Microsoft blocks Google Chrome & other browsers from Cortana in latest Windows 10 release

Microsoft says blocking third-party browsers & search providers improves user experience and is in keeping with how competitors act with their own digital assistants.

Sorry, Google. You, Firefox, Opera and anyone else with a web browser that competes with Microsoft’s Edge will no longer be able to work within Microsoft’s Cortana digital assistant in Windows 10. Microsoft buried the news today in a blog post about Cortana’s personalization of search results. It gave a few examples of how Cortana already integrates into Edge and Bing — nothing new, as far as I can tell, despite the blog post’s “Delivering Personalized Search Experiences in Windows 10 through Cortana” headline.

Google Fully Turns Off Feed To Toolbar PageRank

   As we reported early last month, Google began officially killing off toolbar PageRank. It started on March 7 2016 but it officially ended this past Friday, April 15, 2016.Any last remanent of Toolbar PageRank was officially shut off by Google. They closed the hose, the feed, to obtain the toolbar PageRank data.All the Toolbars that worked in Internet Explorer 6 or any of the web based tools that scraped the data, they have been officially closed down.

Google has been killing off PageRank in the toolbar for years and years. In 2007, Google asked webmasters for feedback on removing PageRank and then in 2009, Google removed showing PageRank like data in Webmaster Tools (Search Console). 

Google warns site owners mobile search results

A month before the Google mobile-friendly algorithm boost, Google starts issuing new warnings to site owners.Google is now issuing a new type of warning to site owners if their site is not mobile-friendly. The new warnings show directly in the mobile search results, but only to the site owner when Google knows that the searcher is the owner of the site.

Jennifer Slegg has an old site that is not mobile-friendly, and she reported that when she views the site in the mobile search results, it says to her in the snippet, “Your page is not mobile-friendly.” That message is a hyperlink to a Google help page about mobile-friendly.Here is what Jenn sees as the site owner of a non-mobile-friendly website:

Google desktop SERP changes

First-page minimum bids continue to rise in wake of Google desktop SERP changes.AdWords bidding trends following Google's move to eliminate right-rail ads and show four top-of-page ads for some queries.We’re just about a month out from Google’s sweeping changes to desktop SERPs, in which text ads were removed entirely from the right-hand rail and the number of text ads appearing above organic results increasingly grew to four, where there used to be three.

As we reported a couple of weeks ago, the overall impact of the change hasn’t been dramatic, with at most minimal shifts in CPCs and traffic.Two observations included in our previous analysis were:
Rising first-page minimum bids for non-brand text ads, as the total available ad inventory decreased from a maximum of 11 text ads per page to seven.Decreasing top-of-page minimum bids for non-brand text ads, as the total available ad inventory above organic results increased from three to four for some searches.In the days since, we’ve seen first-page minimums continue to steadily increase, while top-of-page minimums appear to be back on the rise.While it’s too soon to attribute these changes precisely to causes, these are the symptoms we would expect if advertisers did get more aggressive with paid search bids as a result of the changes.