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Google will introduce a new policy for advertisers, AdSense publishers and YouTube creators that prohibit ads for, and monetization of, content that contradicts authoritative scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change, the company announced Thursday. Google will use its automated systems as well as human reviewers to enforce the policy, which will take effect next month.

Why Google is making this change. “In recent years, we’ve heard directly from a growing number of our advertising and publisher partners who have expressed concerns about ads that run alongside or promote inaccurate claims about climate change,” the company said, “Advertisers simply don’t want their ads to appear next to this content. And publishers and creators don’t want ads promoting these claims to appear on their pages or videos.”

What kind of content and ads are prohibited? The new policy prohibits ads for, and monetization of, the following: content that refers to climate change as a scam or a hoax, claims denying that long-term trends show the global climate is warming and claims denying that greenhouse gas emissions or human activity contribute to climate change.

Sorting out offending content and ads. “We’ll look carefully at the context in which claims are made, differentiating between content that states a false claim as fact, versus content that reports on or discusses that claim,” Google said in its announcement, “We will also continue to allow ads and monetization on other climate-related topics, including public debates on climate policy, the varying impacts of climate change, new research and more.”

Why we care. Advertisers that deal with climate matters should be especially careful as this new policy takes effect. If your ads adhere to the policy but are still disapproved, you can appeal the policy decision directly from your Google Ads account.

Publishers and YouTube content creators that make climate change content should also be careful not to run afoul of this policy as it may make monetization impossible.

For general publishers and YouTube creators that monetize their content, this change may increase brand safety as climate-change-denying ads will be less likely to show up alongside your content.

The post Google takes stand against climate change deniers with new ads and monetization policy appeared first on Search Engine Land.

With the iOS 15 release on September 20th, AMP URLs in Google Search just stopped working. Google is aware of the issue and said the issue should be resolved soon. This is only impacting Google searchers using Google Search on iOS devices that have been upgraded to iOS 15.

What happens. If you are on iOS 15 and you click on a website listing in the Google Search results, you will not be taken to an AMP URL, even if the AMP URL exists for that listing. Instead, you will likely be taken to the main site’s URL for that page, or a link to their mobile app – if you have the app pre-installed on your device.

Jeff Johnson, an iOS developer, dug into this and said with the iOS 15 Safari “User-Agent, there are no AMP links in Google search results, but if I simply change Version/15.0 to Version/14.0 and keep the rest the same, Google search results suddenly have AMP links again!” “This is reproducible on my iPhone, in the Xcode iPhone simulator, and also in desktop Safari Mac with its User-Agent spoofed as iPhone,” he added.

I added an example of what this looks like on my personal blog, if you want to see it in action.

Confirmed bug. Danny Sullivan of Google confirmed the bug on Twitter saying “It’s a bug specific to iOS 15 that we’re working on. We expect it will be resolved soon.”

Why we care. You might notice weirdness with your analytics data around your AMP URLs coming from Google Search over the past couple of weeks. Your traffic should not be impacted because the traffic is still going to your main URL, but traffic to your AMP URLs may have a decline due to this bug with iOS 15. It is still not yet resolved but it should be resolved soon.

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Google will move AdSense from a second-price auction model to a first-price auction by the end of 2021, the company announced Thursday. There is no action for advertisers or publishers to take and these changes will occur automatically.

First-price vs. second-price auctions. In a second-price auction, the final price paid by the winner is determined by the second-highest bid. In a first-price auction, the final price is the same as the winning bid.

This will simplify things for advertisers, Google says. “On display ad selling platforms, a first-price auction simplifies the buying experience for advertisers because the final price reflects the winner’s bid,” Google said on its FAQ page about AdSense moving to a first-price auction.

Which AdSense products are affected. The transition to a first-price auction only affects AdSense for Content, AdSense for Video and AdSense for Games. It does not affect AdSense for Search or AdSense for Shopping.

Why we care. Transitioning to a first-price auction aligns AdSense with Ad Manager and AdMob, both of which are already operating under that model. Making the winning bid the actual price advertisers pay may make it easier for some advertisers to plan their spending.

However, a first-price auction means that the final price the winning advertiser pays will typically be higher than it was under a second-price model. Campaign managers should inform stakeholders of this change as it may affect their budget.

Google also said that publishers will likely not see a change in their earnings as a result of this transition: “Due to the dynamic auction environment, we cannot predict how specific AdSense publishers will be impacted. But, on average we expect the impact to AdSense publishers’ earnings overall from the move to a first-price auction to be neutral. When Ad Manager moved to a first-price auction, there was a neutral to slightly positive impact to publisher earnings on average,” the company said.

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Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, where does diversity start in marketing?

My friend Chima Mmeje, an SEO content writer and strategist for SaaS and tech, tweeted this week asking why there were no Black in-house marketers. “What’s the barrier to entry?” she asked.

We’ve written about the issue on Search Engine Land and MarTech. Here’s what we’ve found: When we talk about the career pipeline that leads to more diverse and inclusive leadership, it starts at the very beginning. The National Association of Colleges and Employers found that Black students are more likely to be in unpaid internships than their white peers – and that has a direct effect on diversity in the workforce. 

“Many organizations use their internship programs to feed full-time hiring; consequently, looking at how they source and select interns is critical for those that are committed to diversifying their workforces,” said Shawn VanDerziel, NACE executive director. If you can’t afford to take an unpaid internship, then you’re already at a disadvantage in your career.

Not only is it harder for Black marketers to break into their careers of choice, but they are less likely to be promoted. Mercer, a human resources consulting firm, released data that showed only 12% of support and operations staff are Black (versus 64% white), and that number continually decreases as Black employees are not promoted to higher levels within companies. The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) in a 2020 report found that only 6% of its total members and 3% of the members who are CMOs are Black. 

So what can we do? SearchPilot recently posted the results of their diversity and inclusion transparency report, which they commit to publishing each year. Dr. Lauren Tucker, founder of Do What Matters, told MarTech that inclusion comes first, “I call it ‘inclusion, equity and diversity.’ Diversity is the outcome of inclusion and equity.” Dr. Tucker says that while Chief Diversity Officers are great, they have to be funded and supported, and employee resources groups are often a great way to get started if your company isn’t big enough for a CDO.

Carolyn Lyden,
Director of Search Content

ETA deprecation, auto-generated remarketing lists and Audience Network updates in Microsoft Advertising

Beginning June 30, 2022, responsive search ads (RSAs) will be the only search ad type that can be created or edited in standard search campaigns, Microsoft Advertising announced in its October product updates on Tuesday.

The announcements also included reporting improvements for Microsoft Audience Ads with view-through conversions, In-market Audiences expansions, an open beta for auto-generated remarketing lists, several Microsoft Audience Network updates and expansions and more.

Why we care. The deprecation of ETAs aligns Microsoft Advertising with Google Ads, making it easier for advertisers to work across both platforms without having to account for any differences in available search ad types. As we stated when Google first made this announcement, this move means that advertisers will have less direct control over their accounts and will have to get accustomed to working with Google and Microsoft’s machine learning, if they haven’t already. We recommend testing your ETAs and RSAs to figure out what works best well before the June 30, 2022 deadline.

Read more details on the updates here.

We asked, you answered: Should Google add noindex support to robots.txt? Poll results

In September, Eric Enge ran a poll on Search Engine Land to see if readers would like to have an instruction in robots.txt to mark pages for No Indexation. The results are in:

In total 84% of the 87 respondents said “yes,” they would like this feature. Some of the reasons offered for wanting this feature were:

• There are no situations where I want to block crawling but have pages indexed.
• Noindexing a large number of pages takes a lot of time because Google has to crawl the page to see the noindex. When we had the noindex directive we could achieve quicker results for clients with over-indexation problems.
• Adding new instructions to an .txt file is much quicker than getting Dev resources
• Quicker, less problematic site indexing blocking 🙂

Reasons for saying no included:

• Noindex tag is good enough
• New directives in robots.txt file are not necessary
• I don’t need it and don’t see it working
• Don’t bother
• Do not change

Read more here.

October 8 is the deadline to nominate for the Search Engine Land Award for Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Search Marketing

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are ongoing efforts and something we need to commit to every day. This is why we’re excited to announce the second annual Search Engine Land Award for Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Search Marketing to celebrate those individuals or organizations who are affecting real change.

The deadline for nominations is October 8, 2021.

You may nominate as many organizations or individuals as you feel deserve the recognition. We ask that you highlight specific initiatives conducted by the nominee and that in the nomination form you include the contact of someone who can “second” that nomination.

Nominate a person or organization now.

Search Shorts: All the SMX expert goodness you might have missed this year

With SMX Next coming up (check out the agenda and register here!), we wanted to recap some of the awesome coverage from our other events this year. Check out the how-tos, myths, and mistakes to avoid:

• How to write ad copy that actually converts (and 3 major mistakes to avoid)
• How to plan SEO content that actually ranks
• Three PPC targeting tactics that power every stage of the funnel
• PPC personas: Learning from the sales process to limit waste and accelerate ROI
• Ask the expert – Your top FLoC questions answered 

What We’re Reading: Search Engine Land’s Guide to Bing SEO

Bing accounts for 26.5% of all desktop searches in the U.S., according to Comscore (April 2021). With the recent prevalence of working from home, people are spending more time on their desktop computers, which might also mean that more people are now using Bing.

Bing’s ranking algorithm is dynamic. “The ranking algorithm is a gigantic machine learning model and it’s evolving constantly,” said Frédéric Dubut, principal project PM manager, core search & AI at Microsoft. Before you integrate the following advice into your SEO strategy, keep in mind that better rankings aren’t guaranteed just because you optimize for the specific factors highlighted in the Bing Webmaster Guidelines.

This potentially means that, if everyone starts prioritizing one ranking criteria, then that signal may become less indicative of relevance and Bing’s algorithm may assign less weight to it. Instead of cherry-picking ranking factors to optimize for, we recommend that you cover all the bases to the best of your ability while keeping in mind how Bing treats the following elements of search.

Quality and credibility. To determine the quality and credibility of a site, Bing looks at factors like the site’s reputation, the author’s reputation, transparency of authorship, completeness of content and the level of discourse.

In terms of site reputation, “It is really about mapping and understanding that this website is an authority for this specific domain,” Fabrice Canel, principal program manager at Bing, said during an edition of Live with Search Engine Land.

Want to keep reading? Check out the full guide here.

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Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, and what is content?

I’ve been chatting with someone on the marketing ops side of marketing a few times a month just to get an idea of how they think the upcoming cookieless world will affect things on their end. She was telling me about tagging and attribution in the many CRMs that she helps clients with and the conversation drifted to what happens in “the middle.”

Her work encompasses the beginning (planning campaigns and tagging) and the end (collecting attribution data and making decisions based on it). But she didn’t have a lot of insight into the middle. Her assumption was that all SEO and PPC were essentially just “content.”

We walked through the technical basics of SEO and PPC and she asked, “So does anyone not need content?” And it got me thinking about the definition of content. We just assume it means pages or posts on our sites, but content can also encompass Google My Business and social media posts, ad creative and landing pages, infographics and videos, and more. Content is what makes the web work. It goes beyond both SEO and PPC but is also at the core of what they are.

P.S. Love my musings? Join me for more at my SMX Next keynote. If you don’t, then you should still join for other people’s expert knowledge. 🙂

Carolyn Lyden,
Director of Search Content

Another Google algorithm update likely happened this weekend

“Many of the tracking tools are showing levels that we have not seen since a Google core update. Moz reported 101 degree weather, Advanced Web Ranking was at the top of its chart,… and the other tools are also super hot,” said Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Roundtable. 

The SEO community has only seen some chatter, however, but it was a big deal to some marketers: “USA traffic [is] still way off, down about 30% from the first two weeks of Sept and still dropping. USA has dropped so much that my UK traffic is now 2/3 of USA, for a population 6+X larger,” said one SEO. “Big movements across all topics and countries. The volatility is similar to a core update. It’s the update they started rolling out yesterday,” said another.

Why we care. If you saw big dips in USA traffic last week or over the weekend, it might be attributed to what’s going on algorithm-wise. Let your clients and stakeholders know what happened before they come to you asking about metrics anomalies. 

Facebook and Instagram outages could affect your social advertising metrics

Facebook and Instagram were down for over two hours yesterday. The outrage resulted in quite a few funny tweets, as Twitter was one of the only social media platforms still up at the time. The error message suggested a Domain Name System (DNS) error. Those who used Facebook as a login verification for other apps also could not log in to those third-party systems. The outage isn’t the first for Facebook. The app and websites were down in March and July this year, too. 

Why we care. Make sure to mark the outage in your Analytics if you rely heavily on leads or traffic from social. The outage will have a heavy impact on both paid and organic social media campaigns, but fortunately only for a short period of one day.

Also read: What marketers can do next time a major social network (ahem, Facebook) goes down

Search Shorts: Keyword data trends in keyword planner, responsive video ad scripts, deep links with content and PR, and the socialization of GMB

Google is showing trending keyword data within Google keyword planner. “This is a small experiment. We’re always testing new ways to improve our experience for our advertisers and users, but don’t have anything specific to announce right now,” a Google Ads spokesperson told Search Engine Land. Hat tip to Arbab Usmani for sending us a screenshot.

Support for Responsive Video Ads in scripts. Reminder: Last week Google Ads launched support for responsive video ads in Google Ads scripts. If you were using the TrueView for action campaign type, you must update your code to use the new video ad type.

How to use content and PR to build deep links. Deep links can drastically improve organic performance in the long term, but they are hard to get and we can’t influence where publishers link to. Screaming Frog has a guide to work around those issues, though.

Google local search trends: Socialization. Google’s local platform — comprising Google My Business, Google Maps, and the local component of Google Search — has become, under our noses, a massive social network. Google has achieved this status not through traditional methods of connecting users to each other, but by allowing and encouraging users to share their experiences, questions, and opinions about local businesses in a variety of forms and at a massive scale. 

What We’re Reading: The podcast ad glossary: A whole slew of new jargon for advertisers

Sure you may know what a pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll ad is in podcast advertising, but how about inventory source targeting or a baked-in ad? Podcasting is experiencing a serious boom, and with that comes all the different ways advertisers can reach those very targeted audiences of listeners.

SXM Media recently published a guide to podcast advertising lingo to clarify the new jargon that’s come along since podcasts have really taken off (especially in the ad world).

So a baked-in ad is “part of the actual podcast recording, meaning they live with that episode forever.” This is the opposite of a dynamically inserted ad which gives podcasters “the ability to insert ads, either client-provided, announcer-read, or host-read, at the time of download. This ensures that all ads are relevant to the time of year (we wouldn’t want any holiday ads in the peak of summer) and to the listener themselves.”

Oh, and inventory source targeting is “the ability to target the inventory of your favorite publishers at-scale, like Stitcher or Pandora.” Make sure to check out the guide to stay up to date on the latest podcabulary — there will be a pop quiz later.

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