Five things worth sharing from the last week or so, brought to you by a different member of the Browser Media team every Friday.
This week’s My Five is by Kerry.
1. Instagram reduces targeting options of underage users
Advertisers looking to reach users under the age of 18 will only be able to target their audiences based on age, gender, and location, with Instagram disabling interest and activity-based targeting.
The change is set to kick in within a few weeks, and will be worldwide, in an attempt to give young people a safer, more private experience, Instagram recently announced. The new policy will apply to Instagram, Facebook and Messenger too.
Instagram has also claimed it is taking efforts to make it more difficult for potentially suspicious accounts to follow minors, developing new technology to identify concerning behaviour. Accounts owned by those under 18 won’t be shown to adults in the Explore Reels or Accounts Suggested For You sections. To be honest, it’s a bit of a concern that they ever did.
2. Google clarifies timeframes on removing redirects
Google’s Gary Illyes has cleared up some misconceptions over redirects, suggesting that as long as they have been live for at least a year, it’s safe to remove the redirect, and Google will continue to pass the signals from the origin URL to the destination URL. Crucially however, this needs to be counted from when Google discovers the redirect, not when you actually do it, so remember to track from the date it’s crawled.
So the main thread branched a lot with a lot of questions but I think this is the main takeaway. 301 redirects really do consolidate those signals (usually in under a year since G first crawled) and those signals still stay with the new page even after a redirect is removed.https://t.co/lGG4vZdix0
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) July 21, 2021
Although a year is a fairly standard timeframe in the industry, it’s actually the first time Google has given official confirmation that the signals passed through redirects last forever even after a redirect is moved.
3. Google link spam update rolls out
The never-ending summer of updates continues, with a new algorithm tweak designed to ‘nulify’ link spam rolling out.
Google won’t penalise you for the odd spammy link pointing towards your site, but it will discount these links, so there may be a slight shift in some search positions as a result of the update, but there shouldn’t be too much of a significant move for most sites. If you do see a big drop that feels like it could be connected, it might be time to take a look at your link profile and see what’s been going on.
4. Facebook reports fastest quarterly growth since 2016
In a recent earnings report, Facebook has revealed it has beaten forecasted figures to record its fastest growth this quarter in five years, with overall revenue reaching $29 billion, up from the expected figure of $27.89 billion.
Profits have doubled on this time last year as a result in an increase in online advertising, but the social networking platform expects this spike to slow down in the second half of 2021.
Nevertheless, daily active users are up too, which is good news for brands looking to reach their audiences on the platform.
5. The Olympics sprinkles a little bit of joy into our week
Team GB are enjoying their most successful start to an Olympics ever, winning more than 20 medals so far in Tokyo, but few images have pulled on the heart strings as much as this photo doing the rounds on social media of Tom Daley getting his long-awaited gold earlier in the week.
London 2012 ?
Rio de Janeiro 2016 ?#Tokyo2020 ?Tom Daley becomes the first Brit to win three Olympic diving medals, but this time it’s ???? as he teamed up with Matty Lee to win the men’s 10m synchronised platform diving ?
— Sky Sports (@SkySports) July 26, 2021
