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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 It’s hard to believe that people prefer outdated titles that refer to Joe Biden as the vice president, to point out a particularly egregious example.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.

Read more here.

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.

Read more here.

Stickers to replace ‘swipe-up’ links on Instagram

On August 30, Instagram will deprecate support for the “swipe-up” link (in Instagram Stories) in favor of a “Link Sticker,” TechCrunch reported 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.”

The post Will Google change this title?; Thursday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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.

Read more here.

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.

Read more here.

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 crunches Crunchbase. Data from FiveBlocks says that Google is showing results from Crunchbase a lot less often since this past Thursday, August 19th. Why? We are not sure, but that is what the data is showing.

We’ve curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader.

• Google Maps navigation requires you to crowdsource data – 9to5Google
• Google NLP Demo Shuts Down – Inlinks
• Google Testing Carousels: Research, People Also Shop & Similar Products – Search Engine Roundtable
• The 3 stages of SEO career development – Kevin Indig
• YouTube SEO: How to use analytics for your video strategy – Yoast

The post Title changes in Google Search causing distress; Wednesday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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, aren’t you tired of hearing “it depends?”

After moderating so many Overtime Q&A sessions for SMX, I’ve noticed that many professionals formulate their questions something like this: relevant background information, goal, “What should I do?”

“It depends” is the preface I hear most often from our expert speakers. That’s because, while they do possess more strategic knowledge that could benefit you, they aren’t totally familiar with your situation (and that’s due to the short nature of Q&A sessions — Twitter conversations are pretty much the same, too). 

Instead of having your peers spitball a few ideas (a fraction of which you’ll reject because you weren’t able to give a comprehensive overview of your predicament), I suggest that we rethink how we ask for help: Ask for what considerations you should take into account as you plan your strategy. This will help you think more critically about your business’ overall goals, how marketing fits into it and the role you, as a search professional, play when it comes to making it all work together.

George Nguyen,
Editor

Top stories images not loading in Google Search

Numerous reports of images not loading in Google’s Top stories carousel began surfacing on Twitter yesterday morning. We were able to replicate the issue (shown above) and the carousel shows either blank or blurred featured images, but some of the reports we’ve seen include screenshots of the carousel in which one or two of the images did successfully load. Google has confirmed that it’s a bug and is working on a fix but has not provided a timeline.

Why we care. A blurred featured image may negatively affect your clickthrough rate, so make sure to annotate your reports to reflect this oddity. In search results where just one or two images loaded successfully, the story (or stories) that didn’t load properly may receive fewer clicks. And, since the Top stories carousel is an important source of visibility and traffic for some publishers, this could also impact advertising revenue and other marketing opportunities that depend on getting a user onto your site if the bug goes unresolved for an extended period. Fortunately, Google is already working on it — we’ll continue to provide updates as they come in.

Read more here.

New ways to show up when people search on YouTube

YouTube this week made two big changes to how search works on the video platform:

1. Timestamps come to video previews: Previously on desktop only, if you hover your mouse over a video, it would play a short preview snippet of the video. This preview capability is now rolling out to mobile. Plus, videos with timestamps will now have chapters available in the search preview.
2. Auto-translating captions: Along with new preview options, YouTube will begin translating English subtitles to multiple languages (and eventually roll this out to captions in other languages, too). 

Why we care. If you want your videos to stand out in YouTube search, adding timestamps will now be critical. The new translation option gives your videos the opportunity to show up for an even wider global audience than before. 

Read more here.

It’s all about transparency

Red alert. “What red flags should companies be aware of when choosing an SEO agency?” asked Kim Doughty, and SEO Twitter is responding. It’s worth checking out just to ensure your own agency isn’t accidentally turning off businesses with its messaging. Our own Director of Search Content Carolyn Lyden advises that businesses steer clear of agencies that make guarantees (“Your site will rank for these keywords in X days!”), those that don’t give you admin access to your own analytics and agencies that use fine print to take ownership over your online properties/listings.

“Paid for by” label on political ads. Google is now placing “Paid for by” labels on some political ads. This transparency feature enables users to learn more about who is paying for the ad and even lets them see details such as how much the advertiser has spent. Tip of the hat to Valentin Pletzer for sharing this.

What if the secret sauce wasn’t a secret? “If Google actually gave you a detailed breakdown of exactly how their algorithm works to rank websites, don’t you think the #SEO industry would become a boring industry to work in?” Mark Preston asked. The responses run the gamut from “SEO would become boring” to deeper insights about how companies might shift their emphasis from paid to organic.

Sydney court orders a scorned patient to pay $450,000 over unjust negative reviews and content that damaged a surgeon’s reputation

As those who run a local business may already know, negative reviews don’t even have to come from customers — they can come from people who simply attempted to engage with your business. That’s what happened to Dr. Warwick Nettle, a Sydney-based surgeon who declined a patient after consulting with her former surgeon, who cautioned him about operating on her.

“A federal court judge on Wednesday said the effect of the false posts caused ‘extreme’ damage to both the surgeon’s emotional and mental state and his prior ‘impeccable’ reputation,” The Guardian published. “His five-star Google rating dropped to 3.5 stars after the first two posts were published.”

The court fined Catherine Cruse, the scorned patient, $450,000. Unfortunately for Dr. Nettle, Cruse seems to have disappeared — she filed no defense and appeared at no hearings, despite her prolific online smear campaign that spanned eight months and various forms of content, including reviews and defamatory posts on online reputation sites.

The extent of the online abuse here is far-reaching: “A since-removed post on a third website included images falsely claiming to be results of botched surgeries by Nettle. The post also featured headshots of the surgeon with the phrases ‘the devil himself’, ‘inhumane medical care’, ‘abuse of power’ and ‘compulsive liar’ superimposed on them,” the story reads.

In the search industry, we typically discuss the cost of fake reviews (and other content that serves a similar purpose) as harming both businesses and consumers, which downplays the damage because it comes off as an abstraction. In this instance, a Sydney court has quantified the harm, and although Dr. Nettle may have a hard time getting what he’s owed, this can be seen as something of a precedent for similar cases. It also highlights the fundamental problem with online reputation sites that extort people and businesses to remove negative content about them.

The post “It depends” doesn’t have to be the answer if you ask the right questions; Thursday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Good morning, Marketers, all the traffic and rankings aren’t worth a thing if they don’t help you reach those business goals.

That’s the bottom line and that’s what we’re focusing on today at SMX Convert, our single-day learning journey that dives into organic and paid search conversion optimization. Barry Schwartz and I will be moderating the organic side, where the day begins with learning how to identify top-converting queries at every stage of the customer journey, then finding out how your content marketing can be leveraged to drive the funnel as well as ways to boost visibility and conversions via your navigation and CTAs. And, we’ll cap it all off with testing your strategy for continued improvement.

On the PPC side, moderated by our own Director of Search Content Carolyn Lyden and Anu Adegbola of MindSwan, you’ll start with how to create copy that converts. Then you’ll hear about targeting tactics to help you make the most out of those new ad copy skills you just picked up. And lastly, we’ll focus on improving landing page conversions using both qualitative and quantitative data.

There’s even more value to be had if you plan on attending the community meetups, site clinics and keynotes — I’m particularly looking forward to Michael Aargard’s talk on “The psychology of disappointment: How it works, why it hurts, and why it’s so bad for conversion.” You can check out everything SMX Convert has to offer over at the agenda page. We hope to see you there!

George Nguyen
Editor

Google’s tool to report indexing bugs is now available in the U.S.

That’s not an actual button in the image above — it’s what the button to access Google’s indexing bug reporting tool looks like, and you can locate the real deal at the bottom of the URL inspection help document and indexing coverage report document.

The tool, which was announced as a pilot program back in April, enables SEOs and site owners to report an indexing issue directly to Google. It is designed for those who need further support with indexing issues outside of the Google community forums and support documentation.

When it was first announced, the company said it would be “fully available to all in the U.S. within a week or less.” Nearly four months later (certainly better late than never), it’s now accessible to all signed-in Search Console users in the U.S. Don’t forget to bookmark it and use it when you need to escalate an issue.

Read more here.

Brett Bodofsky chats with Barry Schwartz about third-party PPC integrations

In the second part of his interview, Brett Bodofsky, senior paid media specialist at Elumynt, discussed some common themes among third-party PPC integrations and shared some guidance for when it comes time to pick one out.

In addition to evaluating the capabilities of the platform and the build vs. buy value, Bodofsky’s number-one piece of advice was to look for a company with a great support team: “When you’re starting with a brand new integration, you may have never used it before and you’re going to want a team to back you and help you get integrated with it,” he said, “Can you get a hold of somebody on the phone? If not, do you really want to consider them? What happens when you have a question?”

In the latter half of the conversation, Bodofsky continues to discuss third-party integrations but with respect to how they can be used to get back more control over your campaigns by layering automation onto an ECPC manual bidding strategy.

Watch the video here.

Consumer sentiment tumbles to 70.2, the lowest reading since 2011

Inflation and surging COVID cases have taken a toll on consumer sentiment, as measured by the University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index, which is informed by 500 monthly telephone interviews of people across the U.S. Since just last month, the metric has fallen by 11 points, bringing it to its lowest point since December 2011.

“Consumers have correctly reasoned that the economy’s performance will be diminished over the next several months, but the extraordinary surge in negative economic assessments also reflects an emotional response, mainly from dashed hopes that the pandemic would soon end,” Richard Curtin, director of the survey, said in the report.

When it rains, it pours: “Only 36% of respondents expect a decline in the jobless rate, down from 52% the prior month, despite record job openings,” Jordan Yadoo wrote for Bloomberg,
“Consumers also became decidedly downbeat about their income prospects. The gauge of expected personal finances fell to a seven-year low.”

Why we care. The initial vaccine rollout, combined with various stimulus initiatives, gave consumers a reason to feel optimistic and behave accordingly (read: spend more freely). That optimism seems to have peaked in April (when consumer sentiment hit a 2021 high of 88.3) and now that vaccination rates have declined and initial worries about the Delta variant have largely become a reality, people and businesses are starting to hedge their bets. This may be a sign that consumers are tightening their spending to prepare for another economic downturn, and businesses may be doing the same with their budgets, which might also affect employment rates. However, I’d like to point out Curtin’s quote, which posits that these assessments reflect “an emotional response” and “dashed hopes” — maybe it’ll be better than we expect.

It looks like B2B influencer marketing on TikTok may become a thing

The domestic B2B digital ad market grew 32.5% in 2020 and is forecasted to grow 24.9% this year to nearly $11 billion in spending, according to a July 2021 report by eMarketer. Some of that growth may be going towards influencer marketing, and for good reason — that’s the takeaway from Erika Wheless’ article for Ad Age.

“The more we test platforms like TikTok, the more we are finding good fits,” Jenni Buchbinder, director of strategic communications at QuickBooks, is quoted as saying, “These influencers are small business owners themselves, so they can speak about our product from personal experience.”

Although QuickBooks also contracts influencers on other social media platforms, it’s found more value on YouTube and TikTok because those platforms are video-first. While the company has partnered with numerous small business micro-influencers, this isn’t a throwaway campaign — it even features baseball player Alex Rodriguez.

Naturally, there are key distinctions between B2B and B2C marketing to be aware if you’re mulling over whether TikTok is right for your brand:

• There are usually longer buying cycles in B2B, and they tend to be more logical purchases (rather than emotional).
• An influencer with a large following may not be necessary. Instead, businesses should look for an influencer that is more impactful and resonates with the intended audience.
• B2B influencers usually work full-time at major businesses, which means they may not be able to accept traditional compensation.

If you’re considering dipping your toes into B2B marketing on TikTok, it’s also good to explore hashtags to see how your (or a competing) product is being used, kind of like a live focus group. And, if you’re looking for ideas, search around for user-generated content that’s already highlighting your product and build from there.

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Good morning, Marketers, Google Trends is 15 years old!

Well, it’s actually about 15 and 3 months, but the company decided to publish a few posts about it yesterday. That inspired me to look back on the top trending searches of the last few years. I hope you like nostalgia because here they are.

• 2020: “Election results”
• 2019: “Disney Plus”
• 2018: “World Cup”
• 2017: “Hurricane Irma”
• 2016: “Powerball”
• 2015: “Lamar Odom”
• 2014: “Robin Williams”

Every time I look at historical Google Trends data, I’m always surprised (yet still somehow not surprised) at what captured our interests and how those priorities have changed over the years. I’ve got my fingers crossed for trends worth fondly reminiscing about in 2021.

Nostalgia trip aside, Google Trends can be a very useful tool for marketers — if you’re unfamiliar, the company has posted an article with tips on how to get the most out of it. And, I’ve included a link to an interview with the person who led the team that launched Google Trends back in 2006, you can find that at the top of the Shorts section.

George Nguyen,
Editor

Instagram is adding more e-commerce support with ads in the Shop tab

Instagram is now testing ads in the Shop tab, TechCrunch first reported on Monday. The ads, which are rolling out now to mobile users in the U.S., can include a single image or a carousel of images, and the test is currently only open to a handful of retailers.

Why we care. Ads in Instagram Shops may provide retailers with a new way to target audiences that are ready to shop. This is especially valuable as the industry moves away from cross-app tracking and third-party cookies, which may be less of an issue in this context since all of the user’s activity happens in the app.

Read more here.

Google Ads will soon block ad targeting based on age, gender or interests of people under 18

With virtual schooling (and the general digitization of life), kids are more online than ever. That’s one of the reasons Google provided for implementing its new ad targeting restrictions. In the coming months, the company will expand safeguards to block ad targeting based on the age, gender or interests of users under 18. Google will also prevent age-sensitive ad categories from being shown to teens.

In addition, the company is introducing a new policy that enables users under 18 years old (or their parent or guardian) to request removal of their images from Google Image results and is defaulting YouTube uploads to private for kids between 13-17. Instagram knocked over the first domino when it made similar policy changes late last month, so we might see other players do the same. While advertisers should not be drastically affected, you may see changes in your ad metrics as audiences are potentially taken away from your targeting.

Read more here.

Instagram introduces the ability to limit comments and DMs from accounts that don’t follow you

Instagram is introducing Limits, a feature that will automatically hide comments and DM requests from users who don’t follow you (or your brand) or who only recently followed you, the Facebook-owned company announced yesterday.

“Our research shows that a lot of negativity towards public figures comes from people who don’t actually follow them, or who have only recently followed them, and who simply pile on in the moment,” the company said in the announcement, “We saw this after the recent Euro 2020 final, which resulted in a significant and unacceptable spike in racist abuse towards players. Creators also tell us they don’t want to switch off comments and messages completely; they still want to hear from their community and build those relationships.” Limits is now available to all users globally.

Why we care. Over the past few years, but especially since last year, brand safety has been a major concern for many businesses. Limits can help brands on Instagram stem the flurry of comments that may come in response to their stance on polarizing topics (like mask mandates, for example). It can also prevent them from alienating their longtime followers on the platform since those users will still be able to comment or send DMs.

Behind the scenes of Google Trends, standing out from the rest of the pack and your suggestions for custom columns in Google Ads

The Google Trends origin story. As I noted in the intro, Google Trends is now 15 years old, and in recognition of that milestone, the company has published an interview with Yossi Matias, VP of engineering and research, who led the team that launched Trends all those years ago. Matias shares where the idea for Trends came from, how the tool has changed and what working on Trends in 2020 was like. 

Dare to be less same. This week’s Marketoon is all about standing out in a “sea of sameness.” Even slight — and sometimes, arbitrary — distinctions can make all the difference, just look at Fiji Water’s bottles.

What custom columns would you like to see in Google Ads? Google’s Ads Product Liaison Ginny Marvin is looking for your suggestions.

On behalf of third-party sellers, Amazon will pay up to $1,000 for property damage and personal injury claims

Amazon is expanding its A-to-z Guarantee to facilitate the resolution of personal injury and property damage claims between customers, merchants and their insurance providers. This program, which will begin on September 1, includes payments of up to $1,000 per claim (that covers about 80% of cases, according to the ecommerce platform).

The resolution program is offered at no cost to sellers and Amazon may step in to pay claims for higher amounts if the seller is unresponsive or rejects a claim that the platform believes to be valid. If the seller doesn’t respond to a claim, Amazon may decide to pursue the seller separately. If a seller rejects a claim that Amazon believes is valid, Amazon may still intervene to address the customer’s concern, but the seller will still have the opportunity to defend their product against the claim.

“Wow, so magnanimous of you, Amazon!” is what some may be thinking. But, in 2019, a panel of Pennsylvania judges decided that Amazon is liable for personal injury resulting from goods bought on its platform — even goods sold by third parties. This new program may help Amazon get out ahead of potential lawsuits by resolving claims before customers lawyer up.

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Good morning, Marketers, over the past week I’ve been monitoring some usual and unusual activity in the organic Google search results.

This past weekend, we had a typical unconfirmed Google search ranking update. It is unclear if this is still part of the link spam update rollout or if this is something new. One thing for sure is that there are multiple signals pointing to an update.  We hope you did well with this one.

More on the unusual side, we’ve seen numerous reports both documented publicly and then some behind the scenes, of Google having new indexing issues. Authoritative sites are noticing both new and old pages dropping in and out of Google’s index over the last few days. It is weird, as the pages drop out, return, drop out again, return again, etc.

Google has not confirmed any of these reports but it is something you may want to be aware of.

Barry Schwartz,
Speculative Google organic search reporter

Attribution models now support YouTube and Google Display ads

Google Ads has upgraded all Google Ads non-last click models, including data-driven attribution, to support YouTube and Display ads. In addition to clicks, the data-driven attribution model also measures engaged views from YouTube. With these upgrades, the data-driven attribution model now learns even more from how users interact with your ads and convert. When used along with automated bidding strategies or updates to your manual bidding, data-driven attribution helps to drive additional conversions at the same CPA compared to last click. 

Why we care. Attribution is a common issue for search marketers and continues to be muddied as more of the web focuses on privacy. The ability to model your attribution journeys through YouTube and Display will help marketers determine which channels to invest in and which channels could use a different strategy. Note the changes that will happen in your Campaigns if you make these changes, though.

Read more here.

Google structured data testing tool landing page is now an informational page

Google has officially replaced its structured data testing tool with a new navigational landing page to direct you to either Google’s rich results test tool or the Schema.org schema markup validator tool.

Above is a screenshot of the revised page, as you can see, it aims to direct you to the right tool for the right purpose.

Why we care. You can now use Schema.org to test generic structured data or Google’s rich results tool to test Google supported structured data. Of course, Google Search Console has tons of reporting for your structured data as well.

Read more here.

Google updates article structured data author URL helps docs

Google updated the article structured data help document to add new author properties to the list of recommended properties you can use in Google Search. Google said the company added a new recommended author.url property to the article structured data documentation. The author.url property is a new recommended property you can add to your article structured markup that is essentially a link to a web page that uniquely identifies the author of the article. This link can be to the author’s social media page, an about me page, or a biography page or some other page that helps identify this author.

Why we care. If your site publishes articles, it might benefit you to add these new property to your article structured data. Who knows if Google will use it more broadly than just in the author knowledge panels, and use it to try to understand the expertise of a specific author across multiple sites. Maybe, just maybe, that can help your site rank better in the long term. That is assuming SEOs spammers do not manipulate it and post fact author markup for their stories.

Read more here.

International ads updates, GMB enforcement and Google Ads editor is live

Google Ads policy updates. Google Ads made a few policy updates including a political content policy update on Ontario, a gambling policy update in India, and a financial services verification requirement in the UK.

Google My Business address enforcement. Google is enforcing for some businesses that they have a real physical address, if they deem the business as a business that should have a physical location. This is to prevent some Google Maps spam.

Google Ads Editor 1.7 live. As you know, we reported on Google released Ads Editor 1.7, but that announcement was premature, it is now officially live – so have at it.

We’ve curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader.

• A performance-focused workflow based on Google tools – Web Dev
• Google Search Console Insights behind the curtains – Google
• Google Search Letting Big Brand News Sites Rank Above Smaller Specialized Publishers – Search Engine Roundtable
• How to Increase Your Quality Score’s Ad Relevancy Factor – Adalysis
• What is the Google Deal Results Page? [And Why It’s Valuable for Brands in Q4] – Tinuiti

The post Google rankings fluctuation, pages are dropping and reappearing in the index; Wednesday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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, here’s a fun (and perhaps creepy) idea that my friends had over the weekend.

I was explaining Google’s FLoC proposal, as one traditionally does over board games with friends. Then, one friend said, “I’d be interested in meeting the other people in my cohort.” “What about a FLoC-based dating service?” another friend chimed in.

Since FLoC groups users with similar browsing behavior into cohorts, it stands to reason that you might share a lot of interests with others in your cohort. That could be a nice way to make friends, meet people in your industry or even establish a support network for those who are looking for support. On the other hand, it might be another echo chamber that insulates us from interacting with people of different lifestyles, viewpoints and backgrounds (although fresh cohorts are assigned on a weekly basis).

It’s highly unlikely Google would ever pivot its ad tech to play some sort of social matchmaker, but it’s fun to think of new ways existing technology can be expanded. I’d want to try it out for two reasons: 1) to see whether the cohorts are actually an accurate way to group audiences, and 2) I want to see where the commonalities end (i.e., do we also share personality traits or does it end with browsing behavior?). 

George Nguyen,
Editor

How to maintain organic performance when merging multiple websites

When performing a site migration or merger, creating a sitemap that draws on the strengths of the existing websites can help give your new brand the initial visibility it needs to succeed. To help marketers make the most out of this opportunity, Tom Crewe, head of SEO at UK-based digital marketing agency Adido, advised that SEOs prioritize the following:

• Traffic drivers. Pages that drive relevant traffic are going to continue to be important, but even if the high traffic pages are slightly less relevant (but not completely irrelevant) to the new business’s offering, it might be worth keeping them to help build brand awareness in the early days.
• Convertors. These pages can keep the sales, inquiries, etc., rolling in while the site builds its rankings/visibility up in other areas.
• Ranking pages. Finding pages that rank for valuable keywords, whether they have high search volumes or not (maybe they don’t drive a lot of traffic, but they attract the RIGHT traffic that converts) and whether they have high rankings or not (if a page ranks position 36 for a target keyword, it can be developed and improved to rank better, rather than trying to start completely from scratch) will be an important part of the strategy.
• Pages with backlinks. If you don’t bring across pages that have backlinks, then the new site will be missing out on all of that potential authority-building goodness.
• Priority page supporters. Some pages may appear to have no value as they get no traffic, conversions, rankings or backlinks, but they might be the supporting architecture helping to hold up the rankings of other pages.
• New business offering/priorities. The sitemap needs to look to the future, not just to the past, so any new offerings or priorities for the newly formed business will need to be considered within the sitemap, and pages will need to be built out within the proposed architecture to cater for these new offerings.

Read more here.

Jobs in advertising, PR and related services slowed down in July after a big jump in June

Employment in advertising, PR and related services increased by 1,200 jobs last month (bringing the total figure to 446,400 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics), a relatively small gain after a big jump (4,800 jobs) in June. This follows six months of growth since ad jobs hit a pandemic-period low of 432,100 jobs in January.

Zooming in on just ad agency jobs, which account for about 43% of the figures stated above, domestic agencies added 2,500 jobs in June, up from just 900 in May. Stats for July aren’t available yet because the BLS reports ad agency employment with a one-month lag, but the overall July increase of 1,200 jobs suggests a small gain in ad agency employment last month.

Why we care. “U.S. ad agency employment tends to peak earlier than the overall U.S. job market in the waning days of a business cycle’s economic expansion before a recession,” Bradley Johnson wrote for Ad Age, “On the flip side, agencies generally are cautious about adding employees as the economy recovers, resulting in a lag in staffing growth.” The slowdown in ad job growth could indicate the “waning days” of the current economic expansion, or it could just be that agencies are opting to play it safe. Unfortunately, with so much uncertainty about the Delta variant, we’ll have to wait and see which one it is, if it’s even either of those.

Tag it, cook it, climb it

How to tag all the things in GMB. Clair Carlile has published her process for tagging links, posts and more in GMB. She even included a link to her Google Sheet auto generator.

Concise recipe content that ranks. Dan Shure tweeted some data for a recipe that has only two sentences of content, but boasts an avg. position of 4.9 and over 700,000 lifetime visits. Checkout the replies for some fascinating discussions as well.

SEO at the Olympics? No, not really. Seo is actually a very common Korean surname. Now, you know!

Some Amazon sellers are pressuring customers to revise or delete negative reviews

“Product doesn’t work and company will bother you till you change review.” “Seller offers $20-$30 to delete negative reviews.” These are two of the Amazon reviews Nicole Nguyen came across during her investigation for the Wall Street Journal. In the course of her research, Nguyen discovered a number of sellers that have broken with Amazon’s policies to reach out to customers, sometimes offering them more than they paid for the product to revise or erase their negative reviews.

The idea here is to appease disgruntled customers and boost the overall star rating, which can bolster sales velocity. The thing is, sellers whose fulfilment is handled by Amazon aren’t supposed to contact customers outside of Amazon’s official channel — it’s actually a violation of the terms of service.

So, how are they obtaining customers’ contact information? One way is via third-party email extraction services available for Amazon sellers (which are also in violation of Amazon’s policies).

“No matter the method a seller or brand might use to obtain customers’ information, the result is the same,” Nguyen wrote, “It’s hard to trust the authenticity of reviews, and you might be less inclined to leave your own negative review of a product, out of fear of seller retaliation.” Not only does this impact consumer trust, it also hurts merchants that are playing by the rules.

And, as a quick plug, I’ve written a guide to Amazon’s A9 product ranking algorithm. Check it out to learn how reviews, sales velocity and keywords factor into product rankings.

The post Hear me out: FLoC, but as a matchmaking service; Tuesday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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 trying to work from a coworking space this week.

It’s strange, to say the least. Everyone is social-distancing… together? As an introvert, it can definitely feel like a lot sometimes, but I’m making it work, designers. When I was chatting with Barry Schwartz about it, he brought up that it’s a lot like shared hosting. I guess I’m the website in this analogy.

I’ve seen a few articles about the pros and cons of shared hosting, and they are confusing if you’re not an expert. Is it bad for SEO? Can it affect your site resources? Yes and no and yes and no. A top-ranking Forbes article says, “The downside is that the resources available will be limited and could even be affected by the actions of others on the same server. For example, if one user on the server gets a virus, it can put everyone else at risk.”

The featured snippet when I ask “Is shared hosting bad for SEO?” tells me: “The choice of a web hosting provider or a web hosting plan does not affect the SEO of a website, if all other things are equal and adheres to Google webmaster quality guidelines.” But then goes on to say, “It is indeed a fact that most low quality spammy websites use shared hosting for hosting most of their sites.”

So what’s a business or SEO newbie to do? Follow John Mueller’s advice from last year and “Host where it makes sense for you.”

Carolyn Lyden,
Director of Search Content

Sorry. The Google Ads search term disclosure was a glitch

Big womp. “Back in September 2020, Google announced it would show less search term data in the Google Ads Search Terms report. As you can imagine, the advertising community was not happy. But something changed yesterday and all the search term data is now showing in that report,” wrote Barry Schwartz for SERoundtable.

Many PPCers responded on Twitter hoping it was here to stay: “Please be feature … please be feature … please be feature … please be feature … please be feature …” tweet-begged CypressNorth’s Greg Finn. But later yesterday Barry confirmed that it seems to be a bug as it just … stopped working for advertisers. We hope you were able to download your search term reports before the glitch was fixed.

Update. Google Ads product liaison Ginny Marvin tweeted that the search terms glitch may become a feature. Yay!

Yelp introduces “Proof of vaccination required” and “Staff fully vaccinated” profile attributes

Yelp is introducing two new COVID-related profile attributes, the “Proof of vaccination required” and “Staff fully vaccinated” attributes, the company announced Thursday. Users will be able to filter searches using these attributes and the “Proof of vaccination required” attribute will be visible in search results.

Why we care. Given the rapid spread of COVID’s Delta variant, these attributes may help customers feel safer when visiting a local business. Yelp’s “additional safety measures” may also help to curb any potential blowback from bad actors seeking to leave reviews based on their stance about COVID vaccines as opposed to their firsthand experiences with the business.

Read more here.

Google drops safe browsing as a page experience ranking signal

Google is removing the safe browsing signal from the Google page experience update, the company announced. “We recognize that these issues aren’t always within the control of site owners, which is why we’re clarifying that Safe Browsing isn’t used as a ranking signal and won’t feature in the Page Experience report,” the company said.

Why we care. This is one less ranking signal and factor you need to worry about when it comes to your performance in Google Search. Of course, you don’t want to provide an unsafe browsing experience for your users, but you can still learn about those in Search Console, but it won’t count against you in your rankings.

Read more here.

Search Shorts: Trends in PPC, salary negotiations, and start your GA4 account now

Key trends in PPC, reporting and analytics. Consumers are more online than ever before. Ecommerce sales jumped $174.87 billion from 2019 to 2020, and there’s still an indication that trends begat by COVID won’t go away anytime soon and may even become our “new normal.” For PPC marketers, that means a focus on the following five trends.

Ready to switch jobs or move up in your career? Don’t forget to negotiate your salary. It’s a job-seeker’s market in SEO and PPC right now. Salary negotiation gives you the chance to ensure you’re paid what you’re worth. Check out these 6 salary negotiation tips from yours truly.

Not ready for the switch to GA4? Well, at least get your account started ASAP. Make sure you’re running Universal and Google Analytics 4 concurrently because “Data will not transfer to GA4 from Universal Analytics” Julie Bacchini reminds us on Twitter.

What We’re Reading: Trying to get shadow banned —  for science

“Shadow banning is the first thing every social media marketer’s mind goes to when they experience sudden drops in engagement or reach,” wrote Stacey McLachlan for Hootsuite. 

However, Instagram’s CEO says shadow banning isn’t actually a thing: “If someone follows you on Instagram, your photos and videos can show up in their feed if they keep using their feed. Being in [Instagram’s Explore page] is not guaranteed for anyone. Sometimes you’ll get lucky, sometimes you won’t.”

To test her “how to get shadow banned” experiment, McLachlan decided to act like a bot. She said the most SMMs believe that there are three main ways to get banned:

1. Using too many hashtags
2. Using irrelevant hashtags
3. Writing generic comments on a bunch of other people’s posts

So she hopped to it. Posting pictures that would normally get engagement with WAY too many hashtags, spam-commenting things like “Nice post” to random accounts on the Explore page, and posting stock photos of her city to her feed.

Did it work? In short, no. She couldn’t get shadow banned. The experiment actually got her account a ton of comments and support, which may be why. McLachlan’s engagement did dip during the shadow ban attempt — going from 17% to just above 9%. But her reach remained the same. “I wouldn’t say I’ve been ‘shadow banned’ so much as I’ve been ‘correctly noted as being a liar,’” she wrote.

Is shadow banning real? Or is Instagram just good at determining what users want when they search for hashtags and content on the platform? Or are the two one and the same?

The post If you saw expanded search terms in Google Ads, it was a glitch; Friday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.