I can’t believe it’s already the end of July. Time flies! I hope you are staying cool. This week there are a few juicy updates for video and web creators, plus a new Google Meet PWA.
Top stories this week:
- A reminder that YouTube and AdSense support will not contact you via Google Chat. They will only send you an email from an @google.com or @youtube.com email address. If you receive a Google Chat notification, you can open the Chat and see the email address of the other participants. Again, Google employees will only have an @google.com or @youtube.com address. If you aren’t sure, post a question in the official YouTube Help Community.
- AdSense has launched consent management features - required to comply with the GDPR and California’s CCPA - in Auto Ads. Learn how to set up a GDPR consent message for your website.
- There is a new Google Meet Progressive Web App (PWA). The PWA doesn’t have any new features, but it is easier to find and use. It requires Chrome 73 or higher to run.
- YouTube is launching trailers for live streams for channels with at least 1000 subscribers and no strikes. Also new: live chat polls available to all creators.
More of this week's updates:
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YouTube and Video
- Wondering about YouTube Shorts? Creator Insider has a new AMA answering user questions.
- StreamYard now lets you stream pre-recorded video. While you could just use a Premiere on YouTube, this lets you stream to multiple platforms.
- Vimeo has a new tutorial on how to trim your videos. If Vimeo is your video platform of choice, this looks like a useful tool.
Publishers and Web Creators
- Google Search Central has posted a new article with best practices for sharing affiliate links and sponsored or guest posts on your website or blog. They are rolling out a “link spam update” that can better detect link spam on the web, so following the best practices is encouraged.
- Google is launching a new Audience Explorer as part of Google Ad Manager’s Audience Solutions. This provides insights, and helps “ think about, market and improve the performance of first-party audience segments”.
- If your application for AdSense was disapproved, check out the latest episode of the AdSense Site Approval Series “Site Rejections and Next Steps.”
Social Media
- Instagram accounts for under-16s are now defaulted to private. They also have “new technology that will allow us to find accounts that have shown potentially suspicious behavior and stop those accounts from interacting with young people’s accounts.” And under-18s will stop seeing interest-based advertising. How do they know how old a user may be? Facebook also explained how they are using AI to detect user age, no matter what birth date they entered on their account.
- Pinterest has launched a new way for Creators to monetize their content: shoppable Idea Pins. If Creators are working with a brand, they can add a “paid partnership” label to the Idea Pin.
- Discord has introduced conversation Threads. That allows a new conversation to be shown in a separate feed. Eventually after a period of inactivity, the Thread is archived.
Image: Chocolate chip cookies from StockSnap on PixaBay. Free for commercial use.
Hi, I hope it's okay to ask here, and I do so as you're a product expert for Blogger. I noticed a couple of bugs, one which is of high concern to me regarding Blogger's Search, although the others may affect user experience on the blog too.
ReplyDeleteThe issue is that the Search box in the blog does not return any results for something in a post which was updated very recently. You can check this yourself by adding some text to an older post (some text which wasn't in the post previously) and then search for that text from the search box in your blog.
I've sent a feedback to Blogger from the Send Feedback option within Blogger itself, but I'm afraid that this may just be ignored like the other feedback and bug reports I've sent since years.
If you'd like to see what this issue is, you may do so on Blogger's official Help Community website. I don't know how to bring these bugs to the notice of Blogger (even their official Twitter account is locked).
Here's a link to it (For Blogger Search Bug) : https://support.google.com/blogger/thread/119030217/blog-search-is-not-working-for-updates-in-posts?hl=en
And here's a link to a previous bug I had reported but got no response.
https://support.google.com/blogger/thread/83991093/image-lightbox-not-working-on-mobile-version-of-site-despite-enabled-in-settings?hl=en&msgid=83991093
There's one more little bug issue unresolved which I had sought help some years ago. In the Label pages, (.../search/Label/LabelName) , clicking on Previous Page links always takes you to the first page for that label instead of the previous page. This may not be visible in newer themes as they don't appear to have a next/previous links at all. This doesn't happens for any other search or index pages.
Anyways, I feel that the first one I mentioned - the Blog Search issue is of high importance because new updates to post are crawled and indexed by external search engines too but Blogger's own search feature fails to show that post in the results for that query.
That is, if you updated a post with some new text information which wasn't previously in that post, that post won't show up in search results on Blogger itself. For search of any text that existed already before the post was updated, the post appears in search results. I have noticed this happens in case of different blogs no matter which theme is being used. Details in the Blogger Community post. The link is above.
Any help in this matter is highly appreciated.
Hi Pradeep: regarding Blogger's Search, it may be that the post has to be indexed by Google Search first, which may be the issue you are seeing. Eventually it should be indexed.
DeleteIf you do a search in Google Search of your blog for "Cats" it is finding the posts with that label (which is indexed). The cache of your post does not show the updated text.
It does help if you submit feedback to Blogger, even if you do not get a response, or it doesn't seem to be fixed.
I have responded to your post in the forum and escalated the issue to Blogger to see if search is working as expected.
Hi, Thanks! I saw that and had marked it as an answer.
DeleteThe Blogger search glitch is still there. The search results for updated post show up when doing a site search on Google or other search engines (meaning that they have already crawled and indexed it) but the Blogger blog's own search still won't find it. This glitch probably wasn't there before and has appeared fairly recently, as whenever I updated something earlier, I used to check and it used to immediately show up in the blog's built-in search. And it happens with different blogs too, irrespective of the template used, either v3 or v2. New posts seem to appear in blog's own search results though, although I don't know if updates to new ones get considered for search results.
By the way, has anyone noticed the recent changes to Custom HTML/Javascript widgets? The font used there is no good for entering code, the cursor jumps back to top or down when backspace or deleting a line, and the window is not re-sizeable anymore. It just makes using custom HTML very difficult.
It used to work fine before and the font in the widget was a coding font too (similar to notepad font), but now it's user-unfriendly. As usual, I've sent a feedback from within Blogger. For now, it is easier editing in an external notepad and then pasting the text into the widget. And in a way it is safer too, as earlier, if there was some error in the code entered while saving, the whole text in the widget would just disappear after saving. Don't know if that still happens, but it is anyway safer to keep a copy of HTML/Javascript outside of that widget.
There are good changes in the new version too, like for example, the code highlighted feature for post and pages editor in HTML view is a time and life saver.