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 how do you use cross-organizational data?

Sharing data between SEO and PPC has probably been one of the easier silos for search marketers to break. It’s pretty simple to go check how your paid search advertising is going and use that data to improve your SEO (check out how Lily Ray did it here). And PPC experts can do the same of SEO data.

But one thing I rarely hear search marketers talk about is data-sharing across the organization. Once a company I worked with told me about how they used their call recordings to improve their SEO and PPC. Not only were they adding in the FAQs to their site that came in over calls, but they figured out where their “leak” in the funnel was.

The company was driving a ton of traffic, but none of it was converting. Not understanding why, they went to their call recordings and quickly found that… no one was answering the phone at certain locations! It’s easy to think that maybe we should tweak a top-of-funnel campaign when the bottom-of-funnel numbers are suffering — but sharing data might show that there’s a step missing in between.

Carolyn Lyden,
Director of Search Content

Four tools to check for title changes in the SERPs

On August 24, Google confirmed that it changed how it creates titles for search result listings. Unfortunately, title change information isn’t available in Google Search Console or Google Analytics. So, SEOs have turned to third-party tools to see whether their titles are being changed. Below is a list of tools you can use to check for title changes and instructions on how to do so.

• Ahrefs: Viewing title changes in Ahrefs is a manual process. You can check for changes via historical SERPs in Site Explorer > Organic Keywords 2.0. Simply toggle the date field to view the SERPs for that particular day.
• Rank Ranger: The SEO Monitor tool in Rank Ranger charts rankings over time. Below the chart is a list of all the changes to the page title and description in Google Search. This means if you or Google make any changes to your title or description, it’ll be displayed here with the date that the change occurred.
• Semrush: Like Ahrefs, Semrush also offers a manual process to check for title changes. For keywords you’ve been tracking in the Position Tracking tool, click on the SERP icon next to the keyword. That will pull the search results page for the date selected in the report. If you suspect a title was changed, you can confirm this by changing the date in the report and repeating this process to compare titles.
• SISTRIX: In the left-hand navigation, under SERPs > SERP-Snippets, select “Show title changes.” There, in the “Title” column, you can view title changes. The red text indicates words that have been dropped from the title and the green text indicates words that have been added.

Read more here.

ICYMI: Google’s payment to Apple to be the default search engine just keeps going up

Search choice has been a topic of controversy over the past year:

• DuckDuckGo has other ideas for Google’s EU search choice screen
• Google drops the auction from its search choice screen
• Google’s search choice screen had virtually no effect on search market share, perhaps by design

So we’re not surprised to see news about Google paying billions to beat out Bing as the search engine default on Safari.

Google pays $15 billion to be Apple’s default search engine. Google paying Apple to be its default search engine on Safari is also nothing new. In 2018, Google paid Apple $9 billion to be the go-to place that users can find what they need on iPhones, iPads, and Macs. That price has only increased year-over-year, with the latest report. “The amount is likely to increase to about $20 billion in 2022. Those estimates are based on patterns found in the latest available financial documents from both companies,” wrote Florence Ion for Gizmodo.

The most interesting part is many analysts see this as a fee to essentially prevent Bing from being the default search engine. Jane Horvath, Apple’s senior director of global privacy, told the Computers, Privacy and Data Protection conference (CPDP) that Safari defaults to Google because it’s the most popular search engine, but that users still have the ability to change to the search engine of their choice: “We do support Google but we also have built-in support for DuckDuckGo, and we recently also rolled out support for Ecosia.”

Why we care. This move has many marketers asking, “So when will Apple launch their own search engine?” The company has been propelled mostly by hardware, and this deal with ever-increasing payments from Google is one of its moves toward improving its services options. But perhaps the deal with Google is more lucrative than the potential of having to compete with the biggest player in the marketplace for some advertising dollars.

How Google and Yelp handle fake reviews and policy violations: A side-by-side analysis of each 

Both Google and Yelp have implemented automated systems as their first line of defense against fake reviews and bad actors. And, they both use human moderators for tasks that the technology isn’t suitable for. However, their respective policies, approaches and punitive measures (a few of which are outlined below), which inform the deployment of their technology and human staff, are the most important distinctions to keep in mind as you establish your online presence. 

• Both platforms can remove illegitimate reviews: On Yelp, every user-submitted report is escalated to its human moderators. Google embraces a preventative, machine learning-first approach, but experts have said that “the success rate is very tiny” when it comes to getting Google to remove fake reviews once they’re live.
• Yelp applies ranking penalties; Google declined to comment: When a business violates one of its policies, Yelp may apply a ranking penalty.
• Yelp may remove business listings; Google may revoke profile ownership: Violators may be removed from Yelp’s platform. Google stopped shy of outright removal, instead it may revoke profile ownership.
• Violators can still advertise on Google, but not on Yelp: Businesses are banned from advertising with Yelp for at least one year if they receive a Compensated Activity Alert or a Suspicious Review Activity Alert (including if Yelp finds evidence that they participated in a review ring). Google has no specific ad penalties related to GMB violations.
• Yelp continues to monitor listings; Google doesn’t seem to: While Google didn’t disclose any details, Yelp went on record, stating that it has a system that monitors for repeated violations.

Read more here.

Shorts: Some questions and maybe some answers

Want to know if Google’s changed your title tags? This bookmarklet checks if the title tag in SERPs matches the one you set on your site.

Could Google’s “Privacy Budget” break the internet? That’s what Kate Kaye asked on Digiday yesterday about Google’s attempt to prevent fingerprinting. 

Would advertisers (and users) switch to a different search engine? If so, here are some non-Google options from contributor John Smith.

What We’re Reading: Despite women’s progress in many parts of society, advertisements still consistently cast women as secondary

“Between 1980 and 2010, women in commercials were shown in workplace settings only 4 percent of the time; frequently they were shown in kitchens, waxing poetic about the products they were selling,” wrote Mara Altman for the NYT. Surely, marketing and advertising have come a long way since then, right? … right?

Sadly, research from Jane Cunningham and Philippa Roberts shows that it really hasn’t, and they say it has to do mostly with who fills the high-level roles at advertising and marketing agencies. 

“The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media found that ads up for awards at the prestigious Cannes Lions advertising festival depicted male characters working almost twice as often as female characters. Male characters also outnumbered female characters two-to-one and had twice as much screen time and speaking time. Another study conducted by Ebiquity, a media consultancy, found that, of the ads aired in 2016, only 4 percent showed women in leadership positions,” said Altman.

The issue is that marketing isn’t just reflecting what’s happening in real life, but it’s affecting women’s real life, too. “There is a really big body of work around the impact of marketing and just how powerful it is — young women are consuming something like 10,000 messages a day from brands. Think about the collective impact that can have when the same things are being said over and over again, which are usually: Be thinner, be blonder, be more feminine, be hairless, be whiter,” said Cunningham in the interview.

So how can women improve these marketing messages? “The way that women can influence marketing is spending with the brands that are doing the right thing by women and refusing to buy from brands that are very evidently trying to keep women in their place, and/or the place they think women should be,” said Cunningham.

The post Cleaning house: how Google and Yelp handle fake reviews; Tuesday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google’s recent change in algorithms that choose which titles show up in SERPs has caused quite a stir in the SEO community. You’ve all probably seen the tweets and blogs and help forum replies, so I won’t rehash them all here. But the gist is that a few people could not care less and lots of people are upset with the changes.

It’s something our PPC counterparts have experienced for a while now — Google doing some version of automation overreach — taking away more of their controls and the data behind what’s working and what’s not. We’ve all adapted to (not provided) and we continue to adapt, so I’m sure this will be no different, but the principle is what’s catching a lot of SEOs off guard. 

What’s going on?

Google has essentially said that SEOs (or those attempting SEO) have not always used page titles how they should be for a while (since 2012). “Title tags can sometimes be very long or ‘stuffed’ with keywords because creators mistakenly think adding a bunch of words will increase the chances that a page will rank better,” according to the Search Central blog. Or, in the opposite case, the title tag hasn’t been optimized at all: “Home pages might simply be called ‘Home’. In other cases, all pages in a site might be called ‘Untitled’ or simply have the name of the site.” And so the change is “designed to produce more readable and accessible titles for pages.”

Presumptuousness aside, someone rightfully pointed out that content writers in highly regulated industries often have to go through legal and multiple approvals processes before content goes live. This process can include days, weeks, months of nitpicking over single words in titles and headers. Only for Google’s algorithm to decide that it can do whatever it wants. Google’s representative pointed out that these companies cannot be liable for content on a third-party site (Google’s). It’s not a one-to-one comparison, but the same industries often have to do the same tedious approvals process for ad copy (which is why DSAs are often a no-no in these niches) to cover their bases for the content that shows up solely in Google’s search results.

When I work with SEO clients, I often tell them that instead of focusing on Google’s goals (which many get caught up in), we need to be focusing on our customers’ goals. (You can check out my SMX Advanced keynote, which is essentially all about this — or read the high points here.) Google says it’s moving toward this automation to improve the searchers’ experience. But I think it’s important to note that Google is not improving the user experience because it’s some benevolent overlord that loves searchers. It’s doing it to keep searchers using Google and clicking ads. 

Either way, the message seems to be “Google knows best” when it comes to automating SERPs. In theory, Google has amassed tons of data across probably millions of searches to train their models on what searchers want when they type something into the search engine. However, as the pandemonium across the SEO community indicates, this isn’t always the case in practice.

Google’s history of half-baked ideas

Google has a history of shipping half-baked concepts and ideas. It might be part of the startup culture that fuels many tech companies: move fast, break things. These organizations ship a minimum viable product and iterate and improve while the technology is live. We’ve seen it before with multiple projects that Google has launched, done a mediocre job of promoting, and then gotten rid of when no one liked or used it.

I wrote about this a while back when they first launched GMB messaging. Their initial implementation was an example of poor UX and poorly thought out use cases. While GMB messaging may still be around, most SMBs and local businesses I know don’t use it because it’s a hassle and could also be a regulatory compliance issue for them.

The irony is not lost on us that Danny Sullivan thought it was an overstep on Google’s part when it affected a small business in 2013. The idea would be that the technology would hopefully evolve, right? Google’s SERP titles should be more intuitive not word salads pulled from random parts of a page.

This title tag system change seems to be another one of those that maybe worked fine in a lab, but is not performing well in the wild. The intention was to help searchers better understand what a page or site is about from the title, but many examples we’ve seen have shown the exact opposite. 

Google and its advocates continue to claim that this is “not new” (does anyone else hear this phrase in Iago’s voice from Aladdin?), and they’re technically correct. The representatives and Google stans reiterate that the company never said they’d use the title tags you wrote, which given the scope of how terrible this first iteration is showing up to be in SERPs, almost seems like a bully’s playground taunt to a kid who’s already down. 

Google is saying they’re making this large, sweeping change in titles because most people don’t know how to correctly indicate what a page is about. But SEOs are often skilled in doing extensive keyword and user research, so it seems like of all pages that should NOT be rewritten, it’s the ones we carefully investigated, planned, and optimized.

How far is too far?

I’m one of those people who doesn’t like it, but is often resigned to the whims of the half-baked stunts that Google does because, really, what choice do I have? Google owns their own SERP, but we, as SEOs, feel entitled to it because it’s our work being put up for aggregation. It’s like a group project where you do all the work, and the one person who sweeps in last minute to present to the class mucks it all up. YOU HAD ONE JOB! So while we can analyze the data and trends, we also need to make our feedback known.

SEOs’ relationship with Google has always been chicken and egg to me. The search engine would not exist if we didn’t willingly offer our content to it for indexing and retrieval (not to mention the participation of our PPC counterparts), and we wouldn’t be able to drive such traffic to our businesses without Google including our content in the search engine.

Why do marketers have such a contentious relationship with Google? To put it frankly, Google does what’s best for Google, and often that does not align with what’s best for search marketers. But we have to ask ourselves where is the line between content aggregator and content creator? I’m not saying that the individuals or teams at Google are inherently evil or even have bad intentions. They actually likely have the best aspirations for their products and services. But the momentum of the company as a whole feels perpetual at this point, which can feel like we practitioners have no input in matters.

We’ve seen Google slowly take over the SERP with their own properties or features that don’t need a click-through — YouTube, rich snippets, carousels, etc. While I don’t think Google will ever “rewrite” anything on our actual websites, changes like this make search marketers wonder what is the next step? And which of our critical KPIs will potentially fall victim to the search engine’s next big test?

When I interviewed for this position at Search Engine Land, someone asked me about my position on Google (I guess to determine if I was biased one way or another). I’m an SEO first and a journalist second, so my answer was essentially that Google exists because marketers make it so. 

To me, the situation is that Google has grown up beyond its original roots as a search engine and has evolved into a tech company and an advertising giant. It’s left the search marketers behind and is focused on itself, its revenues, its bottom line. And that’s what businesses are wont to do when they get to that size. The power dynamic is heavily weighted to Google’s side, and they know it. But the key is to remember that we’re not completely powerless in this relationship. Google’s search engine, as a business, relies on us (in both SEO and PPC) participating in its business model.

The post Search marketers should remember their power in the Google-SEO relationship appeared first on Search Engine Land.

SMX Next returns virtually on November 9-10, 2021 focusing on forward-thinking search marketing.

AI and machine learning have already become part of both paid and organic search performance. Commerce platforms are just as powerful as the traditional search engines for driving sales. And new ways to deliver content across search and social platforms are giving creative marketers more options for driving engagement.

SMX Next will explore next-generation strategies, equipping attendees with emerging SEO and PPC tactics as well as expert insights on the future of the search marketing profession.

Whether you’ve been speaking for years or are just dipping your toes into speaking, please consider submitting a session pitch. We are always looking for new speakers with diverse points of view.

The deadline for SMX Next pitches is September 24th!

Here are a few tips for submitting a compelling session proposal:

• Present an original idea and/or unique session format.
• Include details about what an attendees will be able to do better or different as a result of attending your session.
• Include a case study or specific examples and explain how they can be applied in different types of organizations.
• Be realistic about what you can present in the time allotted. You can’t cover everything about your topic. Going more in-depth on a narrow topic is often more valuable to the attendee.
• Provide tangible takeaways and a plan of action.

Jump over to this page for more details on how to submit a session idea, or directly to this page to create your profile and submit a session pitch.

If you have questions, feel free to reach out to me directly at kbushman@thirddoormedia.com. I’m looking forward to reading your proposals!

The post Calling all future-focused search marketers, submit a pitch for SMX Next! appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google has completed the rollout of the link spam update it started just over four weeks ago. “The link spam update is now complete,” Danny Sullivan said via the Google Search Liaison account.

What took so long. Google originally said this update would “roll out across the next two weeks.” But as you can see, it took an additional two weeks to complete – a total of four weeks. Why did it take so long? Google did not say, but I suspect things got stuck a bit and the rollout hit some unexpected snags.

The original announcement. “In our continued efforts to improve the quality of the search results, we’re launching a new link spam-fighting change today — which we call the ‘link spam update.’ This algorithm update, which will roll out across the next two weeks, is even more effective at identifying and nullifying link spam more broadly, across multiple languages. Sites taking part in link spam will see changes in Search as those links are re-assessed by our algorithms,” Google wrote.

Nullifying link spam. You can see the word Google used here was “nullifying,” which does not necessarily mean “penalize,” but instead, to ignore or simply not count. Google’s efforts around link spam have been to ignore and not count spammy links since Penguin 4.0 was released in 2016.

Why we care. This might be a hard one to pinpoint for you or your clients since it took a month to fully roll out. But if you see any changes to your rankings, maybe in a big way, over the last month, it might be related to this new link spam update. Make sure your links are natural and in accordance with Google’s webmaster guidelines. Work on improving your site, so it can naturally attract new links over time.

As Google wrote, “Site owners should make sure that they are following the best practices on links, both incoming and outgoing. Focusing on producing high-quality content and improving user experience always wins out compared to manipulating links. Promote awareness of your site using appropriately tagged links, and monetize it with properly tagged affiliate links.”

The post Google link spam update done rolling out appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Messy SEO is a column covering the nitty-gritty, unpolished tasks involved in the auditing, planning, and optimization of websites, using MarTech’s new domain as a case study.

Walking into any new SEO project presents marketing strategists with unique challenges. Different website properties need solutions tailored to their specific issues. And with so many things to consider—branding, business goals, site setup, etc.—your project requires particular deliberation.

Search professionals have found themselves cleaning up issues following site consolidation migrations. This is the exact situation I walked into for the MarTech brand. 

It was nothing short of what I call an “SEO mess,” or a collection of issues affecting search visibility in need of intricate solutions.

I recently joined the Third Door Media team to help clean up these issues arising from the consolidation of Marketing Land and MarTech Today. The new site needed someone to jump into the thick of things and chart a path forward. Here’s how the process unfolded:

Issues arising from site consolidation

Many organizations find their sites in need of heavy-duty clean-up after consolidation. But, unfortunately, they don’t always have time to undergo continual optimization and maintenance. 

In MarTech’s case, the issues arose from a necessary business decision for the brand. 

Rather than continuing to split their audience between the brands Marketing Land and MarTech Today, we chose to lean into MarTech. Using our resources to help marketers find their place in the new marketing landscape made sense.

Yet, significant website changes often come with significant issues, no matter how necessary the work. And there’s no one magic strategy to fix the mess. Instead, this situation requires a multifaceted, nitty-gritty solution.

The messy side of SEO

Before the site consolidation, the team took the content published on one platform and repurposed it for the other. For example, MarTech Today produced content for professionals researching marketing technology and automation, while Marketing Land focused on a broader marketing audience. Each would tailor their content pieces to their market, making slight changes where applicable.

The expected duplicate content issues arose following the consolidation, and the required fixes were far from a one-time fix.

The new site now has at least two versions of over 1,000 articles. What’s more, their copy is close enough to target the same topic and keywords. To solve this issue, we put together redirects from the content on Marketing Land to its counterpart on MarTech Today. Most of these contained the “-2” in their URL that WordPress adds to duplicate slugs.

The redirects were a needed short-term solution to prevent user experience and duplicate content issues. But with the new site being as large as it is, not all the redirects were set up, leaving many near-identical pieces waiting to be indexed.

Many other problems were also affecting the site, including many relevant non-indexed pages, broken links, mixed content, and site speed problems. However, we decided to tackle the duplicate pages first because they related to our site’s primary offering; marketing strategy, news, and insights. Fixing the problems affecting content visibility and quality is thus the priority.

Considerations and solutions 

Working on these crucial issues after a site migration and consolidation isn’t glamorous by any means. However, when engaging with any messy optimization project, you need to ensure your expectations align with the likely outcomes. 

The fact is, you won’t see the results of your efforts for some time. And that’s OK.

Google and other search engines need time to analyze the site for these changes, and we want them to be thorough. Fortunately, setting up the redirects directs visitors to the correct pages immediately, preventing UX problems until the consolidated pages are indexed and ranked.

Redirecting our focus

Because the content on each duplicate page in question is targeted toward separate audiences, there are a few factors to consider to determine what will appear on the consolidated page. These include the following:

1. How is the page performing?
2. How are people interacting with the page?
3. Which content is best suited for the target audience?

Using data available from Google Search Console and Analytics, I reviewed clicks, impressions, average page views and time spent on them, and a whole host of other valuable data. This data helped me answer considerations #1 and #2.

But, since the site has only been live since May, more data was required to determine which content aligned with MarTech’s audience interests.

Speaking with our talented writers and reviewing keyword data helped me determine which pieces of duplicated content were best suited for MarTech’s audience. It allowed me to begin the process of placing the best content on our new consolidated pages. And by redirecting the duplicated URLs, I’m able to point people and search engines to the most appropriate destination.

Wrapping up

That’s it for this first installment of “Messy SEO.” Next, we’ll continue to go through the steps taken toward cleaning up the mess post-site consolidation. 

Have you worked on a site consolidation project for your business or clients? What tactics and tools did you use? Email me at cpatterson@thirddoormedia with the subject line Messy SEO Part 1 to let me know.

The post Messy SEO Part 1: Navigating a site consolidation migration appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google has updated the How Google Search Works website portal today and with that informed us that the search company made 4,500 “improvements” to search in 2020. “There have been 4,500 such improvements in 2020 alone,” the company said.

4,500 changes. Google said in the year 2020, Google made 4,500 updates to Google Search. These changes can be ranking changes, user interface changes and much more. By comparison, in 2019, Google made 3,200 changes to Google Search. Looking further back, in 2010, we covered that Google had about one change per day. Google said in 2019 it made about 350-400 changes in 2009.

Clearly, Google has expedited those changes over the years and is increasing the rate at which it updates Google Search.

Updated How Search Works site. Google also launched a “fully-redesigned How Search Works website that explains the ins and outs of Search.”

In 2013, Google first launched its How Search Works site with an explanatory infographic. The site has some pretty cool features, including showing examples of pages Google took down because of spam. Google took down that spam feature and relaunched the portal in 2016 with more details on how normal people want to know how Google Search Works.

Google said in the 2021 version it has “updated the site with fresh information, made it easier to navigate and bookmark sections and added links to additional resources that share how Search works and answer common questions.” “The website gives you a window into what happens from the moment you start typing in the search bar to the moment you get your search results. It gives an overview of the technology and work that goes into organizing the world’s information, understanding what you’re looking for and then connecting you with the most relevant, helpful information,” Google added.

Check it out at google.com/search/howsearchworks

Why we care. It is nice to see Google document how many changes it makes from year to year in Google Search. It is also good for search marketers to review how Google Search works and do a deep dive into the language Google uses to describe how the search engine functions. Dig into the new portal and let us know if you find anything exciting.

The post Google made 4,500 changes to search in 2020 appeared first on Search Engine Land.