Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.1 (ITP2.1) limits the length of client side cookies to seven days. In short this means a Safari user that visits your site today will be viewed as a new/separate user if they don’t directly interact with your site within the next seven days. On February 21, 2019 WebKit (the web browser engine that powers Safari, Mail, App Store and more) announced the next iteration of Intelligent Tracking Prevention with iteration 2.1 or ITP2.1. The largest and most impactful change in IPT2.1 is to client side cookies, which will now be capped to seven days. From WebKit’s announcement: “With ITP 2.1, all persistent client-side cookies, i.e. persistent cookies created through document.cookie, are capped to a seven day expiry.” In layman’s terms, this means a user visiting your site with Safari today will be viewed as a new/separate user eight days from now if they don’t directly interact with your site during that … [Read more...] about What is ITP2.1 & What Does It Mean for Digital Marketing?
What does repatriated mean
How does RankBrain work and what does it mean for search marketers?
It’s hard to meet anyone in the digital industry who hasn’t heard about RankBrain. And it comes as no surprise that this system along with its impact on search results raises endless questions and disputes. We’ve made an attempt to understand the way RankBrain operates and if there’s anything we can possibly do to optimize for it. Let’s start from the very beginning. What is RankBrain? RankBrain is a machine-learning system developed by Google to help improve search results and to interpret brand new queries that haven’t been previously searched for. Some experts consider it to be part of the Hummingbird search algorithm, which was launched to help Google better understand the meaning of the entire query behind exact keywords. The first official statement about RankBrain was made by Google senior research scientist Greg Corrado on October 26, 2015. Here’s how Greg explained the operating principle of the algorithm: “If you’re … [Read more...] about How does RankBrain work and what does it mean for search marketers?
What Does It Mean To Be Mobile First? And Why Should Marketers Care?
There is a fairly new catchphrase going around the marketing sphere as it relates to a brand’s customer journey. The term is “mobile first,” and it is intended to mean that as a company thinks about its website or its other digital means of communications, it should be thinking critically about the mobile experience and how customers and employees will interact with it from their many devices. The term, similar to “big data,” is becoming so overused that it has started to lose its meaning. Some might wonder if mobile first means building a mobile app (god, I hope not), or if it means your website’s user interface (UI) should be responsive. Or does it mean that marketers really need to sit down and completely rethink their customer experience and re-map out their customer journey, especially as it relates to its largest-growing demographic of new consumers and employees, the millennials? If you guessed the third option, you would be right — at … [Read more...] about What Does It Mean To Be Mobile First? And Why Should Marketers Care?
HTTPS & SSL Does Not Mean You Have a Secure Website
The SEO community, in most part, first turned it's attention to the little green lock of HTTPS back in 2014, when Google published a post announcing HTTPS as a ranking signal. Almost immediately all SEOs advised their HTTP clients to move to HTTPS for ranking purposes, but in reality, it has never been (and never should have been) about rankings. So why did Google talk about rankings? In short, to make people take notice. The long-term goal for Google has been to make the web more secure for users and to protect their own users. After all, if Google presents a result to a user that will see them have their credit card details stolen they may be less trusting of Google to serve them safe, quality results. HTTPS is again in the spotlight as Google Chrome 68 will actively highlight websites as "secure" and "not secure" to users. Therein lies the issue for me, the use of the word "secure". Having an SSL certificate does not mean you have a secure website, and with the new European … [Read more...] about HTTPS & SSL Does Not Mean You Have a Secure Website
Why And What Does It Mean?
The search world was rocked by yesterday’s announcement by Google’s Webmaster trends analyst John Mueller that Google will be removing all author photos and Google+ view counts from search results on both desktop and mobile. This change will roll out to all users over the next few days. The pressing question for most people is why would Google do this? The next question, if you’ve personally invested in implementing Google Authorship, is what this means for the future of the Authorship program and any possible “author rank.” As someone who has intensely followed, studied, and made use of Google’s Authorship project since its introduction in 2011, and creator of the largest and most active non-official Google Authorship Community online, I’d like to try to provide some possible answers to those questions. What Google Said. Let’s start with the only official word we have on this so far, the Google+ post from John Mueller announcing this … [Read more...] about Why And What Does It Mean?