In addition to a deep dive with an industry expert on relevant topics, the EDGE also asks each guest to offer insights into recent digital marketing headlines in the bonus news roundup segment. This week features host Erin Sparks and Creative Studio Producer Jacob Mann along with special guest Martin Splitt, Developer Advocate at Google. Here’s the bonus news roundup from Episode 359 of the award-winning EDGE of the Web podcast:
Adobe Flash will Finally Die on December 31, 2020
From Ryan Whitwam on Android Police, we learn that Adobe Flash will finally die on December 31, 2020. The shift to mobile content and the maturation of standards like HTML5 have made Flash a relative rarity online, but Adobe is still issuing security patches. It will stop doing so at the end of 2020, and you will no longer be able to download the Flash Player from Adobe’s site. If you still have Flash installed on your system, Adobe will actively encourage you to uninstall it later this year.
- Erin Sparks: Martin how long have you been preaching to people to stop using Flash?
- Martin Splitt: A long, long time. Besides iPhone making way for a robust smartphone and app system, it was also the first step towards getting rid of Flash and other plugins. It had a role to play once upon a time for bottling up non-web content on the web, as have any number of other plugins. Those who are publishing content using these plugins hopefully see the writing on the wall and are reconsidering their use.
- Erin Sparks: It had its place, but the bots can’t consume that content, so it’s time to let the plugins go away. There are still plenty of sites out there with Flash navigation. Please! Do yourself a favor and get rid of it because you’re doing yourself harm!
Google Cautions Against Guest Posting—This is What’s Really Going On
According to Roger Montti on Search Engine Journal, Google Cautions Against Guest Posting – This is What’s Really Going On. Google’s John Mueller stated on Twitter that Google not only frowns on guest posting for links but has been devaluing them for the past several years. He also said that Google has years of data for training algorithms to catch and devalue guest post links so that they don’t help a site rank better.
- Erin Sparks: Guest posting for links has been devalued since the Penguin update all the way back in 2012. Why won’t this one go away?
- Martin Splitt: It won’t go away because there are always people looking for an easy way to rank, who want to just throw some money at their problem thinking their content will then magically rank. Instead of guest posts, that money would be much better spent on a content strategist, a good content writer, and make your content better. Then you won’t have to pay someone to link to your website!
- Erin Sparks: So another public service announcement: Stop with the guest posting!
Google Again: We Don’t Look At Analytics Bounce Rates For Ranking
On Search Engine Roundtable, Barry Schwartz reports on Google Again: We Don’t Look At Analytics Bounce Rates For Ranking. Again, Google has said that it does not look at [Google] Analytics bounce rate data for ranking web sites. John Mueller of Google said in a webmaster hangout video at the 25-minute mark, “I think there’s a bit of misconception here that we’re looking at things like the analytics bounce rate when it comes to ranking websites, and that’s definitely not the case.”
- Erin Sparks: Here’s another one of these persistent myths that just won’t go away. In fact, I feel like this one has been around for something like 12 years!
- Martin Splitt: Hard to say, but maybe people are focusing in on the increasing importance Google is placing on user experience, and we know Page Experience is coming in 2021, and we know Google looks at page speed, and https, so it’s not much of a leap for people to just assume that Google must be looking at bounce rates as well because it feels like it fits in with all that. But what they don’t understand is that some metrics are simply too “noisy” to make any sense of, and that includes bounce rates, click-through rates, and so on. There are much better ranking factors for Google to look at.
- Erin Sparks: And of course there are people who think that just by using Google’s tools they will somehow get “brownie points.” They seem to think they will get better ranking just because they’re using Google Tag Manager, or worse yet, using Google Ads.
- Martin Splitt: That’s right. It doesn’t work that. You cannot buy organic search results.
Connect with Martin Splitt
Twitter: @g33konaut (https://twitter.com/g33konaut)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinsplitt
Related content: https://goo.gle/js-seo-basics
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