Bing Shopping now includes new customer-focused tabs to help shoppers find exactly what they’re looking for all in one place. The new tabs categorize commerce options under headers like Departments, Deals, Trending products, Price drops, Stores, and more. “These enhanced options provide useful hover menus and informative page guides which highlight choices, deals, and trends,” said the announcement.

With shopping season already upon us, the options for retailers are opening up. Both Google and Microsoft (as well as Facebook and other social channels) are investing in ways to help both small retailers and big-box stores be where they need for customers to find them. Search Engine Land sat down with Sumit Chatterjee, Lead Product Manager at Microsoft Shopping, to chat about the future of Shopping at Bing and how the product roadmap will continue to help both users and retailers find each other.

How Shopping has worked in the past. Chatterjee emphasized that Bing Shopping was previously very search-driven and often only included products from advertisers who paid to show up in the carousels and listings. In August of last year, the company opened up an organic shopping listing option to retailers who participated via the Merchant Center. The feed-based system was limited at first but has grown since. Before this option was available, though, only advertisers who paid to have their product show in listings were able to get traffic from this section of Bing Shopping.

Bing Shopping moving up-market. Along with the upgraded Shopping tabs, Chatterjee says that Microsoft is moving Shopping up the funnel. The company announced in September that Shopping options will soon be available in Edge. The updates will include “easy access to online expert reviews and customer ratings for over 5 million products right from the address bar when shopping in Microsoft Edge” said Liat Ben-Zur, Corporate Vice President. Along with Shopping directly from your browser, Chatterjee also hinted at new shopping options tapping directly into the Windows user base. 

Becoming a shopping recommendation engine. The new direction for Bing Shopping is to become a recommendation engine over just a search engine. Chatterjee explains that Microsoft is noticing three main types of shoppers who use Bing: trend seekers, passive shoppers, and deal seekers. Using privacy-focused shopper data, the shopping experience will eventually become “query-less” says Chatterjee. Being able to make “for you” recommendations will “add another dimension for users.” Bing will be able to customize shopping suggestions based on these shopper types and the overall retail landscape trends it’s seeing.

Bing shopper types. Trend seekers are looking for shopping recommendations based on what others are buying at the time. It could be fashion, trending holiday toys, or any other popular item or item type. For these types of shoppers, Microsoft will have recommended deals based on what the platform is seeing everyone else buying and the best pricing options for buyers. The “highly rated” indicator will also show that many other shoppers have reviewed a trending product for its quality. Passive shoppers would also benefit from the recommended or “for you” deals section. They may just be browsing to see what’s out there or out of boredom, so the personalized suggestions and indication of sales could be what tips them over the edge to buy. The deal seekers will be able to look into price history, ratings and reviews, too. A new section on the roadmap, Chatterjee explained, is a “Good/Great/Epic” deals section which will encourage these deal-seekers to buy while the prices are the best.

Stores have to opt in to make it work. In order for the model to work for both shoppers and retailers, stores will have to opt-in to providing their “entire corpus of products. Right now, they can do that through the Merchant Center:

• If you’re currently a Microsoft Shopping Campaigns customer, there’s no action required by you to participate. All approved product offers in Microsoft Merchant Center will automatically be opted into [Bing Shopping listings]. 
• If you’re not a Microsoft Shopping Campaigns customer, create a Microsoft Merchant Center store, submit all eligible products, and ensure they’re approved. When the Merchant Center store is created you’re opted-in to the free Product Listings offering, enabling your approved products to be eligible to show in the free products listings section on the Bing Shopping Tab.

Microsoft Bing’s new Shopify integration is another way they’re making this process as easy as possible for retailers. “Currently available in the U.S. and Canada, the Microsoft Channel app within Shopify allows businesses to show up automatically in the Microsoft Bing Shopping tab and the Microsoft Start Shopping tab for free as product listings,” Search Engine Land wrote in October of this year.

Going from a price comparison tool to a shopping destination. The Bing Shopping product roadmap includes new features that will bring convenience to purchase, Chatterjee also told Search Engine Land. Along with becoming a recommendation engine, Bing Shopping strives to become a shopping destination by integrating express checkout and shipping directly into Bing Shopping. Shoppers will be able to check out directly through Edge:

“To use this feature while shopping in Microsoft Edge, select guest checkout within the retailer site and then click Try express checkout in the address bar. If you’ve used this feature before, you’ll see your autofill information there. Review the information for accuracy and then click ‘Try all coupons and autofill details,’” said Ben-Zur.

The auto-fill option replicates services like Amazon’s one-click buy making the buying experience even more seamless for shoppers — and reducing checkout barriers that cause abandoned carts and prevent the final conversion.

Why we care. Chatterjee told us that there are 1 billion impressions per year in the Bing Shopping canvas. That number will likely only grow as Microsoft expands their shopping product offerings through to Edge and Windows. As a free listing service that opts in search marketers and retailers with easy-to-use integrations and feed-based systems, it seems like a no-brainer that commerce marketers and even SMBs could benefit from participating in their Shopping roadmap. Many shoppers already use the Bing Shopping tabs to price-compare, which can lead to products seeming like commodities. Many retailers would prefer their shoppers land on-site to discover the value of their products and drive value-based conversions. However, the buy now and checkout options could mean lower friction in the final buy. Either way, it’s worth participating in as the Shopping product continues to grow.

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Searcher and user privacy is the topic of the year when it comes to digital advertising. Many search marketers and publishers are wondering how initiatives like FLoC and FLEDGE (if they ever make it to market) will affect their daily practices. The initiatives have spurred on a renewed interest in how advertisers and publishers ask for, collect, and use first-party data.

Google announces new way for publishers to use first-party data. In an announcement today, Google said it is offering a new way for publishers to share Publisher-provided identifiers (PPIDs) with Google’s programmatic demand to better customize ads, targeting, and advertising experiences. “By helping publishers expand the use of their first-party identifiers to more transaction types, like the Open Auction, our partners will be able to show ads that are more relevant to their audiences, which will increase the value of their programmatic inventory,” said Steve Swan, Product Manager, Google Ad Manager.

How do PPIDs work? A “Publisher provided identifier or PPID allows publishers to send Google Ad Manager an identifier for use in frequency capping, audience segmentation and targeting, sequential ad rotation, and other audience-based ad delivery controls across devices,” according to Google’s documentation on the topic.

How the new system works. The announcement says that the new form of PPID sharing will both protect privacy and help publishers and advertisers:

• Before sharing PPIDs with Google demand, Ad Manager turns them into per-publisher partitioned IDs, so users cannot be identified across other publishers’ sites and apps.
• Then Google Ads and Display & Video 360 aggregate the anonymized data from participating publishers to help build audience segments.
• Using these segments, advertisers can programmatically deliver relevant ads on publishers’ sites and apps based on first-party data.
• In addition to helping publishers earn more revenue in the auction, the data also unlocks core functionality for advertisers, like cross-device reach, frequency management, and creative optimization in programmatic inventory without third-party cookies or other identifiers present.

The announcement also emphasizes that advertisers who will be able to build segments off of the PPID data will not be able to see individualized information or user data, “and because PPIDs are unique to each publisher, there is no way to match identifiers or create profiles across sites,” added Swan.

What is first-party data? First-party data is information that websites, advertisers, and publishers collect directly from users and searchers (that they give voluntarily). This includes things like the actions they take on your websites, the data they submit to forms, social data, survey information, and data that already exists in the company’s CRM.

Why we care. Google prioritized this update based on user feedback, mentioned Swan: “Investing in first-party data is a privacy-forward way that publishers can increase the value of their programmatic inventory now and in the future. Given the feedback we’ve heard from partners, we have prioritized this product area and will continue to develop features that empower publishers with the data and identity tools they need to prepare and grow their businesses.” Given the tumultuous relationship Google has had with publishers, this move could help news and other outlets recoup some of the revenue that might be lost to Google’s other policies. This also could benefit the advertisers who show ads on these publications to show a more targeted and useful inventory to readers while keeping user privacy top of mind.

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Yahoo! halted its services in mainland China on Monday, according to Reuters. The company cited an “increasingly challenging business and legal environment” and is the second major American platform to shutter its Chinese operations over the last month.

America’s tech presence has evaporated in China. In October, Microsoft announced that it would shut down its localized version of LinkedIn in China, similarly citing “a significantly more challenging operating environment.” The Chinese government has also made numerous other platforms, including Facebook, Google, Instagram, Twitch, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit and YouTube, unavailable to its domestic users. Bing seems to be the only major platform for search marketers that is still accessible to Chinese users.

Why operating in China may be unfeasible for American companies. Under Chinese law, companies must submit their data to local authorities if requested to do so. The data could be used to identify and persecute dissidents, as it was in 2007 when Yahoo! turned over sensitive e-mails to Chinese authorities. Thus, companies operating in China may face pressure from the local government there but also back in America for helping Chinese authorities suppress free speech.

Although not specifically cited in Yahoo!’s statement, the withdrawal coincides with China’s new Personal Information Protection Law, which also went into effect on November 1, 2021. The law limits what data companies can collect and establishes requirements for how it must be stored. In Microsoft’s announcement that it was closing the localized version of LinkedIn, the company cited “greater compliance requirements” as a cause for its departure.

Why we care. China has 854 million internet users, the most in the world and more than twice the amount of users in the U.S. (313 million). As the platforms that marketers can use to potentially reach the Chinese audience withdraw from the country, so too do opportunities to tap into that user base. The opposite is not necessarily true, however, as TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is one of the most popular social media platforms in America at the moment.

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Sarah Bird, the CEO of Moz, said that it is “time for me to move on and make space for new voices, new leaders,” on the company blog. After 14 yeas with the company, almost 8 of those years as the CEO of Moz, and the previous years as Moz’s President and COO, she is leaving the company.

Sarah Bird took over as the CEO in January 2014, after Rand Fishkin, the co-founder, stepped down from that role. Rand Fishkin explained that Sarah Bird was the President and COO of the company and was taking over as the CEO then. She has been with the company for 6 years and has been acting in many ways as the company’s CEO, prior to her taking on that role. In 2017, Rand Fishkin left day-to-day operations of the company.

Moz has been through many ups and downs over the years but most recently in June of this year, just about five months ago, Moz was acquired by iContact. While Sarah Bird did not specifically say much about the reason she is leaving outside of saying “I’m going to take the winter off to reflect, rest, and cherish my loved ones. I don’t know what the future holds for me, but I know it will be a grand adventure.” One can guess that she accomplished her goal of getting Moz acquired and is now moving on to a new role.

We wish Sarah Bird much luck with her next adventure and we wish Moz and its employees much success with its new leadership, which has yet to be disclosed.

Sarah Bird said “I feel good knowing that I’m leaving Moz, and all of you, in good hands.”

Why we care. Moz is one of the more reputable toolsets in the industry, we hope to see future leaders in the search community represent the company going forward.

For members of the search community at Moz, many of whom have been featured here or at SMX, we hope the future has exciting things in store for you at Moz.

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When Google released the real-time Penguin algorithm update, which some SEOs code-named 4.0, back in 2016, Google told us this version devalues or ignores most spammy links. For the most part, Google’s Penguin algorithm no longer penalized for bad links because it would aim to neutralize the spammy links and just not count them, as opposed to penalizing for them.

John Mueller, a Search Advocate at Google, said on Friday in a video question and answer session that Penguin does try to ignore the spammy links. However, in the cases where Google cannot because there is a “very strong pattern” of spammy links pointing to the site, Penguin may penalize and distrust the site as a whole and not act in the granular way it was designed for.

John Mueller said this at the 37:06 mark in this video he posted on Friday on the Google Search Central YouTube channel.

What was said. The question John was asked was “Is the Penguin penalty still relevant at all or less relevant spammy toxic backlinks are more or less ignored by the ranking algorithms these days.”

John responded, “I’d say it’s a mix of both.” He explained, “For the most part when we can recognize that something is problematic and any kind of a spammy link and we will try to ignore it.” “If our systems recognize that they can’t isolate and ignore these links across a website, if we see a very strong pattern there, then it can happen that our algorithms say well we really have kind of lost trust with this website and at the moment based on the bigger picture on the web, we kind of need to be more on almost a conservative side when it comes to understanding this website’s content and ranking it in the search results and then you can see kind of a drop in the visibility there.”

John is saying, that in some cases, Google’s Penguin link algorithm can demote the whole site based on the links and not just ignore the specific spammy links. But it seems like it has to be very high levels of spammy links.

“But for the most part like the web is pretty messy and we recognize that we have to ignore a lot of the links out there. So for the most part I think that’s fine. Usually, you would only see this kind of a drop if it’s really a strong and a clear pattern that’s associated with the website,” John added.

John came back on Twitter to clarify that “this is the case for many spam & low-quality signals” in the Google algorithms. He explained, “we’ll work to ignore the irrelevant effects, but if it’s hard to find anything useful that’s remaining, our algorithms can end up being skeptical with the site overall.” “Our spam algorithms are pretty nuanced and they do look at a number of factors,” he added.

Disavow links. So do we need to disavow links now, even when Google said we really don’t need to? The answer is no, you don’t need to disavow links. You can John Mueller said, “I’d either ignore it or use the disavow file (for the worse domains).”

The video. Here is the video embed where John said this:

SEO consultants chime in. I asked a few SEO consultants their opinion on what John said in this video and here is what they had to say:

Lily Ray, the Senior Director, SEO & Head of Organic Research of Amsive Digital told us, “John’s advice here shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to SEOs who have dealt with companies engaging in large scale link building initiatives using tactics that violate Google’s guidelines, only to encounter massive declines in ranking and traffic.” “Google doesn’t always send out a manual action when the sites run into trouble. But in many cases, sites can either struggle to rank or feel that they’ve received an algorithmic penalty without any formal notification. Often, when you take a look at their backlink profile and talk to the company about their SEO strategy, you might discover that most of the links are paid links, guest posts, footer links, exact match anchor text, etc. on websites no one has ever heard of. In these cases, I believe it’s important to reconcile Google’s trust issues with your site by disavowing the paid/offending links, as well as earning new, trustworthy links organically,” she added.

Glenn Gabe, SEO consultant at G-Squared Interactive told us, “Rolling out Penguin 4 was a great move by Google in 2016, since it devalued link spam versus penalizing it. But as John explained, if Google’s algorithms cannot find any useful links (which would be an extreme situation), and there is a strong and clear pattern of spammy links, then it can be skeptical with the site, and Google can lose trust with the site overall. As a result, the site can see a drop in search visibility. The problem is that many site owners believe they are being attacked via negative SEO (and that those link attacks are working — and it’s the reason they have seen drops over time). Google has explained in the past that negative SEO attacks don’t work and that its algorithms can just ignore the link spam (especially for sites with a normal mix of links). So for many of those sites fearing negative SEO attacks, the situation John covered in the latest Search Central Hangout would not really apply. In my opinion, if a site has an overwhelmingly spammy link profile (almost all of the links are unnatural and spammy), without any other quality links, then that obviously can be problematic. But for most sites that have a normal mix of links, what John is explaining should NOT be a problem. Unfortunately, I’m already hearing from site owners about this… when their sites definitely don’t fit into the situation John explained in the video.”

Dr. Marie Haynes, the CEO of MHC inc told us, “Google’s communication on what site owners need to know about Penguin has been frustrating. At a Pubcon conference in late 2016 Gary Illyes told us that it was indeed possible for Penguin to algorithmically cause harm saying, “If Penguin sees signs of manipulation, it can decide to discount ALL the links, which can be pretty bad for a site.” Our belief is that while this can happen, it is reserved for cases where there is an obvious history of links being built solely to manipulate PageRank on an astronomical scale. While we have seen improvements for some sites after filing a thorough disavow, even if no manual action is present, the only cases that we feel we can attribute improvements to disavow work are for sites with a history of years of very manipulative link building.”

Why we care. Ultimately, when it comes to link building, you should be careful. Don’t buy links, don’t look for cheap and easy ways to get links to your site. Make sure to review Google’s documented link schemes help document and stay far away from those methods.

When working on client sites that may have link issues, you need to decide if you really need to disavow links or not and then which links you should disavow. At the same time, Google is likely already ignoring most of the bad links, so you may not have to worry too much about it.

It may just be easier to avoid the practice of link building and build a website and content that other sites naturally want to link to without you asking them.

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