Over the weekend, a large number of sites were hit with manual action penalties from Google. Although this isn’t the first time Google has issued unnatural link penalties, it’s interesting that this particular penalty is related to outbound links – meaning the source site was penalized, not the site that was being linked to.
On Tuesday, Google announced that beginning in July 2016, pay-per-click advertisers will no longer be able to upload Flash-based display ads, and as of January 2nd 2017, Google will stop running all display ads in flash format. Currently Google has not disclosed whether or not this change will also impact video ads, but it’s safe to assume that Flash video will be next to get the axe.
Google just unveiled their new open source machine learning system called “TensorFlow.” Over the past few years, Google has been gradually integrating their proprietary machine learning technology into a variety of different products. Google latest AI technology has the ability to build and train neural networks up to five times faster than their legacy system.
Facebook’s VP of Search Tom Stocky recently announced their new and improved search product Search FYI, which is designed to help users “find what matters.” Now users can tune into what the world is saying about virtually any given topic. In addition to real-time search functionality, Facebook boasts an enormous index of over 2 trillion posts, with some content dating back to 2004.
On Monday Google announced that they would be cracking down on sites containing malware and other types of malicious web spam with their new “hacked site” algorithm. According to Google, this update is estimated to impact approximately 5 percent of global search queries, once it’s completely rolled out.
