Jul 8

Shemeo Search News #03 - goodbye UA, and another round of spam updates

Featured image for blog, contains graphics of a gravestone, Instagram icon, Google icon, and a search bar on a blue, grid background

HANG ON A MINUTE. Where did June go? Blinked at it was over, like it never even happened.

I obviously need to keep a closer eye on my calendar (reports week really snuck up on me this month), but there has been a lot happening in search recently.

This year has given SEOs a lot to sink their teeth into already, and we’re only *checks watch* 7 months in.

Anyway, I’ll stop yapping now and catch you up on the latest, here’s the 3rd edition of my little search news roundup.

Topics

June 2024 spam update
Google are dropping infinite scroll in search results
Instagram comes to the Perspectives tab
We’ve finally said our last farewell to Universal Analytics

1) June 2024 Spam Update

Google has rolled out their second spam update of the year, which comes after they made very significant updates to their spam policies in March.

After some speculation from industry sources over on X, Google confirmed that this was not the algorithmic component of their site reputation abuse update being implemented and they are only handing out manual actions at the moment.

Tweet (X) from Barry Schwartz about site reputation abuse

Source: X

This update took 7 days to complete.

2) Google are dropping infinite scrolling in search results

First introduced to mobile in 2021, and desktop in 2022, Google’s continuous scroll broke away from the classic 10 paginated search pages we were all so familiar with.

But now, just as we were all getting used to not saying “page 1” when referring to the top 10 results, the change is being reversed.

People also search for results for 'is haggis a real animal' with paginated Google results pages underneath

This has happened on desktop already, with mobile coming next.

Why? Because Google figured out that this wasn’t actually having a positive impact on people’s search experience.

Continuous scroll served up results that users weren’t explicitly asking for, but reintroducing paginated search will allow Google to deliver results faster and only when they are requested by a searcher clicking on a page number.

3) Instagram comes to the Perspectives tab

Keen eyes may have noticed that Instagram tiles are now appearing in Google’s ‘Perspectives’ carousel. The Perspectives result is a relatively new feature itself, launched in May 2023 to plug a gap in user generated results.

Perspectives carousel result for search term 'Taylor Swift' on Google

I tried a number of celeb names to get this result, but Taylor won.

Instagram, X, YouTube, blogs and forums are all great sources for finding human sentiments on hot topics. This feature brings popular results from different platforms into one place, and with Instagram being projected to hit 1.44 billion active users by 2025, it makes sense that it forms part of the carousel.

4) We’ve finally said our last farewell to Universal Analytics

Countdown from Universal Analytics showing that property is no longer processing data, countdown timer is set to 0

That’s right, it’s gone forever. Google Analytics 4 was announced way back in 2020, with Google breaking the news that they would be switching over from session based tracking to event based tracking, meaning data from the old platform wouldn’t be compatible with the new one.

In 2023 Universal Analytics stopped processing data, and by the morning of July 1st 2024, the UI was shut down and all Universal Analytics data was permanently deleted.

a gravestone with Comic Sans text on it, saying 'RIP universal analytics, 2004 to 2024, they loved the session'

I shared this joke in an agency update, but nobody got it (and it’s awful).

Anyone who didn’t export their data will have lost it forever.

That’s all 👋