Optimising for Dark Mode

Welcome to the first ever Canonical Chronicle newsletter. It’s only taken us 3 years to send one. Huzzah!

This week in search we talk about optimising for dark mode, new augmented reality ad formats, how google treats 404s and a new ‘search by image’ feature for GMB.

Here is this weeks Google Slide deck with all the news as well as some short tutorials. Share it with your team to keep them up to date with the algorithm changes and SERP movements every week.

Banana enthusiast and Google engineer, John Muller, answered a question on Webmaster Hangouts about whether dark mode was a ranking factor without laughing.

Google started to test “search by image” in GMB listings and AR was introduced into display ads to let you virtually try on make up.

Some of the finest minds in engineering and technology working tirelessly to make a glorified snapchat filter to sell you more lipstick.

What a world!

Facebook announced they are changing the way they report metrics so if you are a social media manager, may i suggest that you have plenty of whisky in the agency booze cupboard because it’s likely your Monday reports are going to have a lot of downward trending red lines.

I will be interviewing a long time friend and “SEO bad boy”, Mr Craig Campbell, for his digital marketing podcast this week. To get some inspiration, I asked Twitter for some questions they would like me to ask him and they did not disappoint.

On the 30th of October, I will be hosting the Global Marketing Day Conference. It’s 24 hour online conference being broadcast from London, New York, San Fransisco and Sydney. It’s being organised by SEMrush and they already have 40,000 people attending…..so no pressure to perform on the day.

More info on their site.

We’ve recently hired some more SEO and PR managers thanks to a surge of new business.

Our new PR managers and settling in nicely and we have another couple of people starting by the end of the month. It promises to be an exciting end to the year.

Our big strategic plans is to complete “the Brain” which is our intranet site containing all of our SOPs, tutorials and templates so we can make the business even more slick and automated than it already is.

For those who know me personally, they know I am very minimalist, always working with time pressure and interested in the latest productivity hacks. So, this chrome extension call Papier is perfect for me. It’s a basic to do list that uses markdown and has a dark mode. So I can put my “Most Important Things” to do for the day into the app and every time I open a new browser tab, it reminds me to stay on track.

I’ve also been playing around with Notion. It’s a wiki, meets trello, meets Google sheets.

If you are on your lunch break and have 7:39 minutes to kill, then this weeks Canonical Chronicle is now live.