G oogle Updates, Business Listings Suspensions and CIA Design
Google’s 2020 Updates Changed How To Market A Business Online
By Amine Rahal from Forbes
- “Assuming you’ve already optimized for mobile SEO, you should pivot your SEO strategy toward providing an enhanced UX.”
- “The past couple of years has seen Google switch to mobile-first indexing, which prioritized mobile screen optimization and UX over desktop. Recently, PageRank started favoring in-depth articles from small webmasters that are optimized for search intent.”
- “…you should develop the Web Vitals that Google has been prioritizing more and more since 2019. This means optimizing for mobile devices, enhancing your local SEO, producing thoughtful and well-researched content and targeting high KD keywords.”
Why Did My Google My Business Listing Get Suspended?
By Sherry Bonelli from Search Engine Journal
- “Another address suspension issue is when businesses rent out virtual offices or co-working spaces (Regus or WeWork shared spaces, for example). Virtual office addresses cannot be used unless the company has leased a dedicated/executive office for their exclusive use.”
- “…sometimes making a bunch of changes to your GMB listing in one sitting can trigger a suspension. No one is exactly sure why this happens, but it could be that Google sees all these updates as suspicious. It’s best if you make one or two changes to your listing, then walk away and do something else.”
- “Your GMB profile is one of your most valuable assets.
- It’s better to be proactive and understand the common reasons why GMB profiles get suspended so you can avoid getting suspended in the first place.”
The CIA Has Always Understood the Power of Graphic Design
By Theo Inglis from Eye on Design
- “The CIA’s vaguely trendy new look, unveiled on January 1st, which uses typefaces by the independent Swiss foundry Grilli Type, is clearly an attempt to improve the agency’s image among young people and to represent itself as a diverse place, shaking up its reputation as a white, male, upper-class, old boys network.”
- “Throughout the CIA’s 74 year history, the agency has used popular artists or avant-garde culture to serve its aims and exercise American “soft power.” The CIA’s psychological operations—or “Psy-Ops”—have routinely used popular culture covertly for propaganda purposes abroad while hiding its own financial or logistical involvement behind front-organizations and plausible deniability.”
- “With hindsight, in comparison to training death squads, assisting in coups, attempted assassinations of foreign leaders, using illegal torture, testing psychedelic drugs on unwitting subjects, selling arms to embargoed countries to support right-wing militias, and counting a drug-smuggling South American president as an intelligence asset—the examples from the cultural cold war seem pretty tame. However, as with the CIA’s new rebrand, they serve as a perfect example that design, and culture in general, is always political.”
Nick Cotton is a project manager based out of Los Angeles, California. He’s got a background in the entertainment industry, and uses his talent at online messaging to extol the virtues of content marketing, interactive fiction and sentences measuring 280 characters or less.
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