Category: News

WhatsApp has officially announced that it is going to stop support for some of the older phones by the end of 2016. They had announced earlier in February, they might stop support for some of the older versions of Android, smartphones such as Nokia, Blackberry, iPhone, Windows Phone 7, and Blackberry by end of 2016. Later WhatsApp clarified that it would extend support for Nokia Symbian S60, Nokia S40, and Blackberry 10 until June 30, 2017.

Now as a first step they will discontinue support for some of the older devices by the end of December.

It’s expected that ending support for older versions will not affect too many phones in Android and iOS universe. WhatsApp will end support only for smartphone users still running on Android 2.1 and Android 2.2, iPhone 3GS or any other iPhone on iOS 6 and Windows Phone  7.

According to WhatsApp, they are forced to stop support as these phones do not have kind of capabilities to cope with the upcoming versions of this instant messaging app with advanced features.

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Google’s John Mueller has announced that the content keywords report feature is officially removed from the Google Search Console. He revealed the news via the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

In fact, content keywords report is one of the earliest features found in the Google Search Console.

Google added that when they launched the tool for the first time, keywords report was the only method to know what Googlebot found when it crawled a website. Today, popular tools such as Search Analytics, Fetch, etc. will help you to do the same.

Moreover, Google found that most of the users were puzzled about the keywords listed in content keywords. That is why they took the decision to remove the feature. Actually, Google had planned to remove the feature in May; so this is not at all a surprising move.

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“Google’s algorithm is giving more preference to WordPress powered Content Management Systems (CMS) “, this is false news circulating in the industry for the past few months. As WordPress blogs and CMSs are developed to be very search engine friendly, it is easy for GoogleBot to accept the content. This is the real fact. Google never rank a website or page for the reason it is built in WordPress.

Google’s John Mueller tweeted on this misconception about Google’s Algorithms. He said “WordPress is a great CMS & works well in search, but afaik our algorithms don’t explicitly check for any particular CMS.”

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It’s known that Google is experimenting new user interfaces. Google tests another new layout last week.

SEO specialist, Sergey Alakov has recently shared some of the screen shots of Google’s new search result user interface test.

The new layout test is an alternate to Google’s card style layout. Google has been heavily testing on card layout.

It’s not easy to keep track of all of Google’s UI tests, as most of them never come close to launching.

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Google recently updated Material Design with a new suite of design and prototyping tools. Material Design is a combined system that includes theory, resources, and tools for crafting digital solutions. As the new update consists of tools and open source projects, Google assures a system of good design which strengthens communication and productivity.

Google developed Material Design in 2014 as a unified design language for both first and third party web and mobile apps.

The new tools allow designers and developers to work more easily. You can access resources and guidelines faster with the new Material.io site.

With the new Gallery  tool you can easily share in- progress work with a team. In addition, images, prototypes and design artefacts are organized in one place.

Now, designers and developers can make real-time, on-device design tweaks with Remixer tool. You can test and modify the design at much earlier stages of development process with the app prototyping tool Stage.

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Google Maps has recently updated the search results user interface.  Now the search results on the left side update dynamically when you move the map around with your mouse cursor.

Google also made a few changes to improve user experience. For example, when you click the next button the search results will be updated dynamically. As there is a checkbox option on the bottom of the search results no dynamic search results will get updated.

In addition to these changes the directions and website icons are also replaced with one image.

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Google is going to introduce a new click-to-message option in AdWords search ads. As more and more people use this method to be in touch with brands, Google envisage messaging as an effective tool for generating leads and conversions.

Unlike popular platforms such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, click-to-message ads function via an ad extension. Advertisers can enable this extension within their AdSense accounts and depend solely on SMS.

According to Google, 65% of people would choose messaging to communicate with a business when they need to know about a product or service.

Google believes the new option will help advertisers to reach consumers on mobile in a faster way and increase conversion rates.

It’s reported that Facebook and WhatsApp is working on a similar click-to-message ad product.

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Google’s Gary Illyes announced that they are going to release a separate mobile search index within months. At present, Google has a single index of documents for search. With the launch of separate search index, it will become the main index that the search engine uses to respond to queries.

Gary first announced that they were working with the idea of a mobile index last year at SMX East.

But, Google has not clarified that how the mobile index will work. Since the mobile index is the primary index, they are yet to confirm whether it contains only mobile friendly content or can be used for desktop enquiries as well.

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