Google explains in a blog post it will delay its mandate for mobile-first search indexing until March 2021, a change from its initial plan of September 2020. The idea is to accommodate webmasters working on other priorities during COVID-19. Google also took an opportunity to highlight issues it has come across with updated sites such as lowering the interaction bar to load assets, robots meta tags, and viewport lazy-loading, among others.

Twitter accounts for Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Kanye West were hacked, along with some brand accounts such as Apple. The hack occurred on July 15.  In response, Google temporarily removed the Twitter carousel from search results and told Android Police it would bring back the content after a careful review. It turns out Twitter's postmortem determined malicious hackers gained control of an internal management tool, affecting 130 accounts. Ryne Hager explains. 

Will Covid-19 be around long enough to make significant structural changes to a business that depends on high-density use? Consumers are shopping more online, but stores and entertainment venues need to start thinking about how to bring that virtual world into physical businesses. Accenture Interactive’s design and innovation consultancy, Fjord, attempts to provide insight into the transition.

Google has added added a specification allowing companies to deploy their brand logo consistently across email clients. The spec, Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI), is being built into Gmail. It works with brands that have adopted the email authentication protocol Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance, also known as DMARC, which helps protect email domain owners from spoofing. The move gives brands using email as a marketing channel to display their corporate logo in Gmail if they adopt DMARC email authentication. Google also added other security updates.

In the Google’s Search Off the Record podcast, the search team discusses the significance of ranking factors. Google’s John Mueller advises SEO professionals not to analyze search ranking as an exact science with an absolute right or wrong way of doing things. Matt Southern highlights Mueller's discussion with Google's Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt about flaws related to attitudes toward rankings.

Thousands of U.S.-based companies that store and try to transfer data about European residents will face restrictions and challenging times after a top court ruled that these types of transfers exposed Europeans to American government surveillance without “actionable rights” to challenge it, according to the Wall Street Journal. The ruling could force companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to decide between costly shift toward data centers into Europe or cutting off business in the region.

AWS Secrets Manager, a secrets management service, helps users protect access to applications, services, and IT resources. Amazon now enables users to search secrets based on attributes such as secret name, description, tag keys, and tag values. With this launch, users can identify, arrange, and manage your secrets into logical groups that can then be used by specific applications, departments, or employees. David Ogunmola and Divya Sridhar explain in AWS' security blog. 

Image SEO isn't something that should be ignored, so Melissa Fach takes us through the process of optimizing a site's images to rank higher in search. The image SEO guide covers images and page-speed scores, finding issues with site images, how to optimize alt text and more. 

With more than 1 billion monthly active users, Instagram has become a platform to reach consumers. Davida Ander suggests a simple way to advertise on Instagram feeds or story -- through the Promote Feature and then move to Ads Manager. He takes through the process. 

Moz officially released the Moz API for Google Sheets. In a post published Thursday, the company takes site visitors on a quick feature tour. This Google Sheets add-on allows users to gather Moz URL metrics without using a code and provides a few extra functions to help manipulate data. In the past, if marketers wanted link metrics for hundreds of URLs, they either had to enter them manually one at a time or required a technical expertise to use the LinkScape API.