If you’re in an African country and you opened up a blank Google page recently, you may have noticed a new message at the bottom of the page – “Start 2019 with free courses from Google”.

Clicking on this hyperlink takes you to the Digital Skills for Africa landing page which seems to paint this as an online course which awards a certificate from Google in the “Fundamentals of Digital Marketing”.

Looking at the course programme, there are 26 modules which require 40 hours to complete in total. The modules cover important topics such as “build your web presence” and “get discovered with search”. It seems that, aside from teaching some basic online business skills, this course is designed to get companies and individuals better integrated with the search algorithms.

To make studying easier (and we do mean studying, as the certificate requires passing a final exam), there are video tutorials.

From our testing using a VPN this offer only appears to those visiting the search engine from an African country, so this is a programme only being advertised to us. That being said, we’re sure anyone with an interest in SEO, or building a business online, would be interested in this course.

We’re not sure how long these courses have been on offer, but the fact that Google is actively advertising them to us is a good idea in our opinion, as we may have missed them otherwise. This is obviously in the interest of Google as it’s ostensibly about their platform and how to use it, but putting your goods and services online means playing Google’s game, and any insight into how it works is a good opportunity.