supported by the new AdWords interface (aka the AdWords experience).
Yahoo has been ditched after a 3 year relationship for Google, who is now Firefox’s default search provider. Mozilla released Firefox Quantum this week, which they say is the company’s fastest browser yet. This attention to speed may be the cause of the switch back to Google.
Mozilla said, “This is part of our ongoing search strategy, announced in 2014 to evaluate and select the best search experience in each region as opposed to having a single global default.”
Firefox users can still manually change their default search engine to Yahoo, or any of the other 60 built-in search engines. Certain regions such as Yandex in Russia, Turkey, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Baidu in China will have a different default search engine, but for the rest of the world, Google and Firefox are back together.
Job hunters have been requesting this feature for some time, and now Google’s job search experience includes salary information. In cases where the actual salary information is not available, Google will display estimated salary ranges based on job title, location and employer, sourcing information from websites like Glassdoor, PayScale and LinkedIn.
This may empower job seekers, giving them a clearer idea of what they should be getting paid. It may also encourage companies to see what their competitors are offering and reconsider their wages.
Last week, Facebook launched a re-do of its Events app – welcome, Facebook Local. The Events app aimed to become a competitor of Google Calendar, but it never quite hit the mark. Facebook Local is aiming at local search platforms like Yelp and Foursquare. Will it have a better chance at success? Let’s see.
Google Maps has introduced a brighter palette with more colours, and they have added icons to correspond to places and business categories. Food and drink is orange or gold, shopping is royal blue, services are lavender, entertainment is turquoise, outdoor activities and places are green, etc.
The changes will roll out over the next few weeks and will be seen in “all products that incorporate Google Maps, including the Assistant, Search, Earth and Android Auto.” These UI changes will also feature in third-party apps and sites that use the Google Maps API.
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