With companies now able to apply to use their own brand as a top-level domain (TLD), there have been suggestions that doing this might be an easy way to get a boost in search-engine rankings. For example, that Samsung using something like www.phones.samsung might get more hits than the usual samsung.com domain. Not so, says Google …
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YouTube will now let creators get a hold of a custom channel URL that matches their channel name. The company noted in a blog post that many YouTubers have a channel name, which is often the user-facing brand of their channel, that doesn’t match the original URL they received when first signing up for YouTube. Users that want to change their URL to match their channel name will soon have the ability to do so:
When Tati joined YouTube, her username was GlamLifeGuru, which made her channel’s URL youtube.com/GlamLifeGuru. But as her channel grew, her fans embraced “Tati” as her brand. So her channel web address — often the quickest way back for her fans to watch more of her content — didn’t match her channel name and branding… To make sure creators like Tati and all of you have a consistent place for new and existing fans to find you, we’re introducing an easier way to pick custom URLs that match your channel names and branding.
YouTube is reaching out to creators with more than 500 subscribers starting this week allowing them to claim a custom URL. The company says it will offer several URL choices that are “based on your channel’s description, Google identity and associated websites.”
It doesn’t look like users can initiate the process manually yet, but instead will have to keep an eye out for the “Get a new custom URL” notification in YouTube’s Creator Studio.
YouTube has full instructions and more info in a support document here.
Google experienced more copyright removal notices for URLs in the last month than it did for all of 2009.
The search engine processed more than 4.3 million URL removal requests in the last 30 days, and it plans to redirect this data as a signal for search rankings. The bevy of infringing Web content spurred Google to take into account valid copyright removal notices for websites to verify its search algorithms yield the highest quality results.
Google elaborated on its Inside Search blog:
- Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily—whether it’s a song previewed on NPR’s music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed fromSpotify.
Today on their Search Blog, Google announced a new layout for sitelinks under Search results. The new update brings an expanded look for sitelinks — showing the title, URL, and a snippet of text from the site. Instead of eight sitelink results, a site can now have twelve.
Sitelinks will now be full-size links with a URL and one line of snippet text—similar to regular results—making it even easier to find the section of the site you want. We’re also increasing the maximum number of sitelinks per query from eight to 12.
Sitelinks will also be using a similar algorithm to regular search results, to provide a higher-quality list of links. The update will be rolling out to users over the next couple of days.
