SANTA ANA, CA, USA, August 25, 2021 /EINPresswire.com/ — LenderHomePage today unveiled details of two new features to its premier mortgage point-of-sale platform, Loanzify POS. The newly released Spanish version digital 1003 and CreditConnect self-pay credit pull are breakthrough features designed to help mortgage professionals better serve their markets and exponentially expand revenue opportunities while saving costs.
First launched in 2019, Loanzify POS is a loan management platform that allows individual and enterprise-level originators to increase their production, accelerate the loan lifecycle, and provide a better consumer experience.
Latino population homeownership in 2020 was 49%, up from 45% in 2014, according to a study by the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals (NAHREP). This 4% increase is even more notable when considering data from the Urban Institute, where they forecast that Latino consumers will comprise 70% of homeownership growth from 2020-2040 and will serve as the primary engine of the US real estate market.
In response to the exceptional homeownership growth rate that Latinos are experiencing as well as the demand from the industry, LenderHomePage unveiled a Spanish version of their already successful digital mortgage application, part of the Loanzify POS platform. This new release maintains all the features of the English version, including friendly interview-style phrasing, help prompts, and an intelligent UX design with configurable automation and branding capabilities.
Loanzify POS Spanish version digital 1003 provides originators the necessary tools to remain competitive in the market while enabling them to deliver an outstanding borrower experience to the often under-served Latino consumer.
CreditConnect Self-Pay Credit Check:
While digital loan intake and processing significantly reduces loan origination cost, the overall cost per loan still remains high at several thousand per loan. One of the overhead expenses for every loan is the creditworthiness analysis conducted with a credit check. With an average price of $39 per inquiry, each analysis that does not result in a loan becomes an added cost, and in aggregate this number can become significant and reduce an originator’s profits by thousands of dollars every year. If you have a few Loan Officers in your company, this expense can grow even faster, especially in today’s environment of high demand for home financing where a lot of people are still attempting to refinance and/or purchase new homes.
Utilizing eCommerce functionality, Loanzify POS now integrates with payment processors. The first of these is PayPal — one of the most trusted transaction processors — to quickly and securely empower the prospective borrower to self-pay and pull their own credit in real-time and during the application intake, effectively transferring the cost of running a credit report to the consumer. Not only does this reduce potentially thousands of dollars in operational expenses off the top, but it also aids in identifying the “tire-kickers” from the truly motivated mortgage consumers, curtailing costs accrued from dealing with unqualified borrowers.
“Our customers ask and we deliver. That has been our motto for years,” says Rocky Foroutan, CEO of LenderHomePage.com. “One of the most fulfilling parts of my job is when I get on the phone with a client and we co-invent a new feature for our platform,” Foroutan added. “Both of these features were direct requests by our clients and now are powerful tools added to our software. We are glad we were able to once again meet our clients’ expectations.”
The world of AI and Machine Learning has many layers and can be quite complex to learn. Many terms are out there and unless you have a basic understanding of the landscape it can be quite confusing. In this article, expert Eric Enge will introduce the basic concepts and try to demystify it all for you. This is also the first of a four-part article series to cover many of the more interesting aspects of the AI landscape.
Current Google AI Algorithms: Rankbrain, BERT, MUM, and SMITH
Basic background on AI
There are so many different terms that it can be hard to sort out what they all mean. So let’s start with some definitions:
Artificial Intelligence – This refers to intelligence possessed/demonstrated by machines, as opposed to natural intelligence, which is what we see in humans and other animals.
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – This is a level of intelligence where machines are able to address any task that a human can. It does not exist yet, but many are striving to create it.
Machine Learning – This is a subset of AI that uses data and iterative testing to learn how to perform specific tasks.
Deep Learning – This is a subset of machine learning that leverages highly complex neural networks to solve more complex machine learning problems.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) – This is the field of AI-focused specifically on processing and understanding language.
Neural Networks – This is one of the more popular types of machine learning algorithms which attempts to model the way that neurons interact in the brain.
These are all closely related and it’s helpful to see how they all fit together:
In summary, Artificial intelligence encompasses all of these concepts, deep learning is a subset of machine learning, and natural language processing uses a wide range of AI algorithms to better understand language.
Sample illustration of how a neural network works
There are many different types of machine learning algorithms. The most well-known of these are neural network algorithms and to provide you with a little context that’s what I’ll cover next.
Consider the problem of determining the salary for an employee. For example, what do we pay someone with 10 years of experience? To answer that question we can collect some data on what others are being paid and their years of experience, and that might look like this:
With data like this we can easily calculate what this particular employee should get paid by creating a line graph:
For this particular person, it suggests a salary of a little over $90,000 per year. However, we can all quickly recognize that this is not really a sufficient view as we also need to consider the nature of the job and the performance level of the employee. Introducing those two variables will lead us to a data chart more like this one:
It’s a much tougher problem to solve but one that machine learning can do relatively easily. Yet, we’re not really done with adding complexity to the factors that impact salaries, as where you are located also has a large impact. For example, San Francisco Bay Area jobs in technology pay significantly more than the same jobs in many other parts of the country, in large part due to the large differences in the cost of living.
Vector isolated illustration of simplified administrative map of USA (United States of America). Borders and names of the states (regions). Grey silhouettes. White outline.
The basic approach that neural networks would use is to guess at the correct equation using the variables (job, years experience, performance level) and calculating the potential salary using that equation and seeing how well it matches our real-world data. This process is how neural networks are tuned and it is referred to as “gradient descent”. The simple English way to explain it would be to call it “successive approximation.”
The original salary data is what a neural network would use as “training data” so that it can know when it has built an algorithm that matches up with real-world experience. Let’s walk through a simple example starting with our original data set with just the years of experience and the salary data.
To keep our example simpler, let’s assume that the neural network that we’ll use for this understands that 0 years of experience equates to $45,000 in salary and that the basic form of the equation should be: Salary = Years of Service * X + $45,000. We need to work out the value of X to come up with the right equation to use. As a first step, the neural network might guess that the value of X is $1,500. In practice, these algorithms make these initial guesses randomly, but this will do for now. Here is what we get when we try a value of $1500:
As we can see from the resulting data, the calculated values are too low. Neural networks are designed to compare the calculated values with the real values and provide that as feedback which can then be used to try a second guess at what the correct answer is. For our illustration, let’s have $3,000 be our next guess as the correct value for X. Here is what we get this time:
As we can see our results have improved, which is good! However, we still need to guess again because we’re not close enough to the right values. So, let’s try a guess of $6000 this time:
Interestingly, we now see that our margin of error has increased slightly, but we’re now too high! Perhaps we need to adjust our equations back down a bit. Let’s try $4500:
Now we see we’re quite close! We can keep trying additional values to see how much more we can improve the results. This brings into play another key value in machine learning which is how precise we want our algorithm to be and when do we stop iterating. But for purposes of our example here we’re close enough and hopefully you have an idea of how all this works.
Our example machine learning exercise had an extremely simple algorithm to build as we only needed to derive an equation in this form: Salary = Years of Service * X + $45,000 (aka y = mx + b). However, if we were trying to calculate a true salary algorithm that takes into all the factors that impact user salaries we would need:
a much larger data set to use as our training data
to build a much more complex algorithm
You can see how machine learning models can rapidly become highly complex. Imagine the complexities when we’re dealing with something on the scale of natural language processing!
Other types of basic machine learning algorithms
The machine learning example shared above is an example of what we call “supervised machine learning.” We call it supervised because we provided a training data set that contained target output values and the algorithm was able to use that to produce an equation that would generate the same (or close to the same) output results. There is also a class of machine learning algorithms that perform “unsupervised machine learning.”
With this class of algorithms, we still provide an input data set but don’t provide examples of the output data. The machine learning algorithms need to review the data and find meaning within the data on their own. This may sound scarily like human intelligence, but no, we’re not quite there yet. Let’s illustrate with two examples of this type of machine learning in the world.
One example of unsupervised machine learning is Google News. Google has the systems to discover articles getting the most traffic from hot new search queries that appear to be driven by new events. But how does it know that all the articles are on the same topic? While it can do traditional relevance matching the way they do in regular search in Google News this is done by algorithms that help them determine similarity between pieces of content.
As shown in the example image above, Google has successfully grouped numerous articles on the passage of the infrastructure bill on August 10th, 2021. As you might expect, each article that is focused on describing the event and the bill itself likely have substantial similarities in content. Recognizing these similarities and identifying articles is also an example of unsupervised machine learning in action.
Another interesting class of machine learning is what we call “recommender systems.” We see this in the real world on e-commerce sites like Amazon, or on movie sites like Netflix. On Amazon, we may see “Frequently Bought Together” underneath a listing on a product page. On other sites, this might be labeled something like “People who bought this also bought this.”
Movie sites like Netflix use similar systems to make movie recommendations to you. These might be based on specified preferences, movies you’ve rated, or your movie selection history. One popular approach to this is to compare the movies you’ve watched and rated highly with movies that have been watched and rated similarly by other users.
For example, if you’ve rated 4 action movies quite highly, and a different user (who we’ll call John) also rates action movies highly, the system might recommend to you other movies that John has watched but that you haven’t. This general approach is what is called “collaborative filtering” and is one of several approaches to building a recommender system.
Note: Thanks to Chris Penn for reviewing this article and providing guidance.
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Good morning, Marketers, the title tag debacle has to improve, right?
Google has confirmed it changed how it goes about creating titles for search result listings, and you can read more about that below, but the explanation isn’t very cathartic for search professionals who meticulously craft their titles, factoring in things like keyword research and audience personas.
The company says that, in its tests, searchers actually prefer the new system. It’s hard to believe that people prefer outdated titles that refer to Joe Biden as the vice president, to point out a particularly egregious example. Google knows this — in fact, it has even set up a thread where you can upload examples and leave feedback. That’s a promising start, but in the meantime, click-through rates are suffering and users may be confused.
This is an interesting predicament because the vast majority of sites don’t have SEOs to optimize their titles, which means that the change may potentially benefit those sites and the users who are searching for that content. However, it may negate or even hurt the work that our industry is putting in. Is this a case of the greater good outweighing the needs of the few? Has your brand been impacted? What’s your outlook on this? Send your thoughts my way: gnguyen@thirddoormedia.com.
George Nguyen, Editor
Google confirms it changed how it creates titles for search result listings
After more than a week of bewilderment and, for some, outrage, Google confirmed that it changed how it creates titles for search result listings on Tuesday evening. Previously, Google used the searcher’s query when formulating the title of the search result snippets. Now, the company says it generally doesn’t do that anymore. Instead, Google’s new system is built to describe what the content is about, regardless of the query that was searched.
The new system makes use of text that users can visually see when they arrive on the page (e.g., content within H1 or other header tags, or which is made prominent through style treatments). HTML title tags are still used more than 80% of the time, though, the company said. Google designed this change to produce more readable and accessible titles, but, for many, it seems to be having adverse effects — just check out the replies in the Twitter announcement. Fluctuations in your click-through rate may be related to this change, so we suggest you make note of it in your reporting.
SERP trends of the rich and featured: Top tactics for content resilience in a dynamic search landscape
The search results change all the time — not just the order of the results, but the features and user interface as well. Over the years, we’ve seen blue links get crowded out in favor of featured snippets, then featured snippets became less prominent as knowledge panels proliferated, and so the cycle goes. So, how do you ensure that your content stays resilient and continues to attract the traffic that your business relies on as the SERP evolves?
At SMX Advanced, Crystal Carter, senior digital strategist at Optix Solutions, outlined the following potential strategies for greater SERP resilience:
Optimize content for mixed media featured snippet panel results. There are often multiple site link opportunities in featured snippets (from images and/or videos), so you might be able to attract clicks even if you don’t “own” the snippet.
Create knowledge hubs for potential contextual linking developments. Google often experiments with new features on live search results, as it did with image carousels with featured snippets. Late last year, it tested out contextual links, and for some niches, this could be a way to gain more visibility or further branding if contextual links receive a wider rollout.
Build structured data into your website before rich results arise. It doesn’t take that much effort to do, it informs search engines about the nature of your content and if search engines end up supporting the structured data with a rich result, you’ll be ready.
Use intent-focused long-form content to potentially benefit from passage ranking. This may help you extract extra search visibility from your detailed content.
On August 30, Instagram will deprecate support for the “swipe-up” link (in Instagram Stories) in favor of a “Link Sticker,” TechCrunchreported on Monday. The Link Sticker will behave much like the poll, question and location stickers in that creators will be able to resize it, select different styles and place it anywhere on their Stories.
Why we care. This change may enable greater engagement between audiences and creators. The swipe-up link only enabled users to swipe up (or they could bounce to the next Story), but Stories with Sticker Links behave like any other Story: users can react with an emoji or send a reply.
Creators that can access swipe-up links will have access to Sticker Links. For SMBs, that may mean that they still don’t meet the follower threshold, unfortunately. However, Instagram says it’s evaluating whether to expand this feature to more accounts down the road — I wouldn’t hold my breath for that, as more accessibility to Sticker Links may have safety implications, especially if bad actors use it to promote spam or misinformation.
You saw my Post where, now?
Google Posts can now appear on third-party sites. Google has posted a notice stating that “Your posts will appear on Google services across the web, like Maps and Search, and on third-party sites.” The company has yet to provide further detail on the nature of these sites, the implementation or if they’ll simply be embeddable by all. Thanks to Claire Carlile for bringing this to our attention.
What should you ask at the interview? There are a lot of jobs available right now, so you may have your pick. Jasmine Granton has published a great thread of questions you should ask to narrow down your prospects.
Nike’s robots.txt. If I told you what it said, that’d ruin the joke. Go see it for yourself at nike.com/robots.txt. Thanks to Britney Muller for sharing this one.
Working remotely? Here’s how to make friends with your coworkers
We’re now very, very deep into working during/around the pandemic. Over the course of the last year and a half, you (or some of your colleagues) may have switched jobs and, now that organized happy hours have sort of lost their appeal, you may be wondering how to build relationships with new coworkers.
To help us all be less socially awkward, WIRED’s Alan Henry offered the following tips:
Ask colleagues to hop on a video call just to chat about what they’re working on or their interests. You could do this over a coffee, drink or even ice cream. And, be willing to reschedule if you or they just aren’t up for it that day.
Make plans for after you complete a big project. The work is done and people are more likely to be in a celebratory mood.
Join in on the conversation. When someone shares photos of their pets, you can share some of yours too (also works for kids!). Share your sense of humor by commenting on jokes or sending memes.
Follow your coworkers on Twitter, or Instagram and TikTok, if you’re comfortable with interacting with them on those platforms.
“The fun never happens organically when you’re all stuck behind screens,” Henry wrote, “You have to make it happen, which means putting yourself out there and making yourself (and possibly someone else) slightly uncomfortable.”
Google’s recent change in algorithms that choose which titles show up in SERPs has caused quite a stir in the SEO community. You’ve all probably seen the tweets and blogs and help forum replies, so I won’t rehash them all here. But the gist is that a few people could not care less and lots of people are upset with the changes.
It’s something our PPC counterparts have experienced for a while now — Google doing some version of automation overreach — taking away more of their controls and the data behind what’s working and what’s not. We’ve all adapted to (not provided) and we continue to adapt, so I’m sure this will be no different, but the principle is what’s catching a lot of SEOs off guard.
What’s going on?
Google has essentially said that SEOs (or those attempting SEO) have not always used page titles how they should be for a while (since 2012). “Title tags can sometimes be very long or ‘stuffed’ with keywords because creators mistakenly think adding a bunch of words will increase the chances that a page will rank better,” according to the Search Central blog. Or, in the opposite case, the title tag hasn’t been optimized at all: “Home pages might simply be called ‘Home’. In other cases, all pages in a site might be called ‘Untitled’ or simply have the name of the site.” And so the change is “designed to produce more readable and accessible titles for pages.”
Presumptuousness aside, someone rightfully pointed out that content writers in highly regulated industries often have to go through legal and multiple approvals processes before content goes live. This process can include days, weeks, months of nitpicking over single words in titles and headers. Only for Google’s algorithm to decide that it can do whatever it wants. Google’s representative pointed out that these companies cannot be liable for content on a third-party site (Google’s). It’s not a one-to-one comparison, but the same industries often have to do the same tedious approvals process for ad copy (which is why DSAs are often a no-no in these niches) to cover their bases for the content that shows up solely in Google’s search results.
When I work with SEO clients, I often tell them that instead of focusing on Google’s goals (which many get caught up in), we need to be focusing on our customers’ goals. (You can check out my SMX Advanced keynote, which is essentially all about this — or read the high points here.) Google says it’s moving toward this automation to improve the searchers’ experience. But I think it’s important to note that Google is not improving the user experience because it’s some benevolent overlord that loves searchers. It’s doing it to keep searchers using Google and clicking ads.
Either way, the message seems to be “Google knows best” when it comes to automating SERPs. In theory, Google has amassed tons of data across probably millions of searches to train their models on what searchers want when they type something into the search engine. However, as the pandemonium across the SEO community indicates, this isn’t always the case in practice.
Google’s history of half-baked ideas
Google has a history of shipping half-baked concepts and ideas. It might be part of the startup culture that fuels many tech companies: move fast, break things. These organizations ship a minimum viable product and iterate and improve while the technology is live. We’ve seen it before with multiple projects that Google has launched, done a mediocre job of promoting, and then gotten rid of when no one liked or used it.
I wrote about this a while back when they first launched GMB messaging. Their initial implementation was an example of poor UX and poorly thought out use cases. While GMB messaging may still be around, most SMBs and local businesses I know don’t use it because it’s a hassle and could also be a regulatory compliance issue for them.
The irony is not lost on us that Danny Sullivan thought it was an overstep on Google’s part when it affected a small business in 2013. The idea would be that the technology would hopefully evolve, right? Google’s SERP titles should be more intuitive not word salads pulled from random parts of a page.
This title tag system change seems to be another one of those that maybe worked fine in a lab, but is not performing well in the wild. The intention was to help searchers better understand what a page or site is about from the title, but many examples we’ve seen have shown the exact opposite.
Google and its advocates continue to claim that this is “not new” (does anyone else hear this phrase in Iago’s voice from Aladdin?), and they’re technically correct. The representatives and Google stans reiterate that the company never said they’d use the title tags you wrote, which given the scope of how terrible this first iteration is showing up to be in SERPs, almost seems like a bully’s playground taunt to a kid who’s already down.
Google is saying they’re making this large, sweeping change in titles because most people don’t know how to correctly indicate what a page is about. But SEOs are often skilled in doing extensive keyword and user research, so it seems like of all pages that should NOT be rewritten, it’s the ones we carefully investigated, planned, and optimized.
How far is too far?
I’m one of those people who doesn’t like it, but is often resigned to the whims of the half-baked stunts that Google does because, really, what choice do I have? Google owns their own SERP, but we, as SEOs, feel entitled to it because it’s our work being put up for aggregation. It’s like a group project where you do all the work, and the one person who sweeps in last minute to present to the class mucks it all up. YOU HAD ONE JOB! So while we can analyze the data and trends, we also need to make our feedback known.
SEOs’ relationship with Google has always been chicken and egg to me. The search engine would not exist if we didn’t willingly offer our content to it for indexing and retrieval (not to mention the participation of our PPC counterparts), and we wouldn’t be able to drive such traffic to our businesses without Google including our content in the search engine.
Why do marketers have such a contentious relationship with Google? To put it frankly, Google does what’s best for Google, and often that does not align with what’s best for search marketers. But we have to ask ourselves where is the line between content aggregator and content creator? I’m not saying that the individuals or teams at Google are inherently evil or even have bad intentions. They actually likely have the best aspirations for their products and services. But the momentum of the company as a whole feels perpetual at this point, which can feel like we practitioners have no input in matters.
We’ve seen Google slowly take over the SERP with their own properties or features that don’t need a click-through — YouTube, rich snippets, carousels, etc. While I don’t think Google will ever “rewrite” anything on our actual websites, changes like this make search marketers wonder what is the next step? And which of our critical KPIs will potentially fall victim to the search engine’s next big test?
When I interviewed for this position at Search Engine Land, someone asked me about my position on Google (I guess to determine if I was biased one way or another). I’m an SEO first and a journalist second, so my answer was essentially that Google exists because marketers make it so.
To me, the situation is that Google has grown up beyond its original roots as a search engine and has evolved into a tech company and an advertising giant. It’s left the search marketers behind and is focused on itself, its revenues, its bottom line. And that’s what businesses are wont to do when they get to that size. The power dynamic is heavily weighted to Google’s side, and they know it. But the key is to remember that we’re not completely powerless in this relationship. Google’s search engine, as a business, relies on us (in both SEO and PPC) participating in its business model.
SMX Next returns virtually on November 9-10, 2021 focusing on forward-thinking search marketing.
AI and machine learning have already become part of both paid and organic search performance. Commerce platforms are just as powerful as the traditional search engines for driving sales. And new ways to deliver content across search and social platforms are giving creative marketers more options for driving engagement.
SMX Next will explore next-generation strategies, equipping attendees with emerging SEO and PPC tactics as well as expert insights on the future of the search marketing profession.
Whether you’ve been speaking for years or are just dipping your toes into speaking, please consider submitting a session pitch. We are always looking for new speakers with diverse points of view.
The deadline for SMX Next pitches is September 24th!
Here are a few tips for submitting a compelling session proposal:
Present an original idea and/or unique session format.
Include details about what an attendees will be able to do better or different as a result of attending your session.
Include a case study or specific examples and explain how they can be applied in different types of organizations.
Be realistic about what you can present in the time allotted. You can’t cover everything about your topic. Going more in-depth on a narrow topic is often more valuable to the attendee.
Provide tangible takeaways and a plan of action.
Jump over to this page for more details on how to submit a session idea, or directly to this page to create your profile and submit a session pitch.
If you have questions, feel free to reach out to me directly at kbushman@thirddoormedia.com. I’m looking forward to reading your proposals!
The global events of the past two years have made it more important than ever for brands and agencies to stand out against the competition. Being able to call your company “award-winning” is one of the most powerful differentiators you can have.
Deadline alert: The final date to submit your Search Engine Land Awards entry is next Friday, September 3 at 11:59pm PST. Begin your application now!
Showcase exceptional work. The campaigns and initiatives you feature in your application will demonstrate to the judges, the community, and the industry at large just how talented you and your team are.
Generate new business. Customers and clients want to work with the best in the biz. And when you take home a Search Engine Land Award, that’s exactly what you’ll be.
Dazzle existing clients and customers. New work aside, your existing contacts will be thrilled to tell their circle they’re associated with an award-winning company.
Boost company morale. Winning a Search Engine Land Award is a wonderful way to put the spotlight on your hardworking colleagues and praise them for their tremendous work. You’ll ride those good vibes for years to come.
Earn international recognition. Search Engine Land Award winners — like Search Engine Land readers — come from all corners of the earth. When you win, you’ll be in the company of some of the world’s most exceptional organizations.
Savor legit bragging rights. New business is terrific. Industry praise is humbling. Bragging to friends, family, and your entire LinkedIn network is no less a well-deserved perk!
Wave from the front page of Search Engine Land. As a Search Engine Land Award winner, you’ll be featured in editorial coverage on Search Engine Land, the industry publication of record.
Enjoy potential speaking opportunities at Search Marketing Expo (SMX). Search Engine Land Award winners are often invited to speak at our sister conference, SMX — yet another opportunity to showcase your expertise and boost brand awareness.
Display a stunning trophy. Because, at the end of the day, who doesn’t love something beautiful and shiny to look at?
Take home the highest honor in search. The. Highest. Honor. In. Search. This is your field. This is your career. This is your chance. You deserve that honor.
There’s only one catch: You have to get your submission in by Friday, September 3 at 11:59pm PST. The submission process is faster and easier than ever before. What are you waiting for? Begin your application now.
Standard entry fees are $595 per application — and you can submit to as many categories as you like.
Our judges look forward to reviewing your work. Best of luck to you and your team!
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, over the past week, Google made a small change that impacted some of the clickable titles in the search result snippets, and some SEOs and marketers are having a hard time with the change.
For well over a decade Google has often not shown the title tag in your page’s metadata as the clickable link in the Google search results. But something changed last week with how and when Google shows the title tag versus headers or other content from the page or links. And with that change, it causes a lot of unrest amongst the SEO community.
Both Brodie Clark and Lily Ray covered this in a lot of detail, and I covered when this happened, which was on August 17, and how it is unrelated to passage-based ranking. But rest assured, Google has heard the feedback and is collecting examples of when these titles do not make sense. In fact, Danny Sullivan even said this might lead to more controls within Google Search Console for us to manage our titles in the Google search results better. Who knows if that will end up happening? Andrew Charlton came out with a nice tool to show you how Google is changing your title tags – just keep in mind, a lot of the title tag changes are query dependent.
My advice: This doesn’t seem to be a huge change. We have already seen Google not use our title tags before and as SEOs, we are awesome at dealing with change. We will adapt and use this to our advantage going forward.
Barry Schwartz, My title changes a lot
Google Shopping bug leads to large impression drops
Google Ads seemed to have a bug last Friday with Google Shopping in some regions, like the UK, where the shopping listings were not showing up. Some advertisers were claiming drops in their listings from showing up by over 90%, yes, 90% impression drops for Google Shopping campaigns.
Impressions and spend have dropped in Smart Shopping for many UK advertisers starting around August 20, 2021. “A high proportion of UK-based advertisers have seen a drop in impressions, cost and revenue for their PLA campaigns since Friday 20th,” tweeted PPCer Liam Wade. Google Ads Platinum Product Expert Emmanuel Flossie posted in the forums that it’s a known issue.
Why we care. “Assuming it gets fixed, bear in mind that bid strategies will likely be affected and may re-enter learning phases,” tweeted Wade in the initial thread. If your accounts or campaigns have been affected by this issue, it’s critical to communicate to clients and stakeholders that this change is a glitch in their metrics, and not indicative of other issues. It’d also be beneficial to annotate this change in Google Analytics so any KPIs can be caveated in future reports. The bug is also causing advertisers to question the machine learning and automation happening behind the scenes in ads. Please note, this was fixed on Tuesday late afternoon, so all should be good now.
Google link spam update is finally done rolling out
A full month after Google initially started to roll out the link spam update, the company has finally confirmed the update is complete. Google initially said this update would take only two-weeks. Now a full-month after it was announced, Google’s Danny Sullivan said via the Search Liaison account “the link spam update is now complete.”
Why we care. This might be a hard one to pinpoint for you or your clients, since it took a month to fully roll out. But if you see any changes to your rankings, maybe in a big way, over the last month, it might be related to this new link spam update. Make sure your links are natural and in accordance with Google’s webmaster guidelines. Work on improving your site, so it can naturally attract new links over time.
Google Ads rolling out a new campaign setup screen
Google Ads is rolling out a new ads campaign set up screen that has the steps to set up your campaigns across the left-hand rail of the screen, as opposed to the top of the screen. This seems to be broadly rolling out now and may surprise some advertisers who have been accustomed to the older version of this screen.
Some advertisers, as you can imagine, are not a fan of this change. It made a lot of industry vets do a double-take and it slowed down their process of setting up new campaigns in Google Ads. We do suspect that advertisers will adapt quickly to this new screen, as time goes on.
Why we care. Don’t be surprised when you see this new Google Ads campaign set up screen. You may have the same reaction as many of your colleagues where it takes you longer to set up the campaigns now because you are not accustomed to where things have moved. But you will quickly learn the change and be able to crank out new campaigns in no time.
Google AdSense new auto-optimize options
Google AdSense has added three new settings to auto-optimize features in your experiments. These new methods include select traffic, block a style and block an experiment.
Select traffic: Select the percentage of users that you want to show optimization experiments to.
Block a style: Remove an ad style that you don’t want auto-optimize experiments to run on. (AdSense for search only)
Block an experiment: Remove types of optimization experiments that you don’t want on your site, for example:
Vignette ads and anchor ads (AdSense for content)
Standard templates, shopping templates, and search keywords (AdSense for search).
Why we care. Publishers, it is probably worth testing some of these new auto-optimize options for your Google AdSense ads and see if they make an impact on your earnings. You can learn more on how to set these up over here.
Custom metrics in Google Ads, did COVID change SEO, and Crunchbase gets crunched
Google Ads custom metrics. Google has announced the addition of four new metrics, these metrics include Search impression share, Click impression share, Display impression share and all phone call metrics.
Poll: Did COVID change SEO? J. Turnbull asked on Twitter, “did COVID change how we do SEO?” 52.5% said no, COVID did not change how we do SEO. 216% said yes, COVID did change how we do SEO. And 22% said, “it depends.”
Google has completed the rollout of the link spam update it started just over four weeks ago. “The link spam update is now complete,” Danny Sullivan said via the Google Search Liaison account.
What took so long. Google originally said this update would “roll out across the next two weeks.” But as you can see, it took an additional two weeks to complete – a total of four weeks. Why did it take so long? Google did not say, but I suspect things got stuck a bit and the rollout hit some unexpected snags.
The original announcement. “In our continued efforts to improve the quality of the search results, we’re launching a new link spam-fighting change today — which we call the ‘link spam update.’ This algorithm update, which will roll out across the next two weeks, is even more effective at identifying and nullifying link spam more broadly, across multiple languages. Sites taking part in link spam will see changes in Search as those links are re-assessed by our algorithms,” Google wrote.
Nullifying link spam. You can see the word Google used here was “nullifying,” which does not necessarily mean “penalize,” but instead, to ignore or simply not count. Google’s efforts around link spam have been to ignore and not count spammy links since Penguin 4.0 was released in 2016.
Why we care. This might be a hard one to pinpoint for you or your clients since it took a month to fully roll out. But if you see any changes to your rankings, maybe in a big way, over the last month, it might be related to this new link spam update. Make sure your links are natural and in accordance with Google’s webmaster guidelines. Work on improving your site, so it can naturally attract new links over time.
As Google wrote, “Site owners should make sure that they are following the best practices on links, both incoming and outgoing. Focusing on producing high-quality content and improving user experience always wins out compared to manipulating links. Promote awareness of your site using appropriately tagged links, and monetize it with properly tagged affiliate links.”
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, I was at a climbing gym last Friday when suddenly a semi-familiar tone sounded off all around me.
It was a severe weather notice for Hurricane Henri going off on everyone’s smartphones at the same time. I tapped on the notice and was taken to Google’s mobile SERP, where I was shown the SOS alert at the top, followed by the latest articles in the Top Stories carousel, a map of the storm’s expected path and links to local resources — a far more useful results page than the simple, nostalgic 10 blue links of days long gone.
Needs change and so do the nature of queries — it’s to be expected that the interface our audiences use to find what they’re looking for also evolves. I don’t expect any of you to be optimizing for storm warnings, but it’s always worth it to take a look at the experience offered on those results pages because, one day, they may make it onto a commerce-driven results page, for example.
George Nguyen, Editor
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
Google said in the year 2020, it made 4,500 updates to Google Search. These changes can be ranking changes, user interface changes and much more. By comparison, in 2019, Google made 3,200 changes to Search. Looking further back, in 2010, we covered that Google had about one change per day.
Google also launched a “fully-redesigned How Search Works website that explains the ins and outs of Search.” In the 2021 version, it “updated the site with fresh information, made it easier to navigate and bookmark sections and added links to additional resources that share how Search works and answer common questions.”
Why we care. It is nice to see Google document how many changes it makes to Search from year to year. It is also good for search marketers to review how Google Search works and do a deep dive into the language Google uses to describe how the search engine functions.
The case for advertising on search engines other than Google
It can be easy to equate search marketing with Google marketing, because, well, statistically, it is. But it shouldn’t be. By focusing on Google above all else, we perpetuate a cycle that overlooks the value that smaller competitors might be offering and keeps the search behemoth at the top.
We can’t write off these smaller search engines’ failure to launch as evidence they were a worse product. That’s an oversimplification and it’s one we see Google and other near-monopolies use to justify their status as “natural” monopolies.
The dilemma is that search engines need revenue to grow, which comes, in most business models, from advertisers. And advertisers need users, which come with growth. It’s a chicken and egg situation. Which comes first: growth or advertisers? Who else can you consider for advertising:
Ecosia: An environmentally friendly, privacy-focused search engine that plants trees as you search.
Brave Search: Started as a browser and recently expanded into the search engine space.
Messy SEO Part 1: Navigating a site consolidation migration
Messy SEO is a new Search Engine Land column covering the nitty-gritty, unpolished tasks involved in the auditing, planning, and optimization of websites, using MarTech’s new domain as a case study.
“I recently joined the Third Door Media team to help clean up these issues arising from the consolidation of Marketing Land and MarTech Today. The new site needed someone to jump into the thick of things and chart a path forward,” writes Third Door Media’s new Content and SEO Manager.
Follow along as Corey sorts through the messy side of SEO and navigates the fixes needed to help this website migration achieve its goals.
The deal with title tags in Google Search, Bing Webmaster Tools adoption and the WFH schism
Get caught up on the title tag situation. For those wondering what the deal is with titles in Google Search, Brodie Clark has published an excellent explainer, complete with an FAQ section at the bottom.
Do you use Bing Webmaster Tools? Eli Schwartz posted a Twitter poll asking whether SEOs ever log into BWT. There are still two days left to participate, but when I last checked, a bit under half of respondents said, “Nope.”
“Why does everyone want to keep working from home?” “Return hesitancy is sparking friction as businesses figure out the new normal,” said Marketoonist creator Tom Fishburne.
The burden of sending our children back to school this year
“It’s enough to bring a parent to tears, except that every parent I know ran out a long time ago—I know I did,” Dan Sinker wrote for The Atlantic. “Ran out of tears, ran out of energy, ran out of patience. Through these grinding 18 months, we’ve managed our kids’ lives as best we could while abandoning our own. It was unsustainable then, it’s unsustainable now, and no matter what fresh hell this school year brings, it’ll still be unsustainable.”
The main point of Sinker’s article is encapsulated in the four-word title, “Parents Are Not Okay.” I’ve chosen to spotlight it today because, chances are, some of your colleagues are parents or you, yourself, are a parent and we are now in back-to-school season.
Sending our children back to school while COVID cases are rising, masking continues to be a battleground and a vaccine for children under 12 remains unavailable is a far cry from the improvements we were hoping for a year ago. Sinker describes it as a “monkey’s-paw situation, because, as a parent, all I’ve wanted for a year and a half is for my kids to go back to school—for their sake and for mine—but not like this.”
While we all like to view ourselves as professionals, there are things that are far more important than our jobs; in this case, the welfare of our children. These worries are likely to take a toll and businesses should recognize that, from practitioners all the way through to the C-suite. No one has ever had to do what parents in 2021 are doing, especially because, unlike last year, remote schooling seems to be off the table in so many regions.
“All this and parents are somehow expected to be okay,” Sinker wrote. Perhaps we can lighten the burden by acknowledging what parents around us are experiencing and maybe even find ways to support them where we can.
Dubai, UAE – June 21-24, 2021: Scene at Arab Health 2021 – the largest healthcare trade exhibition in the Middle East – held at Dubai World Trade Centre during the global Covid-19 pandemic.
A new wave of caution for in-person gatherings is sweeping over marketers as the COVID-19 Delta variant is causing cases to spike, especially in areas with lower vaccination rates.
Marketing professionals we surveyed this summer give it a 5 out of 10 chance, on average, that they will attend an in-person event through the end of 2021. The results showed a slight decrease in optimism compared to April, when respondents gave a 6 out of 10 chance, on average, that they would attend an in-person event in the fourth quarter of 2021.
About 30% of the nearly 170 marketers we surveyed in our latest Events Participation Index, said it was extremely unlikely (1 out of 10) that they would attend an in-person event this year. On the other hand, 20% said they were extremely likely (10 out of 10) to attend an in-person event this year.
This comes as several trade shows, conferences, and smaller regional shows are being planned for the remainder of 2021. It also follows an announcement by the New York Auto Show that it will not hold its 2021 event, despite optimism earlier this year that it could host tens of thousands of attendees in person.
The outlook improves slightly for 2022. Respondents on average gave it a 6 out of 10 likelihood that they would attend an in-person event in the first half of 2022. That jumped to 7 out of 10 for the second half of 2022.
All of this suggests that the kind of attendance seen in conferences, trade shows and more before the pandemic will not return in the near future.
Looking to 2022
Despite lingering concerns over safety, both attendees and exhibitors are budgeting to attend in-person events in 2022. But they plan to attend far fewer than before the pandemic.
About 78% of respondents said they are budgeted to attend a small number of in-person events in 2022, while only 12% said they were budgeted to attend many. We saw the same trend with exhibitors, which make up a smaller proportion of our respondents. Nearly 19% said they were budgeted to exhibit at a small number of in-person events next year, compared to 5% who expect to exhibit at many.
2022 attendance might also be limited by geography. While 56% of marketers said they would attend regional events that they could access through ground transportation or by driving, only 40% said they would fly long distances to attend.
Of course, willingness to attend an in-person conference depends on how safe attendees feel, so it is not surprising that 70% told us organizers should only allow vaccinated adults to attend.
This week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, which could lead to more vaccine mandates across the US. New York City has already mandated proof of vaccination for visiting restaurants or gyms, and several major employers are also requiring staff to be vaccinated. The Consumer Technology Association’s upcoming CES 2022 event in January will also require proof of vaccination to attend.
Still, 30% of our respondents disagree with mandating vaccination, suggesting that organizers should expect mandates to be another limiting factor on attendance.
What hybrid means to attendees
Offering a digital component to a live event is not new. Conferences like SXSW, TechCrunch Disrupt and more had incorporated digital live streams into their events before the pandemic. But with the lockdown proving the value of virtual events, organizers are betting that hybrid events that pair in-person and digital experiences is the future. However, what attendees want from hybrid events is not so clear-cut.
About 32% of the marketers we surveyed said they would prefer a hybrid event where the in-person experience is smaller and more intimate paired with a large virtual experience. On the other hand, 25% said they would prefer a larger in-person event paired with a scaled-down virtual offering.
About 26% said the in-person and digital components of a hybrid event should be identical in scope while 17% said they saw no value in hybrid event experiences.
The virtue of hybrid during pandemic times is it gives organizers a chance to engage a larger audience that includes both in-person and virtual attendees. About 40% of the marketers we surveyed said they would attend an event in-person and access virtual components. About 22% said they would attend in-person only while 38% said they would attend the virtual components only.
Virtual to stay
Many of our respondents commented on how the past 18 months have changed their views on professional training and networking. For many of them, virtual events expanded their access to actionable information.
“It’s wonderful getting the benefit of top-notch presentations from the safety of my office. Going virtual has allowed vastly more people to ‘attend’ events and learn from the best,” wrote one respondent.
“While I love in-person events, I feel like I’ve attended more virtual events and training than I would have otherwise. It’s probably a combination of a reduced overall time commitment, and not having to pay for travel. I also feel like the level of training I’ve received hasn’t diminished from not being in-person,” wrote another.
But when it comes to networking, digital experiences miss the mark for many professionals, which is surprising in the age of social networking.
“I have not found virtual networking to be useful. It’s impossible to genuinely connect when there are so many participants, and the camaraderie that comes from being at a conference in person is totally gone. I don’t know what the magic ingredient is (mutual bonding over bad coffee and lack of sleep?) but online, networking interactions feel much more forced,” one marketer said.
Maybe this response sums it up perfectly.
“Virtual training is possible. Virtual networking … not so much.”
