The Stack is a weekly podcast where we share and discuss the latest trends, news, and content from the world of marketing, sales, and tech. In each episode, Sean, Tim, and Ryan sit down to chat about the hard-hitting questions related to sales, marketing, and tech. You can subscribe on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Google Play Music.
In this episode, we talk about updates to Facebook’s Newsfeed, Google’s Core Update, and JavaScript Tasks. We would love to hear your thoughts so make sure to comment or tweet us at @Sylvestrer1, @SeanHenri, and @Tendrecroppes or @PepperlandMKTG.
Using Surveys to Make News Feed More Personal
Facebook Newsroom
Facebook recently came out with an announcement saying they were making a few changes to their news feed algorithm. This included things like types of posts and updates to video rankings. Facebook recently published an article saying they have made updates to how they are going to make our news feeds even more personal with the use of surveys.
“In addition to surveying people asking them which friends they were closest to, we started two additional surveys asking people 1) how interested they are in content from a specific Page they follow, and 2) how important a specific group they’ve joined is to them.”
Key Takeaways:
- As Facebook continues to update algorithms and ranking factors, content we publish to our social account is going to increasingly need to be of the highest quality and envoke engagement.
- This may cause a shift in the amount of posts and increase the quality of the few that are published.
Are long JavaScript tasks delaying your Time to Interactive?
Addy Osmani for Web Dev
Have you ever run a Lighthouse audit and noticed that your first contentful paint has a good speed but you pages “time to interactive” is suffering? This is likely because you have long JavaScript tasks. What are Long Taks? Addy Osmani explains below:
“A Long Task is JavaScript code that monopolizes the main thread for extended periods of time, causing the UI to “freeze”.
While a web page is loading, Long Tasks can tie up the main thread and make the page unresponsive to user input even if it looks ready. Clicks, taps, and scrolls often don’t work because event listeners, click handlers etc have not yet been attached.”
Key Takeaways:
- Understanding JavaScript tasks or JavaScript, in general, can be hard. Google’s Web Dev team is drawing attention to this issue because it’s important. If you are seeing a lot of long JavaScript tasks in your lighthouse audit, you may want to talk to a developer to help you cut down on these bulky tasks.
Google Search Liaison Algorithm Tweet
Google Liaison Twitter Account
Google did us a huge favor yesterday by tweeting an announcement about an algorithm update. This update named the “June 2019 Core Update” is now live and Google says that their guidance about this update “remains as we’ve covered before.” This sparked another tweet that discussed the reasoning behind some updates being announced and why others may go under the radar.
Key Takeaways:
- There is always so much uproar when someone thinks Google is making a core update. To get ahead of this, Google took it upon themselves to announce a new update and providing information about what that update is impacting.
- It seems that this update improves other updates. They said you will likely not see a major change in any of your data but it’s always good to keep an eye on things when these updates roll out.
App Of The Week
SEO Analyzer By Neil Patel
SEO Analyzer by Neil Patel is a great free tool for people to use to get a better understanding of their website health. While this tool may not replace paid tools like SEM Rush, it helps you understand where you need to put your focus. This can help smaller companies reach out to SEO agencies with a targeted area of the website they are looking to improve.
Use Cases:
- Smaller companies can come prepared to an SEO meeting and feel confident that they know the primary needs of their websites so they don’t get taken advantage of.
- Stay up to date of the general health of your website and set benchmark goals along the way.
The Lightning Round: What We’re Reading This Week
In this section, we quickly run through some other updates that we didn’t have enough time to deep-dive on, but we still felt were noteworthy.
- Google recovers from outage that took down YouTube, Gmail, and Snapchat
- Google Showing New Local Scroll Pak
- Google Maps adds dish-covery to the menu
- Spotify Will Soon Let You Listen Along With Your Friends
Listen or watch for new episodes each Friday, or check out the archives to watch past episodes on-demand. Like what you hear? Leave us a review or let us know in the comments!
