February 9, 2022
Google is considering reducing the frequency of webpage crawling to conserve computing resources and has released a new URL Inspection Tool API for Google Search Console. Meanwhile, following a historic drop in stock price, Facebook shifts focus to short-form video to regain its momentum.
Reducing website crawl rate will be a key focus for Google this year as it aims to make crawling more sustainable by conserving computing resources. Google claims they have been carbon-free for well over a decade. However, they are still aiming to decrease their environmental footprint even further. One easy way to achieve that goal would be to cut down on refresh crawls, i.e., reduce unnecessary crawling for web pages that did not undergo any recent changes.
There are two types of Googlebot crawling: crawling to discover new content and crawling to refresh existing content. Websites that constantly update their content need indeed very frequent refresh crawls. On the other hand, it is wasteful to crawl a website repeatedly if it is not getting updated that frequently. Also, as Google’s Search Relations team, made up of John Mueller, Martin Splitt, and Gary Illyes, has confirmed, more crawling does not mean better rankings.
So if Google were to reduce refresh crawls, which is not 100% confirmed yet, the focus would be to learn which pages need refresh crawls and which pages do not. And if that’s the case, there won’t be any effect on your website since the pages you change more often will continue to be refreshed and updated in search results.
Last week, Facebook recorded its first fall in daily active users since it was founded in 2004. Global daily users dropped from 1.93 billion in the third quarter of 2021 to 1.929 billion. As a result, the stock of Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms Inc, dropped by around 220 billion USD. Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and chief executive, identified the video-sharing app TikTok as a key contributor to the user growth problem. The Chinese-owned TikTok has reached 1 billion users worldwide and is one of the reasons why Meta is struggling to compete in the market for young social media users.
In addition to that, Meta has been earning less money from advertising lately, and one of the main reasons is Apple’s new App Tracking Transparency feature. App Tracking Transparency (ATT for short) is a new feature of iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS 14.5 that requires applications to ask permission to track the user’s activity across other companies’ apps and websites. Meta makes 97% of its revenue from advertising by building up profiles of its users that can then be matched to advertisers’ needs. ATT has reduced the targeting capabilities of Facebook ads, which leads to less user engagement. And less engagement translates into less spending from advertisers.
As there is no not much to be done with the advertising problem, Facebook is setting its sights on tackling the user retention problem by shifting focus to short-form video. The company is now said to be prioritising Reels, a TikTok-inspired short video feature available on Facebook and Instagram. Instagram has been trying to prioritise video since 2020, and now it seems that Facebook is about to follow the same path. What does all that mean for digital marketers? The answer couldn’t be more straightforward: video, with its growing popularity across all channels, is the future of social media marketing. Consumers expect brands to deliver engaging, personalised content on social media more than ever before, and video is one, if not the of the most effective formats to do so.
At the end of January, Google launched the new Google Search Console URL Inspection API, which gives programmatic access to URL-level data for properties you manage in Search Console. Meaning you can access data outside of Search Console through external applications and products.
The URL Inspection API will return indexed information from Google Search Console’s URL Inspection Tool, including index status, AMP, rich results, and mobile usability, but it has 2,000 queries per day and 600 queries per minute limit.
Google provided some use cases for the new URL Inspection API: