1. Will Meta Account Center Make It Easier To Manage Your Privacy Settings? - Meta has announced a new update for its Accounts Center tool, which will make it much easier to manage your privacy settings across Facebook, Messenger and Instagram in one place. The updated Accounts Center will include all of your info from all three apps - including personal details, passwords and security, and ad preferences – in a single place, which will better enable you to review and update your preferences without having to go to separate elements within each.


2. Meta’s Changing The Terminology For Accounts Reached - Meta has announced an update to the terminology that it uses to display performance metrics, with the term ‘people’ being updated to ‘Accounts Center accounts’ within Ads Manager, Ads Reporting, Ads Help Center, Commerce Insights and Instagram Insights. 

Per Meta: “Our calculation methodology for these metrics is not changing. The numbers you see in your reporting are the same as before; the only difference is the name. For example, if a person has one Facebook account and one Instagram account that are linked, they will be counted as one Accounts Center account. However, if those same accounts are not linked, they will be counted as two separate Accounts Center accounts for ads planning and measurement purposes.”

3. Google Drops Playable Podcast From Search Results - Google Search users will no longer be able to access podcast episodes directly from the search Results page (SERP) since Google has quietly removed integrated podcasts from search results (a feature that was launched in 2019).

Going forward, Google will continue to link to podcast episodes in search results page, but to listen to them you’ll have to visit the podcast's host website. According to a Google spokeswoman, the decision to eliminate embedded podcasts from search results was taken to improve user experience.

4. New Subscriber & View Analytics Option In YouTube Studio - YouTube wants to make it easier for creator to see what type of content is working for their channel. So in its latest round of updates for video creators, YouTube is launching more detailed analytics data that will give creators a breakdown of subscribers gained by content type and information about the content their audience is watching across formats. Prior to this update, YouTube only provided data on views per content type, not subscribers.


5. YouTube Makes It Easy To Pinpoint Policy Violations - YouTube has rolled out  its timestamps feature which provides more specific guidance as to when a policy violation has occurred in a video clip and which specific policy is in question. There are also links to more information about the policy, which provides a far more transparent process for upload issues. Creators can then opt to appeal any reports, or they can remove the relevant segment in order to keep the video up, and/or regain their monetization status. The option is still only available to selected creators, but YouTube says that it’s looking to expand the alerts soon.

Furthermore, YouTube’s also developing a new guided resolution flow for violations and reports, which aims to provide creators with even more information on the next steps they should take in response to concerns. Here is what YouTube announced on this feature:

“We’ll show where the policy violation occurs, what precise policy was violated, and what that means for the individual piece of content. And at the end of the guided resolution flow, we’ll show creators what options they have going forward and make it easy to take those next steps.”

6. Performance Max Experiments Now Available In Google Ads - Last year Google launched the ability for advertisers to apply recommendations as experiments. In October, they announced that additional experiments were coming “in the following months.” Now, they have taken it a step further by giving you the same features for Performance Max campaigns. This feature will allow you to run experiments with Performance Max campaigns to monitor the results before you apply those changes to your account.


7. Sharing The Same Name With Another Website - Google's John Mueller was asked about if it is okay with Google Search to have a website with the same name as another site on the internet.

John replied, "There are lots of sites that have similar names (there are a lot of top level domains, so it happpens that someone uses the same "name" on a different top level domain). That's fine, there's no rule against it from us. I can't help with copyright or trademark (or other legal) issues, so if you think that's a problem, you'd be best off checking with a lawyer."

IMO, you should not duplicate the full site name unless you are trying to imitating the other site and dupe visitors. This also means that you do not need to rake your brains for days to come up with a unique name. Just do not copy verbatim.

8. Even Google Quality Updates Can Impact Crawling & Indexing! - Google's John Mueller re-emphasized that quality updates, like core updates and the others in the family, will not only impact the ranking of a page in Google Search but also how Google crawls in the future and if Google will index that page in the future. 

John wrote "a simplified way to see it is if Google doesn't think it's worth showing large parts of a site in search, it's not worthwhile to spend time crawling and indexing it all. Also, even for good sites, we tend not to crawl and index everything because there's just so much other content on the web too."

The stakes have never been higher. Focus on good quality content using the E-EAT principle and still indexing and ranking is not guaranteed - but you have a higher chance.

9. Where Should You Place Structured Data On Your Webpage? - Wondering where and how to place structured data on your web page or does Google care where/how you place ( a graph array to contain / connect all structured data for a page in a single script block vs having individual elements in separate blocks) the structured data? 

Well according to Google’s John Mueller, "I don't think we have any particular preference in that regard. My general recommendation would be to focus more on the individual items that result in the type of rich results that you'd like to see. How you tie those elements together feels more like a theoretical question to me, it's (as far as I know) less critical for rich results."

If you are unsure what this means then you have two options: a.) learn more about SEO and structured data instead of running your business unless you are an aspiring marketing professional or b.)contact an expert who can help you.