Six most important search marketing news stories of the week

Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from around the world of search marketing and beyond.

This week we have Google unleashing Penguin 4.0, AMP coming to organic mobile SERPs, Twitter making some changes for the better and the introduction of Google's own personal messenger service, Allo.

Penguin 4.0 is finally rolled out

As I reported earlier today, Google has finally confirmed that its Penguin algorithm update is now rolling out in all languages.

The spammy-link killing update will feature the following improvements…

Penguin is now real-time

Penguin data is refreshed in real time, so any changes will be made as soon as the affected page has been recrawled and reindexed.

Previously affected webmasters would have to wait for the next update before any penalties could be cleared.

Penguin is now more granular

Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site.

This means the specific page will be penalised, rather than the entire website.

Google AMP is coming to organic search results by the end of the year – confirmed

Google's Rudy Galfi, Google's lead product manager for AMP, revealed this week that the global rollout of AMP in mobile organic search would be complete by the end of the year.

In further remarks posted on Search Engine Land, Galfi clarified that AMP still isn't a ranking signal. And although Galfi wouldn't share specific user-response data, he did state, “We're seeing great user response.” He also said that Google has been “humbled” by the industry's adoption of AMP.

The Coalition for Better Ads to make digital ads great again

As Al Roberts reported this week, a new organization called The Coalition for Better Ads, has been launched to “leverage consumer insights and cross-industry expertise to develop and implement new global standards for online advertising that address consumer expectations.”

This basically means that the coalition will identify new standards that can improve the digital ad experience, implement the technologies needed for these standards, and promote the standards so that they're put into use.

Worth switching your adblocker off for? We'll see.

Twitter makes a few changes – good ones too!

Although Twitter has threatened various unpopular changes over the last 12 months – introducing verification for non-celebrities (celebrities hate this, and by celebrities I mean, Pewdiepie), killing share counts, a 10,000 character increase – here's one that we've been crying out for…

Actually, why tell you via this article, when I can show in embedded tweet form.

Very Important News everyone… You can now ramble for an entire 140 characters in tweets and still have room for this sweet Gif. What a day pic.twitter.com/QxDy1jOld5

- christopher ratcliff (@Christophe_Rock) September 20, 2016

Same goes for images too. Annoyingly links and @mentions still take up characters though.

Still, we got our sweet gifs though, huh gang?

Google launches its 'private' messenger service Allo

Because all the kids are leaving social in droves because they like private messenger apps and not being spied on, Google has realised it wants a piece of that action.

So say allo to Allo – another channel to be pinged on by one or two early adopters while desperately trying to keep up with your WhatsApps, Facebook Messages, texts, emails and all the notices on the office fridge to stop eating all the humous.

Yeah. Let's escape to the mountains together. Come on, I'll pack some sandwiches, you bring a torch.

Here's what Allo will look like…

Cute, although a few sloth emojis won't persuade Edward Snowden to use it anytime soon.

Google will continue to display Quality Score data until October 10

As reported by Matt Southern on Search Engine Journal, Google claimed it would be returning null quality scores for new and underperforming keywords in AdWords as of September 12th.

However as Matt points out, if you've logged in to your AdWords account lately you may have noticed you still have quality score information for new and underperforming keywords.

This is because Google has pushed the date back to October 10th, in order to “give advertisers more time to review their reports, filters, rules, and scripts that rely on Quality Scores, null Quality Scores will now roll out the week of October 10th, 2016.”