Beginning on October 1, 2021, Google will include a 2% “Regulatory Operating Cost” surcharge to advertisers’ invoices for ads served in India and Italy, according to an email sent to Google advertisers on Tuesday. The surcharge applies to ads purchased through Google Ads and for YouTube placements purchased on a reservation basis.
Advertisers should be aware that these fees are charged in addition to their account budgets. As such, the surcharges won’t be reflected in the cost per conversion metrics in their campaign reporting. Advertisers should take these factors into account when creating their budgets.
Additionally, as Greg Finn, partner at digital agency Cypress North, advised on Twitter when Google first announced that it was passing on this surcharge last year, applying the “People in or regularly in your targeted locations” setting can result in racking up more surcharges.
More on the news
Google will add the surcharges to advertisers’ Google Ads costs at the end of each month, to be paid the next time they are charged. The surcharges are subject to any taxes, such as sales tax, VAT, GST or QST that apply in the advertiser’s jurisdiction.
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, do you work for a business that cares about making its content accessible to all?
In our industry, we’re used to speaking of legislation in terms of antitrust or privacy, but for this newsletter intro, I’d like to shift our focus to another piece of landmark legislation: The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) — its 31st anniversary was yesterday. The ADA is directly responsible for the employment of so many people because it requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations, and we’re a more inclusive, stronger society for it.
In addition to brick-and-mortar facilities, ADA protection also extends to websites. Between 2018 and 2019, there were over 2,200 lawsuits filed in federal courts, and although some were aimed at notable brands like Dunkin’ Donuts, Bank of America, Domino’s Pizza and Nike, the majority were directed at SMBs. Today is a fine day to ask yourself and your team, “Are our sites ADA compliant?”
Google publishes timelines for Privacy Sandbox proposals
Google’s Privacy Sandbox timeline. Image: Google
Google recently published a timeline reflecting the stages of development for various categories of Privacy Sandbox initiatives. The timeline provides search marketers with a general idea of when the initiatives should be ready for adoption. That can give marketers some indication as to whether the company will meet its new deadline (late 2023) to deprecate third-party cookies.
Transition period: Stage 1 (in which APIs for each use case are available for adoption) is currently forecasted to begin Q4 2022. Sometime after that, we should have a clearer picture of what advertising with Google looks like as third-party cookies are phased out.
Google fixing two search bugs; review snippets and soft 404 detection
Google has confirmed it is resolving two bugs, one related to review stars showing in the search results and another related to how Google processes soft 404 documents. The two issues seem to be unrelated.
Over the past couple of days, Google Search has, for the most part, stopped showing review snippets — the image above shows the same results screenshotted two days apart. And, Google recently changed how it detects soft 404 pages, which caused some to see spikes in soft 404 errors but not clearly seeing if those pages were in the Google index or not. Both of these issues can directly affect your traffic from Google Search, so when the company does fix them, it may lead to more traffic.
New business openings remained strong in Q2 across categories, according to Yelp
New business openings over time. Image: Yelp.
In Q2, new local businesses opened in record numbers and across numerous sectors, according to Yelp. In categories like home, local, professional and automotive services, new business openings were higher than they’ve been since 2017-2018. Business owners may feel more confident thanks to widespread vaccine rollout and pent-up consumer demand — a phenomenon I’ve seen referred to as “rage spending.”
The economy is rebuilding its momentum and people are rethinking their lifestyles in the wake of the pandemic. We’ve seen massive shifts in the labor force, with many workers using their newly found leverage to find better, higher-paying jobs. While I’d like to say that “the pandemic is gone for good,” my guidance in today’s introduction still applies: never say “never.”
It’s news to me. I just learned that at one point, Sergey Brin and Larry Page called their search engine “BackRub,” because it analyzed backlinks. Just imagine: BackRub Maps, BackRub+, BRMail, BackRub Shopping… So, what’s got a better ring to it? Vote here.
Google Maps updates “dangerous” Ben Nevis route. “Mountaineering groups said the dotted line crossed ‘potentially fatal’ steep, rocky and pathless terrain, while a suggested walking route for a different mountain, An Teallach, would lead people over a cliff,” the BBC reported. I’ve followed Google Maps directions on trails before and it hasn’t always turned out great — I’m glad this is now on the company’s radar, but I wonder if they’ll be able to resolve this issue at scale.
The EU gives Google two months to improve hotel and flight search result transparency
Yesterday, the European Commission told Google that it has two months to improve how it presents flight and hotel search results and explain how it ranks them. If it doesn’t meet the deadline, the company may face sanctions.
“The latest grievance centres on the prices on its services Google Flights and Google Hotels,” Foo Yun Chee wrote for Reuters, “The final prices for these should include fees or taxes that can be calculated in advance, while reference prices used to calculate promoted discounts should be clearly identifiable, the EU executive and national consumer watchdogs, led by the Dutch agency and the Belgian Directorate General for Economic Inspection, said in a joint statement.”
In the U.S., Google is already showing why it ranked a specific search result, so I imagine this won’t be a huge leap for the company to achieve. However, some of the EU’s regulatory tactics seem to have an end goal (like more transparency or increasing competition), but also leave a lot of wiggle room, which companies are sure to take advantage of — for example, the auction that initially powered the search choice screen, which Google ultimately had to drop due to pressure from regulators and competitors. If vague instructions are given, don’t be surprised when the result isn’t exactly what you were hoping for.
Google seems to have resolved the bug it has with showing review snippets or stars in the search results. We are now able to see the gold yellow stars for many search results in the Google Search results.
Timeline. The bug began creeping into the Google Search results interface on Wednesday, July 21st based on the reports that were sent to us. By the following day, Thursday, July 22nd, the review starts were hard to find for any query you conducted in Google. Google confirmed the issue on Friday, July 23rd. Then yesterday afternoon, Monday, July 26th, the issue started to get resolved where now everyone seems to be able to see review stars in the Google Search results.
Reporting issues. Google also wrote on the data anomalies page that between July 19th and 23rd in the Google Search Console Performance reports for Google Search, “Due to an internal issue, you may see a drop in your Review snippet and Product rich results performance during this period. We regret any problems this may have caused on your site.” So make sure to annotate your own internal reports about this issue.
Why we care. Google was not showing review stars in the search results and that can lead to a lower click through rate from the search results. Lower click through rates can lead to less traffic and less traffic can lead to less conversions. But at the same time, your competitors likely did not show the review stars, so everyone was in the same boat.
Google is rolling out the link spam update today and throughout the next two weeks. This link spam update targets spammy links “more broadly” and “across multiple languages,” Duy Nguyen, a Google search quality analyst, said.
The announcement. Google wrote “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 rollout 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.”
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.
Might feel like a penalty. While Google may not penalize your site for these spammy links, if Google ignores or nullifies links that may have been helping a site rank well in Google Search, that might feel like a penalty. In short, if you see your rankings drop over the next two weeks and if it is a sharper drop, it might be related to this update.
Best practices on links. Google’s Duy Nguyen published a blog post about link spam and best practices that you can read here.
Why we care. Again, if you see ranking declines in Google over the next two weeks, 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, and I’m moving this week.
I read somewhere once that moving is one of the top three most stressful life events, and I believe it. Everything is chaotic, and I don’t know where anything is. I thought having movers would make it a lot easier, but it’s actually made it harder for me, personally. There’s an element of releasing control that I don’t quite have a handle on. I don’t have control over my control issue.
Barry kindly reminded me that this is exactly what a site migration can feel like for SEOs too. Sometimes it’s out of your hands, with developers doing the work, and you just orchestrating. When you’re in the middle of it, even the best-planned migrations can feel chaotic and like you don’t know where anything is or goes.
But the idea is that, with months of planning and structuring, when you get to the other side, things will be simple and work as you intended. If you’re navigating a site move, I hope you feel more settled than I do with my house move, right now. Either way, we’ll get to the other side.
Carolyn Lyden, Director of Search Content
Google’s three-strikes ad policy isn’t the problem, it’s policy application that worries advertisers
Google Ads’ new three-strikes program, which begins in September 2021, applies to violations of its Enabling Dishonest Behavior, Unapproved Substances and Dangerous Products or Services policies. If an advertiser is found to be in violation of Google’s policies, they’ll receive a warning for the first infraction. After that, penalties become increasingly strict with each violation, leading up to account suspension after the third strike.
The PPC professionals that spoke to us for this article were largely in favor of the three-strikes system. However, Google’s enforcement, which can be haphazard, has them concerned. “I’ve had ‘false flags’ come up specifically in these categories a handful of times over the past year (including display ads for a cybersecurity company being disapproved for promoting drug use!),” said Tim Jensen, campaign manager at Clix Marketing.
Communicating the change with stakeholders and clients ahead of time can help you frame their expectations once the new policies come into effect. Eventually, more advertisers may potentially run afoul of the system, so it’s best to get ahead of it now instead of allowing that first warning or strike to be issued.
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.
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.
Search Shorts: Click maps, CRO and new tools for media planners
Collect user data with click maps. You have probably heard that to be successful you need to be data-driven, only if it was that simple. Collecting data is the easy part; figuring out what matters and how to use this information to your advantage is a lot more difficult. Here to save the day are click maps – a simple yet powerful heatmap tool that makes it easy for you to collect, visualize and understand your website’s analytics data.
How to build user trust with CRO & UX tweaks. A user’s trust of your site isn’t always the most pressing issue a site can have, from an SEO perspective. Often, you’re too busy putting out technical fires or building a brand from scratch, one backlink at a time. But when the technical foundations are there, your content marketing/PR is on point, and yet the graphs start to plateau; this can be a great time to take stock of a site and really dig into whether it’s as strong as it can be from a trust perspective.
Plan for business growth with Display & Video 360. To help media planners adjust to this new way of working, Google Ads is introducing two Display & Video 360 tools that will help you estimate the reach of your campaigns in real-time across any inventory type – including traditional TV, connected TV (CTV) and even audio.
What We’re Reading: Using keywords in YouTube videos: How to get more views
Video has been the “next big thing” for a while. Over 75% of GenZers age 15-25 watch YouTube. “Their most used platform is YouTube closely followed by Instagram – so video is clearly a priority for them,” wrote Sorilbran Stone. So it only makes sense that more search marketers are using Google’s video platform for both paid and organic reach.
This guide demonstrates how YouTube’s algorithm works and how you can optimize your video content to show up in those results. The key is to plan for your audience and work backward from there. Important metrics include things like watch time, retention rate, and engagement, but your keywords are also critical.
YouTube assesses keywords not just from titles, tags, and descriptions, but also from the audio of the video — which means it’s critical to actually say them in your audio script and transcription. How do you choose the keywords? Well, good, old-fashioned keyword research, of course.
Join this hour-long event curated for marketers on July 29 at 12 p.m. ET. Learn how to simplify the personalization process and use resources more efficiently and effectively from special guest Randy Warner of Forrester and also experts from Sleep Number and Dow Jones.
Attend for:
Insights from Forrester’s latest personalization research to act upon immediately
Tips for better marketing based on real-life success stories
Industry trends that show where and how you can optimize for your organization’s growth
Register today for an insight-packed event that promises to inspire your personalization journey.
On Friday, Google published a timeline reflecting the stages of development for various categories of Privacy Sandbox initiatives.
Caption: The Privacy Sandbox timeline, as of July 23, 2021.
The timeline (shown above) divides initiatives into four categories (“fight spam and fraud on the web,” “show relevant content and ads,” “measure digital ads,” and “strengthen cross-site privacy boundaries”). The phases indicated on the timeline are as follows:
Discussion – The technologies and their prototypes are discussed in forums such as GitHub or W3C groups.
Testing – All technologies for the use case are available for developers to test and may be refined based on results.
Ready for adoption – Once the development process is complete, the successful technologies are ready to be used at scale. They will be launched in Chrome and ready for scaled use across the web.
Transition period: Stage 1 – APIs for each use case are available for adoption. Chrome will monitor adoption and feedback carefully before moving to next stage.
Transition period: Stage 2 – Chrome will phase out support for third-party cookies over a three-month period finishing in late 2023.
Why we care
This timeline provides search marketers with a general idea of when various Privacy Sandbox initiatives should be ready for adoption. That can give marketers some indication as to whether the company will meet its new deadline (late 2023) to deprecate third-party cookies.
Transition period: Stage 1 (in which APIs for each use case are available for adoption) is currently forecasted to begin Q4 2022. Sometime after that, we should have a clearer picture of what advertising with Google looks like as third-party cookies are phased out.
More on the news
APIs shown on the timeline are based on Google’s current expectations and are subject to change. The timeline will be updated monthly.
Google expects Stage 1 of the transition period to last nine months. At some point during Stage 1, the company will announce a new timeline that decreases third-party cookies’ “Time to Live.”
The transition period will begin once APIs for all of the use cases are ready for scaled adoption. Chrome will announce the start of the transition on the timeline page and on the Keyword blog.
Google has confirmed it is fixing two search related bugs that impact what is shown and displayed in the Google search results. The issues are with review stars showing in the search results and how Google processes soft 404 documents. The two issues seem to be unrelated but are both being addressed and fixed by Google.
Soft 404 bug leading to de-indexing issues
A couple of weeks ago, we reported that Google changed how it detects soft 404 pages and that led to some pages being removed from the Google Search index. In short, Google said it now does soft 404 detection by device type, which caused some to see spikes in soft 404 errors but not clearly seeing if those pages were in the Google index or not.
Google has confirmed this morning both on Twitter and on YouTube that the company has pushed out a change to address the issue over the next few days. Google wrote “you may have noticed an increase in soft 404 error reports in Search Console the past few weeks.” “The team identified the classifier that was causing the issue and deactivated it while they fine-tune it,” the company added. That was written by Gary Illyes of Google.
John Mueller of Google said earlier this morning “we saw a bunch of these reports recently, in the past couple of weeks, and the team has been looking into that, and I think they turned one of classifiers off now based on some of the feedback that we got.” “So I would suspect that maybe this will catch up again and work out in the next couple of days and week or so.” John Mueller added.
So you should see improvements on this front in the upcoming days.
Review snippets and stars go missing
Over the past couple of days, Google Search has stopped showing, for the most part, review snippets. Those stars that are placed under some of the search results that have review structured data. Danny Sullivan of Google confirmed this afternoon that this is indeed a bug and Google will hopefully fix it soon.
I asked Danny Sullivan about this on Twitter and he responded “yes, it looks like there is a bug. We’re looking at it further and hope to correct soon.”
Here are screenshots that illustrate the before and after that I personally captured.
Review snippets from two days ago:
Review snippets from this morning:
As you can see, the stars are not showing up but Google is now aware and the issue should be resolved soon.
Why we care. All of these bugs can directly impact your traffic from Google Search. When Google resolves the bugs, it may lead to more traffic to your site from Google Search. In the first case, of the soft 404 bug, Google was not listing some pages in its search results that it will soon re-list after the bug is resolved. The second case, of the review stars, Google was/is not showing review stars in the search results that can lead to a lower click through rate from the search results.
Hopefully both will be fully resolved soon and you will see a positive impact in your traffic.
Over the last few years, the movement in favor of greater transparency and consumer protection has garnered more mainstream attention. In response, Google is making greater efforts to explain how its systems work. On the organic side, the search engine is now showing why it ranked a specific result. On the paid side, the company introduced a three-strikes pilot program earlier this week in order to prevent harmful ads from showing on its platform.
The three-strikes program will help to improve consumer safety on Google and advertisers largely agree with the policies, but the company’s record with incorrectly flagged ads has PPC professionals concerned that false positives may carry greater ramifications, ranging from more time spent communicating with Google Ads support representatives to account suspension for repeated violations that aren’t resolved in time.
Google Ads’ three-strikes pilot system
Google Ads’ new three-strikes program, which begins in September 2021, applies to violations of its Enabling Dishonest Behavior, Unapproved Substances and Dangerous Products or Services policies. “This includes ads promoting deceptive behavior or products such as the creation of false documents, hacking services, and spyware, as well as tobacco, drugs and weapons, among other types of content,” the company said its announcement. Though these ad types have long been prohibited, Google’s system to enforce these policies is new.
If an advertiser is found to be in violation of Google’s policies, they’ll receive a warning for the first infraction. After that, penalties become increasingly strict with each violation, leading up to account suspension after the third strike.
Type
Trigger
Penalty
Warning
First instance of ad content violating our Enabling Dishonest Behavior, Unapproved Substances and Dangerous Products or Services policies
No penalties beyond the removal of the relevant ads
First strike
Violation of the same policy for which you’ve received a warning within 90 days
The account will be placed on a temporary hold for three days, during which ads will not be eligible to run
Second strike
Violation of the same policy for which you’ve received a first strike within 90 days of the first strike
The account will be placed on a temporary hold for seven days, during which ads will not be eligible to run. This will serve as the last and final notice for the advertiser to avoid account suspension
Third strike
Violation of the same policy for which you’ve received a second strike within 90 days of the second strike
Account suspension for repeat violation of our policies
Strikes expire after 90 days and Google has systems in place to prevent advertisers from circumventing its policies (by creating new accounts to bypass a suspension, for example). The company also plans to expand its three-strikes program after the initial pilot to include more policy types.
“The policies aren’t the issue, it’s the unequal and sometimes plain incorrect application of the policy”
The PPC professionals that spoke to us for this article were largely in favor of the three-strikes system. However, Google’s enforcement, which can be haphazard, has them concerned.
“I want to be clear that the policies aren’t the issue, it’s the unequal and sometimes plain incorrect application of the policy,” said Amalia Fowler, director of marketing at Snaptech Marketing, “It’s the fact that an account where I have previously appealed multiple times still gets flagged for the same reason . . . If I trusted the appeal process to be smooth or that repeat flags wouldn’t occur, I would not be as worried as I am.”
“Ludicrous disapproval[s].” One might expect flagged ads to be a fact of life in heavily regulated sectors such as healthcare, but stories of inappropriately flagged ads are quite common, even in sectors like CPG and event management.
“Two of my clients were disapproved for unapproved substances and dangerous products earlier this year,” said Amy Bishop, owner of Cultivative, “I distinctly remember because the clients and I got a good chuckle out of it, considering one of them is in the event management SaaS space and the other was in the CPG space.” “It was an equally ludicrous disapproval for both of their businesses,” she added, noting that both instances were successfully appealed.
“I’ve had ‘false flags’ come up specifically in these categories a handful of times over the past year (including display ads for a cybersecurity company being disapproved for promoting drug use!),” said Tim Jensen, campaign manager at Clix Marketing. While these examples are especially concerning for ads identified as violating Google’s three-strikes policy, it speaks to a larger issue that PPC professionals have been navigating for some time: “I have clients that receive erroneous disapprovals all the time,” Bishop said, caveating that the disapprovals aren’t all for categories addressed by the new policy.
The Google Ads team seems to be aware. “I assure you, there’s no drinking during ad reviews :),” Ginny Marvin, ads product liaison at Google, tweeted in response to a comment made in jest, “I’ve passed this feedback along to the teams.”
I assure you, there’s no drinking during ad reviews :). I’ve passed this feedback along to the teams.
Google is no stranger to complaints from advertisers about inappropriately flagged ads, but the new consequences raise the stakes, and advertisers want assurances that the odds aren’t stacked against them. It’s also in Google’s best interest to improve its ad violation detection systems, since ads are the company’s main source of revenue and tying up Google Ads representatives with a deluge of support requests is an unsustainable proposition.
The potential impact on advertisers
Previously, falsely flagged ads might have been a minor frustration for marketers. But, under the new system, they could prove to be roadblocks to revenue.
For clients. “For my clients in particular, there are two or three that continuously get inappropriately flagged for substances and dangerous weapons, and we are constantly appealing,” Fowler said. “Google Ads is what drives their e-commerce presence, which makes up a very large portion of their overall business, so getting flagged incorrectly is one thing, but having it result in account suspension is another,” she added.
I would conjecture that 90% of ad disapprovals occur from honest advertisers who don’t even realize one of their products is prohibited or there is an issue on the site. If Google strictly enforces this system, many advertisers are going to suffer. #ppcchat
“I have clients that receive erroneous disapprovals all the time,” Bishop said, caveating that “They aren’t for the categories being addressed in the three-strike rule, so I doubt this will impact my clients but I can see where folks with clients in other industries, especially healthcare, might have concerns.”
Fortunately for advertisers, strikes expire after 90 days and they can appeal strikes they believe were inappropriately applied. Successful appeals aren’t counted towards the three-strike limit.
For agencies. “For the agency, this could entail additional time spent haggling with support/reps to ensure that ‘false flags’ don’t count against us,” Jensen said.
“If I write an ad, it gets disapproved, I appeal, and it gets rejected, how many more times am I likely to try with this short runway?” Fowler said, adding, “In cases where the policy is administered unfairly or poorly, or simply incorrectly, it stifles a company’s ability to advertise and adds a level of anxiety.”
More time spent “haggling” with Google Ads representatives may mean less time spent optimizing the actual campaign. And, while these false flags can stall progress, accounts that are prone to receiving a lot of them may end up getting suspended. The combination of these factors can negatively affect the agency-client relationship.
What advertisers can do to prepare for Google’s three-strikes system
In all likelihood, Google is probably improving its systems to minimize incorrectly flagged ads. However, the three-strikes program is set to begin in a matter of weeks, so it may be in advertisers’ best interests to tread carefully.
“Watch for violations that are flagged and be ready to appeal,” Jensen advised, “You can’t always predict when ads might be flagged, but just be extra mindful of display ad imagery and wording that might somehow be construed to fit these policies.”
“Understand that it isn’t just ad text that causes these violations,” Fowler said, recommending that advertisers check their extensions, destination URLs and their site as a whole. “If you have an account that historically has been flagged under these policies despite not violating them, make sure you are happy with your account setup and the number of ads. I would create ads, make sure they get approved, and then pause them for future testing so you don’t have to create them under this new policy,” she added.
Additionally, communicating the change with stakeholders and clients ahead of time can help you frame their expectations once the new policies come into effect. “In the future, we plan to expand the strikes system in phases to scope more of our policies in,” Google said in its announcement, which means that, eventually, more advertisers may potentially run afoul of the system, so it’s best to get ahead of it now instead of allowing that first warning or strike to be issued.
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 Google Ads’ new strike system has y’all feeling a lot of feelings.
And with good reason. I’ve seen a fewtweetsalready from advertisers dealing with ridiculous ad violations. This can be especially hard to explain to clients who don’t get why a giant tech company like Google doesn’t have available or adequate support channels to figure out these issues, too. Imagine how hard it is for SMBs or those trying to figure it out themselves, too.
This seems to be an issue on the local SEO side too, in my personal experience. I once had a client whose GMB got suspended. A small business owner, he DIY’d his listing and couldn’t figure out how to fix it. So he just created another one. When he finally got through to GMB support, the help person told him to delete the listing that was associated with his very profitable YouTube account. This is about the time he called me in a panic for emergency help.
I saw a job posting for a position at Google that ended with this almost-proverb: “Know the user. Know the magic. Connect the two.” Maybe Google’s too big to see the IRL, in-the-weeds perspectives of those of us who are in the thick of it every day. It seems like a perfect sentiment on the face of things, but the execution seems lacking overall.
Carolyn Lyden, Director of Search Content
Google says your redirects only need to stay up for a year
For the sake of SEO and Google being able to trace your changing URLs, Gary Illyes told Twitter that any redirects should stay up for a minimum of one year. However, you may choose to keep them up longer for the sake of users (nothing is more annoying than clicking a link to a new site and getting a 404).
The “clock” for this one year of redirection starts when Google initially crawls and recognizes the redirect — not necessarily when your team implements the change. This could be another reason to keep it for longer than the year mentioned.
Why we care. This is the first time Google has officially confirmed that the signals passed through redirects last forever even after a redirect is moved, if the redirect is live for over a year. If you have stakeholders or clients that really want to remove redirects for whatever reason, it is safe to do so from an SEO perspective after that one-year mark (specific to Google Search).
Google is rolling out a new SERP feature that tells you why a result was ranked the way it was. This feature is an expansion to the about this result box that launched in February 2021.
Google Search can show the terms it matched on the web page and your query, including the terms that were related but not direct matches. Google also lists if links from other websites influenced the ranking, if the results had related images, if there were geographical reasons for the result ranking and more.
The company is now rolling this out in the U.S. for English results. We expect it to be visible in almost 100% of queries in the U.S. later this week. Google said it will expand this to more countries and languages overtime.
Why we care. Search marketers always wanted to know why Google ranked a specific site for a given query. Well, Google is now giving you pretty detailed clues into why. Of course, this is not detailed ranking weights and signals, but it does tell you if the words match or match closely, if people link to the site, if there are geo-specific reasons and more.
The SEO Periodic Table: Architecture success factors
How your site is built helps search engines know what your pages are about. These elements include everything from the URLs you use and the page load speed to your security and crawlability.
The most critical element here is Crawl (Cr). If a search engine can’t crawl and index your pages, you’ve got no hope of appearing in the search results at all, let alone ranking well. Next comes Mobile (Mo) first, which represents optimizing your content so that mobile searchers can see everything that desktop users see on your site. Hand in hand with Mobile is Speed (Sp). Not only do page load delays frustrate users and decrease conversions, but Google has also made it clear that speed is a ranking factor.
More nuts-and-bolts architecture concerns include the proper handling of Duplicate (Dd)content by setting canonical URLs – this gets back to the above-mentioned algorithmic crackdown on sites simply copying other sites’ content without their permission. Additionally, using appropriate contextual keywords in your pages’ permalinks or URLs (Ur) sends a signal to the engines and users that the page contains the info they’re seeking. And, of course, a secure site — HTTPS (Ps) — is table stakes at this point.
This year we’ve also added two new elements to keep up to date with search engine changes like Core Web Vitals and the page experience update. Structure (St) is all about the information architecture of your site. We’ve also added Parity (Pr) which means that your site should offer the same user experience regardless of what device a searcher or website user is on.
Twitter is working on a dislike button. “Twitter writes that iOS users may see upvote and downvotes in several different styles (up and down arrows, a heart icon and a down arrow, and thumbs up and thumbs down icons) and that it’s testing the feature to ‘understand the types of replies you find relevant in a convo, so we can work on ways to show more of them.’ Currently, votes are not public,” wrote Ian Carlos Campell for The Verge.
Social media managers, rejoice! Instagram data now spans 60 days. And it’ll expand even further to 90 days of data later this summer, according to a tweet from Vishal Shah, VP of Product at Instagram. This update will be a big deal in helping both marketers and SaaS tools show trend data over time. We love something that makes our jobs easier.
TikTok’s new Spark Ads to boost native content. “Spark Ads enables brands to amplify existing organic videos that fit their campaign objectives such as video view and conversion with great flexibility and efficiency,” said the TikTok For Business Editorial Team in the announcement.
What We’re Watching: TikTok’s algorithm — Great for advertisers but weird if you zoom out
“A Wall Street Journal investigation found that TikTok only needs one important piece of information to figure out what you want: the amount of time you linger over a piece of content. Every second you hesitate or rewatch, the app is tracking you.”
That’s the summary of this 13-minute video on WSJ that digs into just how TikTok’s algorithm figures out its users’ interests and then takes them down very niche rabbit holes of content. The publisher created over 100x bot accounts and assigned them specific interests and then had them watch over 100k videos on the social media app.
TikTok says “shares, likes, follows, and what you watch all play a role in what TikTok shows you.” But the WSJ found that TikTok actually only needs one metric to target users so specifically: how long you linger over a piece of content. “Through this one powerful signal, TikTok learns your most hidden interests and emotions.”
This video highlights the debate we’ve been seeing play out on multiple channels. When search marketers have access or targeting based on this very specific data, it also means we can customize our advertising to those very niche audiences. If you love pets and TikTok figures out that you love French bulldogs in particular, advertisers can use that to make distinct ads to serve that particular audience.
But audiences may not realize that lingering on specific types of TikTok videos gives both the social media company and potentially advertisers that information — which as the video proves, can be very personal.
It’s the classic paid advertising conundrum: audiences want targeted advertising, but they’re afraid of giving up their personal data to get it.
