SEO life can be tough, but at least we don’t have to deal with Facebook Ad Manager. Amirite? Anyway, lots of good news this week — Google stepped out of its shell with some candid information about indexing bugs, and the content marketing world came to life with with some unexpected Tumblr news and some big podcast marketing updates.
The News
Google shared some behind the scenes information about recent indexing issues and the company’s communication strategy around future bugs. Google lost part of search index earlier this year due to a deployment problem, messaging and information sharing to the SEO community was less than perfect. Google plans to fix this by sharing future issues quickly in Search Console and through the official webmaster Twitter account.
Google will start surfacing playable podcast episodes in search results based on the content of the podcast, not just titles or metadata. Podcasts should be part of any robust SEO strategy.
AMP now supports server-side rendering to help pages load even faster. The new optimization is specifically recommended for sites using AMP across pages, not just a separate blog section. This makes a nice companion update to the official release of AMP toolbox 1.0 , a set of command line tools and APIs to assist with AMP publishing.
Automattic (parent company to Wordpress) bought Tumblr for an undisclosed amount. Nobody knows exactly what this means, but I imagine they will most likely hunt for complementary functions between Wordpress and Tumblr, and maybe try leveraging Tumblr’s remaining (and weird) community. Will be interesting to watch how this progresses in the next few months.
Spotify for Podcasters launched this week, letting podcasters submit shows to the platform. The service also delivers a range of podcast performance metrics, sharing things like average listen time and audience demographics. It’s another reason to beef up podcast marketing efforts, and the data Spotify provides could prove extremely useful when incorporating podcasts into your content marketing portfolio.
Contently launched a new lead generation course containing education videos, hands on exercises, and production-ready frameworks. It’s a super useful set of content marketing materials with actionable advice and insights.
Ranking Factors
