I hope summer is off to a great start for you! This was a relatively quiet week, with a few updates for webmasters, AdSense publishers, Twitch Affiliates and Partners and more.
- Google announced they are formalizing the “Robots Exclusion Protocol” that allows webmasters to exclude bots and web crawlers from specific pages of their site with a robots.txt file. Google has also open-sourced the library their production systems use for parsing and matching rules in robots.txt files. Of particular note, Google will be retiring “unsupported and unpublished rules” such as using crawl-delay, noindex or nofollow in the robots.txt file. If you have been using that, there are alternatives, such as noindex in meta tags, 404 and 410 HTTP status codes, and Disallow in robots.txt.
- Both AdSense and Google Ads started showing a notice that Chrome would start filtering “annoying, disruptive ads” on sites globally beginning July 9th. If you have a blog or website, check out the Ad Experience Report for your site in Google Search Console to make sure it complies with the Better Ads Standards.
- Reminder: If your application for the YouTube Partner Program is under review, there is NO way to speed up the process by posting in the official AdSense help forum or YouTube help forum. See this FAQ: Why is my application for monetization still under review?
- YouTube’s Creator Insider has a “deep dive” into the new default comment moderation settings, that holds potentially inappropriate comments for review.
- Have you signed up to try out any experimental features at YouTube New yet? The experiments are short, only a few weeks, so there should be new ones to sign up for appearing periodically.
- Twitch has launched Subscriber Streams in beta. Viewers pay to subscribe to channels on Twitch. Subscriber Streams are only viewable to subscribers. Non-subscribers will get to see a preview on the Twitch Affiliate or Twitch Partner’s channel, and be prompted to subscribe. But before you jump in, be aware that the Subscriber-only streams may violate the Terms of Service of some games.
- Twitch Partners and Affiliates can use the Amazon Blacksmith Extension to earn revenue from sales through the Amazon Affiliates program. There will be special bonuses for “Prime Day” on July 15th, so now is a good time to try it out if you are eligible.
- Note that July 10-13 is VidCon, which usually brings updates from YouTube and other video platforms. Mark your calendars.
- Ivan Kutskir, creator of the Photopea browser-based advanced image editor did an AMA on Reddit. It's a free alternative to Photoshop that works nicely on a Chromebook. One new thing I learned: once you have uploaded any image, you can use Photopea even when you are offline. Check it out!
- David Lieb, Product Lead for Google Photos, asked Twitter what features they would like to see. In response he gave some hints as to what new features are under consideration and development. Some features on the roadmap include manual face tagging, pet photo sharing in Partner Sharing libraries, desktop features like time stamp editing coming to mobile and more. A word of caution: there was no time frame given, and that could mean they are coming soon, or a year from now, or maybe even never if the roadmap changes.
- Turns out, I used to be a celebrity! The UK Advertising Standards Authority has ruled that 30,000 followers makes you a celebrity. This matters because in the UK celebrities are not allowed to endorse medicines in ads, including over-the-counter medications. If you are a “celebrity”, and you promote products, you should read the ASA’s entire Code for celebrity endorsements.
- Facebook has changed it’s News Feed algorithm to reduce posts with exaggerated or sensational health claims and posts selling products or services based on health claims.
- If you use G Suite, be sure to check out their half-year roundup of news and updates.
Read on for more updates and tips for video creators, webmasters and more.
Image: Lavender by
suju from
Pixabay
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