Archive for the ‘seo news’ Category
Monday, January 23rd, 2023
Expedia buys Travelocity
In 2015, Expedia bought rival Travelocity for $280 million amid sluggish travel industry growth and pressure from insurgent travel providers.
Expedia had actually been powering Travelocity.com since 2013. So the acquisition seemed quite logical from both perspectives.
At the time, Expedia also owned several online travel brands: Hotels.com, Hotwire, eLong and Trivago.
Read all about it in Travel Search Consolidation: Expedia Buys Rival Travelocity For $280M
Also on this day
2022: The free basic subscription was an alternative to its full-featured subscription, which cost $4.95 per month.
2020: There would be no more referral fees from partners in flight search, as Google sought to emphasize price and convenience in rankings.
2020: Google added new features to Google Dataset Search with this rollout.
2020: In this installment of Barry Schwartz’s vlog series, he chatted with Grehan about the early days of search, how technology like AI and machine learning are impacting search and who originally came up with term “search engine optimization.”
2019: The “new-to-brand” set of metrics were also available for Amazon sellers’ display and video ad campaigns.
2018: A federal judge invalidated five patents SEO platform provider BrightEdge claimed in lawsuit against competitor Searchmetrics.
2018: After running its Hotel Ads offering in beta in 2017, Bing Ads rolled them out widely.
2017: You could now read book previews directly on your smartphone from Google search.
2017: The Google Doodle paid tribute to Ed Roberts, co-founder of the World Institute on Disability.
2015: Advertisers using a different currency in AdWords and Analytics would now be able to easily compare cost data in Analytics.
2015: Click share also rose on Bing’s product ads, doubling from Q3.
2015: Pinterest adjusted its Guided Search system to serve results that differed depending on whether the user was female or male.
2015: Local news became available for 12 US cities, including San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Seattle and Boston.
2015: The latest images showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.
2014: There was no way to search for an HTTPS version of a “what is my referrer” site. So Barry Schwartz made one.
2014: The new smartphone user-agent crawler would follow robots.txt, robots meta tag, and HTTP header directives for Googlebot instead of Googlebot-Mobile
2014: MapQuest notified business users that its local business center and basic local listings product would be formally shutting down.
2014: A judge determined patent-holding company Vringo was entitled to additional royalties from Google in a patent infringement case involving Google AdWords.
2013: With the new system made it easier to quickly skim through multiple images, rather than the old system that requires a lot of clicking, then closing windows to go back and select a new image.
2013: Examples of searches that were a mix of comedy and creepiness.
2012: The companies behind the tool felt Google hadn’t focused on what was best for its users with Search Plus Your World.
2012: In the past, Google ignored most punctuation marks and didn’t show any useful results for them.
2012: The Google 2012 mobile revenue “run rate” range was projected to be between $4 billion and $6 billion (globally). In the US the figure would probably be just over half the number.
2012: Some suggestions for how a social-nuclear war between Google, Twitter and Facebook could be averted.
2011: The Wayback Machine was redesigned and relaunched with a nicer user interface and migrated to a new platform as a foundation for further improvements.
2009: “Wouldn’t it be nice if Google understood the meaning of your phrase rather than just the words that are in that phrase? We have a lot of discoveries in that area that are going to roll out in the next little while,” said Google CEO Eric Schmidt
2009: Google’s sites reached 77% of the online population, age 15 and up, in December 2008.
2008: Google appeared to be serious about showing as many as 10 local listings beside the map and phasing this into results around the world.
2008: Google’s Matt Cutts shrugged off discussion about a pattern of websites ranking in Position 1 or 2 falling to Position 6 in Google.
2008: For the second year in a row.
2008: Google had the greatest decline, down 19.5%. Yahoo was just behind at 18.5%, with Microsoft at about 12.5%. The NASDAQ overall was at 15.5%.
2008: The login page for Google Health was live, although the service itself was not.
2008: As part of this launch, Baidu revamped the Japanese home page and added blog search.
2008: Google had labeled some of the regions in South Korea as being part of North Korea.
2008: Multiple groups asked the US Federal Trade Commission to rule on whether Ask was using unfair and deceptive trade practices in marketing its tool.
2008: The head of an EU group looking into search privacy issues said that Internet Protocol addresses assigned to computers should be treated as personal information.
2008: Remix clustering let you click a link to quickly answer the question, “What other, subtler topics are there?”
2007: Google added plus signs next to each RSS title that, if clicked, would open to show a snippet of the summary from the post.
2007: Google removed the cap on the number of sites you could exclude in the Site Exclusion Tool.
2007: Google: “procedures have been put in place to strip login information from future submissions.”
2007: The ads were to be tested for four weeks.
2007: Microsoft said it would donate $1 per search to Team Seattle’s Seattle’s Children’s Hospital fund.
2007: Google was reportedly giving an undisclosed amount to Seedfund, to indirectly invest in technology in India.
2007: The reviews and opinions presented were generally positive but some smaller businesses had problems and frustrations.
2007: It was free, direct-to-consumer, voice-enabled directory assistance.
2007: The fundamentals course went live and provide 15+ tracks.
Past contributions from Search Engine Land’s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
These columns are a snapshot in time and have not been updated since publishing, unless noted. Opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
< January 22 | Search Marketing History | January 24 >
The post This day in search marketing history: January 23 appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Sunday, January 22nd, 2023
Google explains the “core” algorithm
In 2016, Google’s Andrey Lipattsev explained the “core” algorithm.
This happened following the news about Panda becoming part of Google’s core algorithm. SEOs wanted to better understand what being part of Google’s core algorithm meant.
Put simply, it meant that an algorithm is consistent enough that Google doesn’t have to worry about it because it’s been tested, works the way it should, and won’t require many changes in the future. As Lipattsev explained:
It is less about the functionality, which means it probably doesn’t change that much over time, and it is more about how we perceive it, in the context of the algorithm. Do we still think this is an experimental thing, it is running for a while and we aren’t sure how long it will last? Or is it like PageRank, it is part of it, it will always be there, at least in the foreseeable future and then probably call it in certain context part of the core algorithm.
So now when you hear about the latest Google core updates, hopefully you better understand what Google’s core algorithm means.
Read all about it in: Google Explains What It Means To Be Part Of The “Core” Algorithm
Also on this day
2022: The tag let you define if you wanted your content indexed when it was embedded through iframes or other means.
2022: Google added a note to the product structured data help documentation to explain how to specify car markup and still have Product review snippet feature eligibility.
2022: It was a temporary technical issue that affected serving on YouTube inventory.
2020: Site owners needed to convert to the schema.org markup if they wanted their pages to be eligible for Google rich results.
2020: CallRail developed the solution partly as a response to the rise of “zero-click search” and the “cannibalization” of website traffic by GMB.
2016: One of Google’s efforts was to prevent accidental mobile clicks when app developers purposely placed ads too close to application buttons.
2016: Bing deploys multiple updates per day in an effort to constantly improve the search results and features.
2016: Weather-related search results would now include hourly sky conditions, air quality and severe weather alerts.
2015: It was unclear what changes RetailMeNot made to recover from the Google Panda algorithm, but their rankings did bounce back.
2015: Additional copy below each Sitelink extension became available in most markets and languages supported by Bing Ads.
2015: “It’s our strong view that there needs to be some way of limiting the concept, because it is a European concept,” said David Drummond, Google’s Chief Legal Officer.
2014: A round-up of industry reactions, summarizing comments from a selection of popular bloggers.
2014: Expedia appeared to have been hit by a Google penalty related to unnatural links.
2014: Marin expected retailers to allocate roughly a third of their PPC budgets to PLAs.
2014: Pinterest also added an “Indulge Me” button to perform searches for “not so healthy” dessert recipes.
2013: “People no longer have patience for traditional search results … They mostly just want quick (and reliable) answers, which is exactly what Google is increasingly giving them.”
2013: The Doodle was in shades of blue, green and yellow. With Dr. King’s face as one of the “O”s in the Google logo.
2011: How well would the leadership shuffling tackle Google’s many challenges?
2011: The desire to get some of its old startup fire back was one of the driving forces behind Page’s ascension.
2011: Matt Cutts promises a renewed effort to take action against content farms (which he defined as “sites with shallow or low-quality content”).
2011: A redesigned document-level classifier made it harder for on-page spam to impact Google’s search index.
2011: It was arguably the first update in almost 9 months – though Toolbar PageRank was very out of date and didn’t have a direct impact on ranking.
2011: The tool let advertisers see how their ads looked on different devices (iPhone, Android, etc.) on multiple carriers.
2011: The first was making the Google search left-side bar more compact and the second was changing the menu choices in the top menu while in Gmail.
2011: The latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.
2010: Google reported revenues of $6.67 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009, representing a 17% increase over fourth quarter 2008 revenues of $5.70 billion.
2010: This was the second time in about two years that someone with no general stature, reputation or well-known and documented history had tried to claim a trademark on SEO.
2010: Some additional information asserted default search status on the iPhone was a real possibility for Bing.
2010: Google really wasn’t the content vampire that some news publishers accused it of being.
2010: Facebook and Microsoft scaled back their display ad relationship.
2010: The tool helped you search for music and create YouTube playlists based on that query.
2010: Bing pulled the recipes from popular websites and let you filter by holiday, meals, ratings and convenience.
2010: Brin said the people of Haiti were “the real heroes.”
2009: Updates many SEOs and SEMs noticed at Google, Yahoo and Ask.com in the past week.
2009: This was expected to impact around 6,000 to 8,000 employees of its 95,000 workforce.
2009: It was a three-day incentive to encourage participants to do more searches on Live Search.
2009: Google shared some interesting facts and figures about inauguration-related search activity.
2009: NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a partnership with Google to use Google Maps on a new tourism website and information center.
2008: An informal, online reader survey, of two different audiences, on a range of high-level topics pertaining to mobile search yields different results.
2008: Google created the guide to help webmasters learn the features and reasons to use the tool.
2008: The data Google would be hosting would be available for scientists and also for free for anyone.
2008: Perhaps as many as 2,500.
2008: For some users, a search would show whether a page listed in Yahoo results was also on Delicious and how it had been tagged.
2008: The Europeans appeared poised to be more aggressive than their American counterparts in holding Google’s feet to the fire.
2008: Google had an artistic logo, with children drawing the face of Martin Luther King Jr. on a sidewalk.
From Search Marketing Expo (SMX)
Past contributions from Search Engine Land’s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
These columns are a snapshot in time and have not been updated since publishing, unless noted. Opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
< January 20 | Search Marketing History | January 22 >
The post This day in search marketing history: January 21 appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Sunday, January 22nd, 2023
Google deduplicates featured snippets
In 2020, Google rolled out a global change to featured snippets that resulted in any URL only appearing once on the first page of search results, instead of twice.
Google said there would be no change to its overall set of web search results. There would still be 10 unique listings, as before. It’s just that Google would be deduplicating and no longer show any of those listings twice.
Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan announced the news via Twitter:
If a web page listing is elevated into the featured snippet position, we no longer repeat the listing in the search results. This declutters the results & helps users locate relevant information more easily. Featured snippets count as one of the ten web page listings we show.
@dannysullivan
In November, Google was testing removing a site’s normal snippet when a featured snippet was displayed. Google even tested this back in 2017.
Read about it in Listings that earn featured snippets will not repeat on the first page of Google search.
Also on this day
2021: The updated interface aimed to make the search interface easier to read for searchers while providing a cleaner and more modern experience.
2021: The new form asked the business owner, “Why are you reporting this review?” Then it offered multiple options.
2021: “The latest version of the Code requires Google to pay to link to news sites, breaking a fundamental principle of how the web works,” said Mel Silva, Google Australia’s managing director.
2021: The potential for more links to appear in this high-visibility search result feature had SEOs concerned about click-through rates, brand safety and how to optimize for it.
2020: New guidelines were added in several areas, including crawling, structured data, visual content, and best practices.
2020: In this installment of Barry Schwartz’s vlog series, he chats with Sperzel about how he got into technical SEO, site architecture and spider crawling issues, and more.
2019: Improved process would make it easier to set up service areas on GMB.
2019: Defendant firm had falsely represented that it was acting on behalf of Google.
2018: Most users were able to see their properties in the new Search Console beta.
2018: The animated image highlighted the director’s technique for creating montage film effects.
2016: According to court documents and testimony in Oracle’s copyright suit against Google, “Apple received $1 billion from its rival in 2014.”
2016: Including “powered by” search, Google controlled 64.8% of US search query volume, while Bing powered 32.2% of organic search.
2016: The latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more.
2016: The interactive doodle included an animated Scoville, pepper facts and a game pitting an ice-cream cone against different pepper types.
2015: Yahoo won the deal to be the default search engine in Firefox in November; now after losing some search share, Google was fighting back.
2015: Advertisers could see how ads would display with bid increases before committing to new keyword bids.
2015: Days after Yahoo was caught testing a Google search design interface, Bing is also caught testing it.
2015: It combined the company’s high-intent local query data with cross-screen behavior and ad exchange mobile display inventory.
2014: The crawl errors report showed errors on the final URL of the redirect, as opposed to the origin URL of the redirect.
2014: A video answered the question: “Are Facebook and Twitter signals part of the ranking algorithm?” Short answer: no.
2014: The data provided background on the website listed in the search result, and it appeared in a small popup window that’s accessible from a clickable link on the second line of the result.
2014: That meant more protection for searchers but what did the loss of referrer data mean for search marketers?
2014: The options you saw at the top might differ or be in a different order based on the query you entered into Google’s search box.
2014: Display advertising did generate more search volume, clicks and conversions.
2013: A new Panda refresh.
2013: Desktop searches remained level from Q3 2012 to Q4 2012, while mobile experienced an increase in search share.
2013: The cost-per-click across Google’s advertising business increased approximately 2% in the fourth quarter, as compared to the third quarter, after several consecutive quarters of decline.
2013: Since June 2011, Google’s top bar had a black background color with white/gray text overlaid.
2013: You (or others) could tag pages to appear associated with you in Bing’s search results. This would be visible to those who had a Facebook account connected to Bing.
2013: The traditional role played by libraries, including access to print works and professional librarians, was still important to most.
2012: Transit time search was only available in cities where Google had partnered with local transit agencies to integrate their data into Google Maps.
2011: Matt Cutts confirmed that Google had discussed giving searchers the ability to remove domains from its search results.
2010: Cutts answered a question about where he thought Google and search would be in 2010. In another video, he re-created his presentation on the “state of the index.”
2010: Globally, searches grew overall by 46%.
2010: Google added an events hCalendar microformat and started highlighting answers in the snippets.
2010: This was part of a plan to diversify their portfolios over time.
2010: Google also ranked fourth on the list in 2009, after being first in 2007 and 2008.
2010: Ballmer called it an “irrational business decision” on Google’s part.
2010: How to see before and after images, taken by satellite, as well as 360-degree ground-level videos.
2010: Microsoft wanted people to download (or update Sliverlight) so they could use the new and improved Bing Maps.
2010: The latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.
2009: Google reported revenues of $5.70 billion for the quarter ended Dec. 31, 2008, an increase of 18% compared to the fourth quarter of 2007.
2009: For all the effort to put value into real-time search, particularly where Twitter was concerned – Twitter itself may have put an end to those efforts by announcing new limits on its API.
2009: The layoff rumors were true, though the numbers were less than anticipated.
2009: The Google AdWords team has launched a new mini-site to help advertisers reach their goals in light of the current economy.
2009: Job search was the fastest-growing search category in the U.S. in 2008.
2009: President Obama inherited all the links containing anchor text with the words “miserable failure” in them, aimed at former president Bush.
2008:Yahoo had been rolling out updates to their “crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms” over the past couple days.
2008: “Google would exchange its technological know-how for Publicis’s analytical and media planning expertise.”
2008: The fast response was meant for “corporate policy issues.”
2008: A design in Satya Paul’s collection was named “Oogle sari” that looked like a sari
made up of the Google web search results.
2008: The video reportedly drew over 15,000 hits in just two days and apparently embarrassed the couple tremendously.
2007: Yahoo officially confirmed recent speculations of an index update taking place.
2007: Google has quietly removed the information, which included usernames and passwords of individuals, including credentials for accounts at banks and other financial institutions.
2007: This was due to a discussion of a new SEO contest, where editors were warned of an onslaught of spam.
2007: Google would make some of BBC’s content available through Google Video and possibly YouTube.
2007: That time when Google Germany disappeared due to google.de domain registrations shenanigans.
2007: Google was “always considering new ways to extend Google’s advertising program to benefit our users, advertisers and publishers” – including in-game advertising.
2007: They hoped to “allow readers to download entire books to their computers in a format that they could read on screen or on mobile devices such as a Blackberry.”
2007: Google added your sponsored link click activity to Google Search History.
2007: It sought to solve the problem of figuring out where to go and what to do with a group of colleagues or friends.
From Search Marketing Expo (SMX)
Past contributions from Search Engine Land’s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
These columns are a snapshot in time and have not been updated since publishing, unless noted. Opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
< January 21 | Search Marketing History | January 23 >
The post This day in search marketing history: January 22 appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Friday, January 20th, 2023
On Thursday, a diverse group of individuals and organizations defended the liability shield of Big Tech in a crucial Supreme Court case regarding YouTube’s algorithms. This group included businesses, internet users, academics, and human rights experts, with some arguing that removing federal legal protections for AI-driven recommendation engines would have a major impact on the open internet.
Among those weighing in at the Court were major tech companies such as Meta, Twitter, and Microsoft, as well as some of Big Tech’s most vocal critics, including Yelp and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Additionally, Reddit and a group of volunteer Reddit moderators also participated in the case.
What happened. The controversy started with the Supreme Court case Gonzalez v. Google and centers around the question of whether Google can be held liable for recommending pro-ISIS content to users through its YouTube algorithm.
Google has claimed that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects them from such litigation. However, the plaintiffs in the case, the family members of a victim killed in a 2015 ISIS attack in Paris, argue that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm can be held liable under a US anti-terrorism law.
The filing read:
“The entire Reddit platform is built around users ‘recommending’ content for the benefit of others by taking actions like upvoting and pinning content. There should be no mistaking the consequences of the petitioners’ claim in this case: their theory would dramatically expand Internet users’ potential to be sued for their online interactions.”
Yelp steps in. Yelp, a company with a history of conflict with Google, has argued that its business model relies on providing accurate and non-fraudulent reviews to their users. They have also stated that a ruling that holds recommendation algorithms liable could severely impact Yelp’s operations by forcing them to stop sorting through reviews, including those that are fake or manipulative.
Yelp wrote;
“If Yelp could not analyze and recommend reviews without facing liability, those costs of submitting fraudulent reviews would disappear. If Yelp had to display every submitted review … business owners could submit hundreds of positive reviews for their own business with little effort or risk of a penalty.”
Meta’s involvement. Facebook parent Meta has stated in their legal submission that if the Supreme Court were to change the interpretation of Section 230 to protect platforms’ ability to remove content but not to recommend content, it would raise significant questions about the meaning of recommending something online.
Meta representatives stated:
“If merely displaying third-party content in a user’s feed qualifies as ‘recommending’ it, then many services will face potential liability for virtually all the third-party content they host, because nearly all decisions about how to sort, pick, organize, and display third-party content could be construed as ‘recommending’ that content.”
Human rights advocates intervene. New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights has stated that it would be extremely difficult to create a rule that specifically targets algorithmic recommendations for liability, and that it might lead to the suppression or loss of a significant amount of valuable speech, particularly speech from marginalized or minority groups.
Why we care. The outcome of this case could have significant implications for the way that tech companies operate. If the court were to rule that companies can be held liable for the content that their algorithms recommend, it could change the way that companies design and operate their recommendation systems.
This could lead to more careful content curation and a reduction in the amount of content that is recommended to users. Additionally, it could also lead to increased legal costs and uncertainty for these companies.
The post Businesses, users, experts defend big tech against algorithm lawsuits appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Friday, January 20th, 2023
Google will demonstrate a version of its search engine with chatbot features this year, according to a New York Times report.
Why we care. AI – and OpenAI’s ChatGPT in particular – has been discussed ad nauseum over the past two months. Microsoft already is reportedly working on adding ChatGPT features to Microsoft Bing search. This has the potential to reshape SEO significantly. If you thought featured snippets were stealing your traffic, just wait until Google starts being able to accurately answer some even more complex questions which your existing content is designed to answer.
Code Red at Google. In December, following the launch of and reaction to ChatGPT, Google CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly issued a “code red,” realizing the technology was an urgent and significant threat to Google’s search business.
Founders return. Google executives reportedly called in Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who stepped down in December 2019, for several meetings about the company’s A.I. product strategy. Prior to this, neither had been involved with Google search since leaving Google, according to the Times.
What’s coming? According to the Times:
Google now intends to unveil more than 20 new products and demonstrate a version of its search engine with chatbot features this year, according to a slide presentation reviewed by The New York Times and two people with knowledge of the plans who were not authorized to discuss them.
Three priorities were discussed in that chatbot search presentation:
- Getting facts right.
- Ensuring safety.
- Getting rid of misinformation.
Google may block certain words to avoid hate speech and will try to minimize other potential issues relating to hate and toxicity, danger and misinformation, according to the report.
Dig deeper. The New York Times has all the details in Google Calls In Help From Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. Fight (registration required).
The post Report: Google search will debut chatbot features this year appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Friday, January 20th, 2023
The Verge has a piece up today named Inside CNET’s AI-powered SEO money machine. It covers much of what we reported in Google search responds to BankRate, more brands using AI to write content last week. It also dives more into how the company has been using machines to replace low-cost humans to generate low-quality content designed to rank well in search.
Google’s algorithms. All of this reminds me of the Google Panda update days, where Google built algorithms to detect content farms and content written with the purpose of generating search traffic. Now, with the helpful content update, that specifically aims to discount content written for search rankings (and not for users) – this strategy deployed by the Red Ventures websites seems like it is set up to fail ultimately – that is, if Google’s algorithms do what they say they will do.
Red Ventures goal. According to The Verge:
“Red Ventures’ business model is straightforward and explicit: it publishes content designed to rank highly in Google search for “high-intent” queries and then monetizes that traffic with lucrative affiliate links.”
That specifically goes against Google’s latest helpful content update algorithm, which aims to downgrade sites where content is written for search engines first (i.e. content written to rank in search and not help people).
The article goes on to explain how these sites are trying to rank well in the credit card space, and turn that traffic into clicks to affiliate revenue. “Red Ventures has found a major niche in credit cards and other finance products,” the article explains.
This goes beyond just CNET. Red Ventures also owns The Points Guy, Bankrate, and CreditCards.com, “all of which monetize through credit card affiliate fees,” they add.
“The CNET AI stories at the center of the controversy are straightforward examples of this strategy: ‘Can You Buy a Gift Card With a Credit Card?’ and ‘What Is Zelle and How Does It Work?’ are obviously designed to rank highly in searches for those topics. Like CNET, Bankrate and CreditCards.com have also published AI-written articles about credit cards with ads for opening cards nestled within.”
Sound familiar?
Content farms. Replace humans with AI to build content farms, content that is aimed to rank well in search, generate traffic, clicks on ads, revenue from affiliates and other publishing goals.
The article goes on to say:
“Viewed cynically, it makes perfect sense for Red Ventures to deploy AI: it is flooding the Google search algorithm with content, attempting to rank highly for various valuable searches, and then collecting fees when visitors click through to a credit card or mortgage application. AI lowers the cost of content creation, increasing the profit for each click. There is not a private equity company in the world that can resist this temptation.”
Didn’t Google already tackle such efforts with Panda with the downfall of content farms? I guess not. Not yet.
Wordsmith. The tool being used to generate this content is Wordsmith, something they have been using for well over a year now, and something other companies have been using as well.
“A former CNET employee says that Red Ventures was using automated technology for content long before the AI byline began cropping up in November. They say a tool called Wordsmith — nicknamed “Mortgotron” internally because of its use in mortgage stories — has been used for at least a year and a half.”
Not new. Yes, for a year and a half, this has been going on. But it has been going on longer.
You see it a lot with financial earnings news analysis, sports scores news stories and anything that can be somewhat templated. Machines can pull out the metrics and then write up a sensible article using the revised data.
It is cheap and serves the purpose. But is this the type of content that Google wants to rank?
Here is a tweet from Glenn Gabe showing how it worked years ago:
I know a lot of people have focused on AI content recently based on ChatGPT, but many forget that Wordsmith, and others like Heliograf, have been doing this forever. Here's a tweet of mine from 2017 showing AI articles ranking well at the time 
https://t.co/qFgZknMEgX
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) January 20, 2023
Good enough to rank. So with the layoffs at these publishing companies, they came up with more and more ways to have machines write content that ranks in search. The Verge wrote that it just needs to be good enough to rank,
“But the robot articles published on CNET don’t need to be ‘good’ — they need to rank highly in Google searches so lots of people open them and click the lucrative affiliate marketing links they contain.”
It can’t last. I mean, it can’t last, it can’t continue to work in the long run, right?
If Google has their say, and they do, Google wants content written in a way that is designed to help users. If The Verge is accurate in saying the intent of this content that AI writes is to just rank well in search, then Google’s new helpful content update should tackle that. It might not tackle it today but it should in the future.
Why we care. It is tempting to find low-cost ways to generate endless content that can rank well in Google Search. I mean, who doesn’t want to make a lot of money fast, for very little cost? But how long will those efforts last? Is this a long-term strategy? Will we look back at these efforts and say this is why Google rolled out the helpful content update?
Time will tell, but it is super interesting to watch this all play out, just like we did with the Panda, Penguin and other Google Search algorithm updates over the years.
The post Is AI-written content replacing cheap old content farms? appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Friday, January 20th, 2023
According to six sources and documents reviewed by Forbes, TikTok and ByteDance employees frequently engage in “heating,” which is a manual process that guarantees certain videos receive a specific amount of views.
Heating is cheating. Six current and former employees of TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, as well as internal documents and communications reviewed by Forbes, TikTok and ByteDance staff use a practice called “heating” to artificially boost the distribution of certain videos in addition to relying on the algorithm to determine what becomes popular.
According to one of those sources:
“The heating feature refers to boosting videos into the For You feed through operation intervention to achieve a certain number of video views,” an internal TikTok document titled MINT Heating Playbook explains. “The total video views of heated videos accounts for a large portion of the daily total video views, around 1-2%, which can have a significant impact on overall core metrics.”
TikTok doesn’t publicly disclose this, of course. Sources stated to Forbes that TikTok has used “heating” to attract influencers and brands by artificially increasing the view count of their videos, indicating that this practice may have benefited some influencers and brands that TikTok has business relationships with at the expense of others it does not have partnerships with.
“Heating” suggests that some videos on the For You page may not be based on personal preference but rather intended to increase views for specific brands or creators. Without labeling, it isn’t easy to distinguish these videos from regular content.
Potential abuse cases. Sources have informed Forbes that employees have misused “heating” by using it to boost the view count of their own or their loved ones’ accounts in violation of company policies. Documents reviewed by Forbes also support this, showing that employees have used “heating” on their own accounts and the accounts of people they have personal relationships with. One document revealed that an account had received over 3 million views due to this type of “heating” incident.
How TikTok has responded. “We promote some videos to help diversify the content experience and introduce celebrities and emerging creators to the TikTok community. Only a few people, based in the U.S., have the ability to approve content for promotion in the U.S., and that content makes up approximately .002% of videos in For You feeds.” TikTok spokesperson Jamie Favazza wrote.
Dig deeper. You can read the full article from Forbes here.
Why we care. If TikTok is artificially inflating the view count of some videos through “heating,” it could skew the metrics that marketers use to evaluate the success of their campaigns. This could lead to brands investing in partnerships or collaborations with influencers or channels that may not have as large of an audience as they appear to have, ultimately reducing the ROI of their marketing efforts.
Additionally, artificially inflating view counts could also lead to misleading metrics and data, which could cause issues with transparency, trust and reputation of the platform and brands on it.
The post TikTok has a secret “Heating” (cheating?) button appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Thursday, January 19th, 2023
Google has just rolled out Performance Max experiments, and Twitter has taken notice.
Why we care. If you’re an advertiser using Performance Max, you can use this feature to test changes to your account before applying them permanently.
Recommendations as experiments. Last year Google launched the ability for advertisers to apply recommendations as experiments. In October, they announced that additional experiments were coming “in the following months.” Now, they have taken it a step further by giving you the same features for Performance Max campaigns.
Google has not officially announced the update.
The post New Performance Max experiments have just rolled out appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Thursday, January 19th, 2023
The State of Technical SEO Report 2023 is out from digital marketing agency Aira and the Women in Tech SEO community. So what matters in 2023? Here’s a quick summary of some of the more interesting results.
Resources matter. The biggest risk the report highlighted was an organizational lack of resources. A lack of resources means changes don’t get made or are very slow to get made – which means less than stellar SEO results. So if you work at a company where resources are lacking, prioritization of tasks will continue to be critically important.
Tools and technology that matter. Google Search Console was the most popular tool for technical SEOs overall – 92% reported using it. It was also the top tool used (78%) for measuring organic search rankings.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider was popular choice for crawling and log file analysis. Meanwhile, Semrush was the top choice for assessing the search visibility of a website.
For non ecommerce platforms, technical SEOs most preferred working on WordPress. Wix was considered the most problematic to work on.
Time matters. Sadly, waiting months for technical SEO changes to happen is fairly common – 88% of respondents waited anywhere from a month to 24+ months for technical SEO changes to be made.
Perhaps a bit surprising: 22% reported waiting only a month for technical SEO changes to be implemented. Meanwhile, 20% reported waiting 12 months (which was down slightly from the prior year). And 11% of respondents reported waiting 24 months or longer.
Skills that matter. What are the top three skills a technical SEO should have? According to the respondents:
- Data anaysis (72%)
- Reading and understanding HTML/CSS (58%)
- Content strategy (39%)
It was surprising to see content strategy ranked so highly. But as Steph Greaves pointed out in the report comments:
- “It’s definitely helpful to know how content relates on a website to fully understand internal linking opportunities that serve the user.”
Technical SEO = marketing. Search Engine Land contributor Mark Jackson has made the case that SEO is marketing. So it was nice to see that marketing (74%) was the top answer to this in-house specific question: “In your organisation, in which team does accountability for technical SEO sit?
Dig deeper. There’s much more to read. Here’s the full, ungated report: The State of Technical SEO Report 2023
Why we care. Overall, this report is good news for our industry. Clearly, we’re facing issues, most notably an uncertain economic outlook. Plus there have been many layoffs. But it’s encouraging that the report finds the outlook for SEO is still relatively positive and demand for SEO remains in a good place.
The post Technical SEO report reveals what matters in 2023 appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Thursday, January 19th, 2023
Google has updated the video indexing report in Google Search Console to improve the accuracy of the error reporting. Google said you might see “missing thumbnail” errors reclassified under new error types. Google also added that the total number of errors reported should not change, and that this is just a reclassification of errors.
January 19, 2023. This change went into affect today, January 19, 2023.
Google’s statement. Google wrote, “Search Console can now more accurately classify thumbnail indexing issues. As a result, you may see a reassignment of “Missing thumbnail” issues to more specific issue types. The total number of affected videos should remain the same.”
What is the video indexing report. The video indexing report shows how many indexed pages on your site contain one or more videos, and how many of those pages a video could be indexed. Google said the report can help you understand the performance of your videos on Google, and identify possible areas of improvement.
What it looks like. Here is a screenshot of this report for one of my sites in Google Search Console:
When the report shows. Google said if Google detects videos on your site, the Video indexing report will appear on the left navigation bar in the coverage section. If Google has not detected a video on your website, you will not see the report.
What it tells you. The report shows the status of video indexing on your site. It helps you answer the following questions:
- In how many pages has Google identified a video?
- Which videos were indexed successfully?
- What are the issues preventing videos from being indexed?
In addition, if you fix an existing issue, you can use the report to validate the fix and track how your fixed video pages are updated in the Google index, Google explained.
Why we care. You may want to recheck some of the errors in this report and see if some were reclassified from “missing thumbnail” to a different error type. This way you can resolve any errors that might not have been resolved earlier.
The post Google improves error classification in video indexing report appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
