SEO news week 7, 2022: Pricerunner vs Google, Privacy Sandbox & GDPR
In the news in week 7, 2022: Pricerunner sues Google, the TCF consent framework breaches GDPR, and Google’s Privacy Sandbox is coming to Android.
Screaming Frog 16.6 fetches indexing data from Search Console
Screaming Frog’s latest update makes it possible to import data via Google’s new “Inspection API” for Search Console. With the update, Screaming Frog’s Search Console integration now provides indexing data with filters for mobile usability and AMP validation, among other things. The one drawback is that you can only check 2,000 URLs per property per day (images, JS and CSS included).
➡️ https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider-16-6/
Pricerunner sues Google
Pricerunner is suing Google for SEK 22 billion in lost profits. This follows the EU court’s confirmation that Google breached competition law by manipulating search results to favour its own price comparison service, Breakit reports.
No mechanism for changing title tags
Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable has written an interesting piece on how Google has still not taken on board the SEO community’s criticism of the change to the title links algorithm made in August 2021. Under the new algorithm, the ranking page’s title is not always shown in the SERP. Instead, the title shown in the search results is generated automatically in a majority of cases. This has negative consequences from an SEO perspective and can also cause legal problems, since an automatically generated title may contain incorrect information in breach of the law. The most common error is that the generated title starts with a lower-case letter instead of a capital.
➡️ https://www.seroundtable.com/google-title-tag-changes-legal-reasons-32861.html
Google’s ad revenue rose 32.5 per cent in the fourth quarter
Alphabet’s quarterly report for Q4 2021 shows that revenue from Google Advertising rose by 32.5% compared with Q4 2020. Google Search Advertising performed best, growing by 35% year on year. Google’s Chief Business Officer, Philipp Schindler, says the rise in Google Advertising is the result of “broad-based strength in advertiser spend and strong consumer online activity”, Search Engine Land writes.
Meta (Facebook), by contrast, performed considerably worse. In its Q4 report, Meta fell short of analysts’ expectations and forecasts growth of 3 to 11% in the first quarter of the year. Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer at Meta, explains in the report that one reason for the weak figures is that Meta has been hurt by Apple’s anti-tracking feature for the iPhone, rolled out in spring 2021. The feature is expected to cost Meta 10 billion dollars in lost advertising revenue in 2022. Sandberg also argues that rival Google’s search advertising business is not harmed but rather helped by the changes, as it is not affected by Apple’s restrictions, SvD reports.
➡️ https://searchengineland.com/google-q4-2021-earnings-379735
➡️ https://www.svd.se/facebooks-tapp-kan-kosta-tusentals-miljarder
Two pharmacy chains become one
Kronans Apotek and Apoteksgruppen are merging into one company with a combined 470 pharmacies and a larger e-commerce operation in Sweden. The new company will probably use Kronans’ technology choices and e-commerce platform, MKSE writes.
Mozilla and Meta collaborate on lawful tracking
Mozilla and Meta have confirmed that they are working together on a “privacy preserving attribution” system that will give advertisers access to campaign data without the information being linkable to individual users. The project, known as “IPA”, uses multi-party computation to collect data, so that sites, search engines and advertisers cannot gather information about individual users’ behaviour. The data collected will also be aggregated so that it cannot be linked to an individual user, Martech reports.
➡️ https://martech.org/mozilla-and-meta-are-working-on-privacy-preserving-attribution/
Google’s Privacy Sandbox coming to Android
Google plans to start beta testing on Android for several of its “Privacy Sandbox” initiatives, including the Topics API, the Fledge API and the Attribution Reporting API. Developers can already read Google’s proposals for the tests on Android’s developer site, Search Engine Land writes.
➡️ https://searchengineland.com/googles-privacy-sandbox-topics-api-coming-to-android-380361
IAB Europe’s consent framework breaches GDPR
The Belgian data protection authority, which acted as lead authority on behalf of the EU’s data protection authorities, has ordered that data collected using IAB’s consent framework (TCF) must be deleted. This follows the authority’s finding that the system breaches several GDPR articles. As TCF is used across large parts of the European tracking industry, the decision will affect several players in online advertising, including Google, Amazon and Microsoft, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties reports.
➡️ https://www.iccl.ie/news/gdpr-enforcer-rules-that-iab-europes-consent-popups-are-unlawful/
Google tests widgets on its search home page
Google has started showing widgets for weather, news and local events, among other things, on its home page. So far the new feature is only shown to a limited number of users and only on desktop, Swedroid writes.
➡️ https://swedroid.se/google-testar-att-visa-widgetar-pa-sokmotorns-framsida/