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    How to create an enterprise SEO monthly report

    Written on January 19, 2023 at 4:59 pm, by admin

    Of all the ridiculous and sublime ways to spend $10,000 a month of your enterprise SEO budget, your least greatest ROI has come from link exchange emails like this below, where a C-note can get you a backlink on a website with a domain authority of 80+ – potentially evening out that PBN you created for another $10k. 

    Link exchange pitchThe author took the screenshot.

    If you missed that hint of sarcasm above, let’s be clear, you should not be spending your enterprise SEO budget on link exchanges or PBNs. 

    Instead, you should be looking to spend your enterprise SEO budget on SEO tactics that bring value to the company and align with the overall business objectives of your leadership team. 

    And when it comes to reporting to your C-suite, they want to connect the dots between your SEO budget and the bottom line. 

    We’ve all been there. You agonize over creating the Looker Studio dashboard and including the right metrics. You email your boss an impressive, in-depth SEO report and hope for the best. 

    But you are struggling to articulate clearly how your enterprise SEO strategy impacts ROI. 

    Well, it’s time to put your money where your mouth is. Don’t let feelings guide your decisions. Instead, you need hard, cold data to build your enterprise SEO report that will win over your leadership team. 

    My enterprise SEO monthly report template to answer all your boss’s questions

    Based on inspiration from Tom Critchlow’s The SEO MBA and Adam Gent’s SEO Roadmap, I created this enterprise SEO monthly report template. 

    This report includes screenshots of all my Looker Studio and Tableau dashboards. 

    Caveat: I hate presentation decks. It’s a giant waste of time. But the reality is your boss and your bosses boss will likely want a deck. So give them what they want and what they are comfortable reading. 

    Here’s how to deliver your monthly enterprise SEO report to your boss and across departments

    Every month I send two emails to my bosses, direct reports, and cross-departments. The main goal of these biweekly emails is to begin to build an SEO culture within the company. 

    The second email of the month, typically on the 15th, is the previous month’s report. I call out 3-5 highlights, lowlights, and next steps to give the C-suite a high-level overview. 

    SEO monthly report templateScreenshot taken by author.

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    72 enterprise SEO metrics to include in your monthly enterprise SEO dashboards

    Below is a list of enterprise SEO metrics I include in all my dashboards. 

    It’s important to note that not all of these metrics are shared with my leadership team. Use these metrics to help understand the story you want to tell the leadership team.  

    Also, remember you are an enterprise SEO lead, not a data scientist or Google Analytics expert. 

    If you’re working at an enterprise-level company, you will likely have a data analytics team to collaborate with to build these dashboards with you. 

    In your first 90 days as an enterprise SEO lead, I recommend copying/pasting this as a starting conversation with your data team. 

    All reports listed below should be available to segment by:  

    Website organic dashboard  

    All should be available to segment by organic, direct, or referral traffic. 

    Organic overview 

    Leads overview 

    Organic content overview 

    Organic technical overview 

    14 enterprise SEO tools to make your SEO report look so fresh and so clean

    Below is a list of enterprise SEO tools I use to create my monthly reports: 

    Free enterprise SEO tools

    Paid enterprise SEO tools 

    Enterprise SEO tools I wish I had the budget for: 

    Avoid overwhelming your C-level executives with SEO metrics they don’t care about

    The chances of your boss or any C-level executives reading your 50-page SEO report are about as high as Tom Hanks finding Wilson.

    It’s our job as SEO professionals to get under the hood to see how the car works. It’s our job to diagnose the issues. But it’s not our job to explain how the motor works or why. 

    You must choose wisely the metrics you share.  

    Before you hit send, ask yourself: Is SEO worth it from this report? 

    After all, you must make a compelling case for SEO in your reporting, or SEO will be left behind. 

    The post How to create an enterprise SEO monthly report appeared first on Search Engine Land.

    Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing




    Google ranking signals: A complete breakdown of all confirmed, rumored and false factors

    Written on January 17, 2023 at 8:54 am, by admin

    Every article you can find online about Google ranking factors will tell you there are at least ~200 or so odd variables that contribute to how a site will perform in the SERPs. 

    That being said, there’s an enormous difference between what might impact SEO, what’s actually confirmed as a ranking factor, and what is simply a good principle to rank well.

    It might sound like semantics, but “best practices” don’t just automatically translate into confirmed ranking factors in and of themselves. 

    So let’s separate these confirmed facts from fiction and all the other stuff you simply should be doing as a good marketer on a daily basis. 

    In this article, we’ll analyze all of the known, confirmed, rumored, and absolute myth-level Google ranking factors in an easy-to-read, highly condensed way. 

    Confirmed ranking factors 

    These are all the ranking factors that have been confirmed as true. We know they definitely impact your results in Google’s search engine to varying degrees.

    Core Web Vitals 

    Your Core Web Vitals assess page experience signals to evaluate how engaging the user experience is. They confirmed in 2021 that they are a ranking signal, so make sure your site has a “good” ranking standing.  

    Source: Timing for Bringing Page Experience to Google Search

    Anchor text  

    Google has confirmed that they use concise anchor text (read: “SEO strategies” as the anchor text and not “click here”) to better understand what’s on your pages, which can directly lead to them placing your page higher in the SERPs. 

    This isn’t the strongest ranking factor on the list (especially after the Penguin update), but it can still help. 

    Source: Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

    Domain history 

    You may be running an up-and-up, fully legitimate business now, but what if a sketchy business was using the domain before to scam customers?

    Domain history does matter, and it’s a confirmed ranking signal, though Google’s John Mueller has gone on to say that the issue will resolve itself over time. Still, we recommend playing it safe on this one.  

    Source: English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout (Nov. 13, 2018)

    E-A-T 

    Google’s E-A-T framework assesses expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness – and while it isn’t a ranking factor in and of itself, many of the factors that go into its calculation are ranking factors. So we’re putting this one in the confirmed column, but with a little “but only kind of” note. 

    Source: How Google Fights Disinformation 

    Headings  

    Headings – including H1s and H2s – can absolutely be a ranking factor, as they help Google understand the content on the page. They aren’t the only ranking factor, but they matter, so have them clearly written and keyword-friendly.  

    Source: English Google Webmaster Central office-hours (Aug. 7, 2020)

    HTTPS 

    Secure search, or HTTPS – compared to HTTP – is a known and confirmed ranking factor. It also is an important part of a safe user experience, so make sure you get on this one fast if you haven’t already. 

    Source: HTTPS as a Ranking Signal 

    Content 

    It’s abundantly clear that content is used as a search ranking signal, and the quality of the content, including how directly it answers a question, can be vital to performance in the SERPs. The content on its own (and not just headings) is assessed by Google.

    Source: English Google Webmaster Central office-hours (Aug. 7, 2020)

    Backlinks 

    Links coming to your site from other sites have long been a general SEO best practice. That’s because PageRank established backlinks as “votes” from the very beginning, offering a new way to analyze quality that was originally modeled after citations to academic papers.

    Source: Ranking Results – How Google Search Works

    Keyword prominence 

    Keyword density isn’t a ranking factor (we’ll get to that later), but keyword prominence is. This is the location of the keyword, and the closer to the title or beginning of the text, the more prominent it is.  

    Source: English Google SEO office-hours (June 18, 2021)

    Keyword stuffing

    Keyword stuffing – which involves over-stuffing your content with keywords in an attempt to get it to rank well – is a negative ranking factor, as confirmed by Google. Doing this will hurt you, so avoid it. 

    Source: Spam Policies for Google’s Web Search

    Known paid links 

    If you’ve paid for backlinks and you get caught (which is admittedly very difficult) it is a negative ranking factor. It’s best to stay away from this. 

    Source: Spam Policies for Google Web Search

    Mobile-friendliness 

    Mobile-friendliness is confirmed as a ranking factor, and it’s been strengthening as a ranking signal for years. It’s particularly important for mobile search results, which have eclipsed desktop searches for at least seven years now. So here’s where mobile responsive best practices and confirmed ranking signals overlap nicely.

    Source: Continuing to Make the Web More Mobile Friendly

    Page speed 

    We know that page loading speed is a confirmed factor for Google’s SERPs (and has been since 2010) – and it’s an important one. It also directly impacts the user experience, so make sure that your site loading times are as quick as possible. 

    Source: Speed is Now a Landing Page Factor for Google Search and Ads

    Physical proximity to the searcher

    Google absolutely takes the physical closeness of the searcher into account when determining what results to show them, especially in local search. While you can’t change the location of your business, make sure that all of your business information (including location citations) are up-to-date and accurate. 

    Source: How to Improve Your Local Ranking on Google

    RankBrain  

    RankBrain is an AI system released in 2015 (and significantly updated in 2016) to integrate AI into search queries for improved results, which is particularly helpful for ambiguous queries or long-tail keywords. It’s a confirmed ranking factor, but there’s no clear or distinct way to intentionally optimize for it. 

    Source: Google Q&A

    Relevance, distance and prominence 

    Confirmed by Google as ranking factors, these three signals determine the popularity and geographical closeness of a business along with how relevant it is to the specific search. They are each vital for local search results, so take that into account when optimizing your local business page and remember to generate reviews. 

    Source: How to Improve Your Local Ranking on Google

    Title tags  

    There’s plenty of evidence that optimizing title tags can have a correlative increase with ranking, though we know they’re not nearly as critical of a ranking factor as the rest of the content itself. It’s a small detail in a bigger picture, but they also say that Google looks for keyword stuffing here as a negative factor. 

    Source: English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout (Jan. 15, 2016)

    URLs 

    URLs are a minimal search ranking factor, which means that keywords in a URL are assessed when Google is crawling your site. Mueller has repeatedly stressed that this is not a ranking factor worth spending a lot of time on. 

    Source: @JohnMu on Twitter

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    Unconfirmed but suspected ranking factors 

    Google hasn’t confirmed every single ranking factor out there, but that doesn’t mean that these elements below don’t have some sort of impact on the ranking algorithms. This is the unconfirmed but suspected-by-expert ranking factors that could impact your SEO. 

    Alt text 

    Having alt text for your images is definitely considered an SEO best practice, having alt text in and of itself is not a confirmed ranking factor. That being said, using it correctly and with keywords can help your SEO strategy by giving Google more context about what you have on the page. 

    Source: Google Image SEO Best Practices 

    Breadcrumbs  

    Breadcrumbs help Google to assess the hierarchy of how your pages are arranged. Right now, we know it can help Google categorize pages, and that Google treats breadcrumbs as normal links in PageRank. We think they can have an impact on ranking, even if they aren’t confirmed as a direct ranking factor. 

    Source: @methode on Twitter

    Click depth 

    Click depth, or the number of clicks it takes to get from your home page to the destination page, is very likely to be a ranking factor based on remarks from Mueller. But not a significant one. Think about how easy it is for users to get to the end page. 

    Source: English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout (June 1, 2018)

    Local citations 

    Location citations that mention your key business information like name, address, and phone number, and while having these appear online aren’t officially confirmed as a ranking factor, it’s close. Google has noted that local results favor the most relevant results and that businesses with complete information will be prioritized. 

    Source: Improve your local ranking on Google

    Co-citation 

    Co-citation and co-occurrence help Google assess how closely two unrelated sites or pages may be related and may give them clues as to how the pages are related and in what context. A few high-quality, trusted links to your site can help Google put together some of the puzzle pieces, but still, this is unlikely to be a significant ranking factor. 

    Source: Google patent on related entities and what it means for SEO

    Language 

    It only makes sense that someone searching for shoes in Mandarin is less than likely to come across a site written in Spanish. To reach users in different locations, you’ll want to create content in the languages they speak.  

    Source: Ranking Results – How Google Search Works 

    Internal links 

    These are links to your own content on your site, but they need strong use of anchor text. At the very least, they definitely don’t hurt. That being said, they’re unlikely to be a strong ranking factor compared to others like site loading speeds. 

    Source: Learn About What Sitelinks Are

    Schema 

    Schema markup is highly valuable when it comes to driving clicks, and it also provides microdata that Google is able to understand easily. 

    It isn’t confirmed as a known ranking factor but we know it can help you rank for queries you may not have otherwise. So it may help as a ranking signal, but the worst-case scenario is it just helps your overall SEO. 

    Source: Understanding How Structured Markup Data Works 

    The user’s own search history 

    Each user is different, and Google knows that. The algorithm do take the past search history into account when delivering search results as best as possible.

    This, however, is not something that you can influence at all, and the impact is rarely significant (other than prominent locally personalized SERPs or frequently visited pages).

    Source: @searchliaison on Twitter

    Rumored but unlikely ranking factors 

    These are ranking factors that have long been speculated about, and while they have not been outrightly denied so far, we have a good reason for thinking they’re unlikely to be official signals. 

    301 redirects 

    While former Googler Matt Cutts said in 2012 that Google would follow an unlimited number of redirects from one page to another, there may be a slight PageRank lost in the process. 

    However, not much has been officially said, and, likely, they’re not a page ranking factor. In any case, you still want to manage redirects and linking closely to avoid issues in potential redirect chains. This is often more of a best practice for site performance.

    Source: When migrating from HTTP to HTTPS Google says to use 301 redirects 

    Canonical links 

    Canonical links do have a connection with search rankings, but we know that even when they’re used correctly, Google might ignore it and pick their own canonical URL to show in the search results instead. Think Captain Barbosa’s famous quote from Pirates of the Caribbean here, “The code is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.” 

    Source: Google selects canonical URLs based on your site and user preference

    Outbound links 

    Outbound links are way too easy for people to game to be a ranking factor, but it is important to note that the anchor text and the links you choose can help Google better understand your content so it can bring in value indirectly.

    Source: English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout (Jan. 26, 2016)

    Disproven ranking factors  

    While some rumored ranking factors are hanging in limbo, some have been disproven. Let’s look at what you don’t have to worry about, at least as far as SEO is concerned. 

    Worth pointing out – there’s a lot that isn’t on this list, but we wanted to cover the big ones. 

    Bounce rate

    We’re listing this one first because it’s a common misconception that bounce rate impacts ranking. Google has repeatedly confirmed that bounce rates are not a ranking signal. 

    Source: @methode on Twitter

    404 and soft 404 pages 

    Google itself has confirmed 404 pages do not impact how your other URLs rank, easily dispelling that ranking factor myth. Broken links and pages, however, can provide a poor user experience (so they should be found and updated when possible).

    Source: 404 (Page Not Found) errors

    Google Display Ads 

    This one has a bit of an asterisk. 

    Having ads from Display Ads on your page can lower site loading speeds, especially if you have a large number of them. So the concern was that these ads could hurt your ranking. And they don’t directly hurt your ranking just by appearing on your page.  

    They won’t directly impact your SEO ranking, though you will want to make sure that you aren’t overloading your pages with so many ads that performance (including site loading speed) isn’t impacted, because you don’t get a pass if they do. 

    And for that matter, using Google Ads, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics won’t automatically impact your ranking, either. 

    Source: The Top Heavy Update: Pages with too many ads above the fold now penalized by Google’s “Page Layout” algorithm 

    AMP 

    This one is simple: AMP is not a ranking factor, and we know that because Google has confirmed it multiple times, since 2016 at least. 

    Source: This Week in Google Podcast 341

    BBB 

    While Better Business Bureau (BBB) reviews can impact consumer buying decisions, there is no evidence at this point in time that it can impact your SEO rankings, and one of Google’s team members confirmed it. 

    Source: English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout (Nov. 13, 2018)

    Click-through rate 

    Your click-through rate (CTR) has long been rumored to be a ranking factor, but it’s confirmed this isn’t the case – especially since Google knew that people were trying to game this years ago. So sure, it’s great for your site to have a higher CTR, but don’t expect it to help your rankings.

    Source: CTR in the Google Algo: Google’s Gary Illyes and Stone Temple’s Eric Enge Discuss 

    Code to text signal 

    This one is not a direct ranking factor, but it can still impact the performance of the page, including ranking factors like loading speeds, along with user experience. So not important for ranking, but still good to keep in check. 

    Source: English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout (Mar. 27, 2018)

    Meta descriptions

    We know that having a strong meta description is a great SEO best practice to drive a higher CTR to your site, but Google hasn’t used it as a ranking signal since sometime between 1999 and the early 2000s. 

    Source: @JohnMu on Twitter

    Manual action 

    Manual actions are those that manually adjust a website’s visibility in search results by demoting or removing a site or specific pages from Google Search. These are conducted by Google – and they’re a penalty, not a ranking factor. 

    Source: Manual Actions Report

    Content length

    SEO writers will swear up and down that you need at least 1,000 words or 2,000 words or whatever that magic number is in order to be ranked by Google. That’s not true. 

    Google doesn’t look at content length as a ranking factor, but you should have enough quality content to be competitive on any given keyword to rank well. 

    Source: johnmu on /r/bigseo

    Domain age 

    The age of your domain can help with site authority overall (see below), but Google has confirmed that it is not currently a ranking factor.  

    Source: @JohnMu on Twitter

    Domain authority 

    Google has repeatedly confirmed that domain authority is not a ranking factor, as any “site authority” score is created by a third-party tool.

    Sites with higher domain authorities may correlate with improved SEO because some of the calculations may be close, but they’re correlative and nothing more. Really, this one is common sense. 

    Source: johnmu on r/SEO/ 

    Domain name

    Your domain name is important (“www.coolshoes.com” can absolutely drive clicks), but it is not a ranking factor and hasn’t been for a while. 

    Source: English Google Webmaster Central office-hours (Sept. 11, 2020)

    First link priority 

    Google doesn’t care which link comes first. This isn’t the magic hack some people insist that it is. They care about the quality of the links. And remember, anchor text matters more than where the link is placed. 

    Source: English Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout (Feb. 20, 2018)

    Recency of content 

    Is Google automatically prioritizing a brand-new article over one written last year? No. 

    That being said, the thoroughness and quality of the article matter. If you need to refresh to stay competitive, that can help your ranking. 

    Source: @JohnMu on Twitter

    Types of links 

    Think that having a .gov or .edu at the end of your domain will make a difference? Maybe to users, but unfortunately not to Google. Not a ranking factor. 

    Source: @JohnMu on Twitter

    Keyword density 

    This may have influenced ranking at one time, and though it’s a general best practice, it is not a ranking factor. And remember: keyword stuffing doesn’t do you any favor. 

    Source: What is The Ideal Keyword Density of a Page?

    ‘We have no idea’ if these are legitimate ranking factors (or not)

    Looking for a potential ranking factor that we haven’t discussed so far? There are a few that are still currently up in the air, with evidence that they may be a ranking factor but nothing to confirm that they actually are.  

    Authorship of your content 

    Does a specific author’s byline impact how Google will rank your page? Honestly, we’re not sure, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to use reliable authors who your audience will trust. 

    Google has recommended adding author information into article schema and we suspect that authorship expertise does play a part in E-A-T. But again, it’s inconclusive at this time. (Note that we’re speaking about “authorship” more broadly here than referring specifically to Google’s old Authorship.)

    Source: 14 ways Google may evaluate E-A-T 

    HTML lists

    Orders or unordered HTML lists could be a ranking factor, but we really don’t know. If it is, it’s not a particularly strong signal, but it can help with SEO, especially if it can help you snag a featured snippet spot.  

    Source: How to get Google featured snippets: 9 optimization guidelines 

    MUM

    The Multitask Unified Model (MUM) was rolled out in 2021 to help the algorithms better understand language so Google can more effectively answer complex search queries. It’s not a known ranking factor right now, but it could be in the future, especially since Google has discussed how it’s improved some search results in early tests.  

    Source: Using AI to Keep Google Search Safe

    Text formatting 

    Using HTML elements to format text can help both readers and Google’s crawling tools quickly find important parts of your content. There’s evidence that bolded or italicized wording, for example, may receive extra weight in importance. Since it can help you tell Google what you want it to notice on the page, it may impact ranking, but the jury is still out here. 

    Source: @JohnMu on Twitter

    Conclusion

    There you have it – an expansive list of all the known, confirmed and refuted Google ranking factors, along with everything in between to keep us guessing.

    And that’s just the point. This list will change in the future. That’s probably the only thing we can guarantee at the end of the day.

    Because while the SEO rumor mill has speculated on what exactly Google’s “200 ranking factors” for nearly two decades, the truth is probably a lot murkier than that.

    As Google continues to employ AI, machine learning, and other advanced technologies to slice and dice data, the true “ranking factors” that will move the needle for marketers tomorrow aren’t likely to be the same old static ones we used to rely on yesterday.

    The post Google ranking signals: A complete breakdown of all confirmed, rumored and false factors appeared first on Search Engine Land.

    Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing




    How to avoid 7 mistakes that tank retail Performance Max campaigns

    Written on January 17, 2023 at 8:54 am, by admin

    Imagine this: A small business owner, relying on Google Ads to make sales on his Shopify store, has had his livelihood crushed by Performance Max in two months. Sales are practically zero, cost per conversion is up 20x ($6 to $120), yet his Optimization Score is at 100%.

    It’s a real and unfortunate situation that contradicts Google’s stance that their automation makes online advertising easier.

    In fact, it illustrates how desperately the PPC advertising community needs better education on ad platform automation, especially when it comes to something as prominent as Performance Max.

    That business owner did everything Google recommended, nearly destroying his online business in the process, and it’s unlikely he’ll recover without the help of a seasoned Google Ads professional.

    This is the future that Google’s automation was supposed to prevent, but instead, we’re still trying to understand the basics of a campaign type that’s largely a black box.

    Let’s fix that. Here are seven mistakes I’ve seen people make with Performance Max campaigns that you can avoid repeating.

    Mistake 1: Thinking audiences and audience signals work the same way

    Audience signals don’t work the way audience segments do in other campaigns, because you can’t target specific audiences in Performance Max. Instead, you provide signals that tell Google who to start showing your ads to, and Google uses the initial data to expand your audience.

    Many account managers underestimate the importance of audience signals (I’ve seen some skip it completely). But anything that relies this much on automation won’t work as intended unless you provide the strongest possible inputs.

    That’s why my top recommendation is to make sure you start every Performance Max campaign with strong audience signals. These can include:

    Performance Max audience signalsSource: Google.com

    When you import those audiences at the start of a campaign, Google will analyze them for the millions of signals it tracks. And your campaign can begin with strong, relevant audience input instead of wasting money on guessing games.

    Mistake 2: Neglecting your data feed

    Because retail Performance Max and Standard Shopping campaigns rely on data feeds for keyword targeting, an incomplete feed means you’re missing out on potential opportunities. 

    A lot of brands advertising on Google don’t pay enough attention to their data feed, and that goes for Standard Shopping campaigns, too. It’s tempting to get started in Google Ads immediately, but take a step back to the Merchant Center and optimize your data feed for the best results.

    Some of the things my agency checks for include making sure that:

    Provide Google’s systems with high-quality inputs, and stay on top of the data you share to keep it accurate and up-to-date.

    Mistake 3: Picking the wrong campaign structure

    I’ve seen many Performance Max campaigns with several asset groups targeting different audience signals, but with the same creative or products. In my experience, that goes against the spirit of how Performance Max works.

    Instead, we build asset groups around product categories or services. Because our targeting is based on audience signals rather than lists, splitting them this way provides little to no benefit. The lack of reporting at the asset group level for Performance Max means it’s unclear how this is helpful.

    Source: Producthero.com

    If you use different UTM parameters to send multiple traffic sources to a page, you could view the data in Google Analytics or offline conversions. But different audience signals can still target the same cohort. You can’t target a fixed audience in Performance Max.

    It may seem counterintuitive if you’re new to these campaigns, but my experience says that building asset groups around audience signals only confuses the system.

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    Mistake 4: Ignoring standard Shopping campaigns

    Many of my peers aren’t happy with the lack of control over where Performance Max places your ads, but there’s one way to counter this.

    To set up Performance Max to work as Smart Shopping only, you have to do two things:

    When you do those two things, the campaign will likely spend the core budget on Shopping with very little spilling over to placements like Search, YouTube, and Display.

    On the flip side, if you remove the data feed entirely, your ads typically won’t show up in Search and Shopping as Google focuses more on YouTube, Gmail, Discovery and Display.

    Outside of that and a few account-level exclusions, there really isn’t much you can do to control placement by the campaign.

    So when we work with ecommerce clients with larger catalogs, we typically recommend running Performance Max and Shopping campaigns together.

    That means running one product segment in Shopping – whether by category, sub-brand, or other attributes – and others (like top items) in Performance Max.

    Our team is auditing an account and the same SKUs are being targeted in both Smart Shopping and Performance Max campaign.

    Not sure what this agency was thinking but this won't work. PMax is going to steal the show.

    — Duane Brown ????????????️‍???? 4x Vax'ed! (@duanebrown) March 30, 2022

    If a client is already active in Shopping and it’s working, we move some products that aren’t selling well to Performance Max. We may even do the opposite and move the top-performing products over. All we’re doing is testing what works to find the path to optimal profitability.

    If you’re starting out with Performance Max and want to test Standard Shopping alongside it, what we recommend is looking for the subsets of products that are not getting:

    Exclude those from Performance Max and put them in a Standard Shopping campaign where you have greater control.

    Use manual bidding, be more aggressive with search term blocking, and use the added control to push those products to a stronger place.

    Mistake 5: Saying ‘yes’ to all Google Ads recommendations

    I can’t stress this enough: You should be the one making decisions about how to optimize your accounts and campaigns.

    Google’s recommendations often focus on applying more automation and rely on the average of tens of millions of accounts. Only you have the ability to exercise judgment based on the nuances of your business.

    Watch: How to turn off Google Ads auto-applied recommendations

    During the automatic transition from Smart Shopping to Performance Max (now complete), the system automatically created a handful of non-Shopping assets – one or two images with your logo plus a couple of generic headlines – and began spending more of the budget outside of the data feed.

    Smart Shopping may have split your budget 90/10 between Shopping and retargeting, but an “auto-upgraded” Performance Max campaign would spend a higher portion of your budget on prospecting ads using auto-generated assets that don’t convert well.

    What helped us was making sure those assets were stripped away, and going back to core assets so the campaign could only target and create ads from your data feed. It might still spend more on prospecting than Smart Shopping, but it would be a much smaller expense with the focus largely on Shopping.

    Mistake 6: Not optimizing assets to sculpt traffic

    When I analyze a Performance Max campaign, I first look at total campaign spend and performance versus listing groups, data feed spend, and performance.

    That gives me a breakdown of total spend on creative assets versus ads created from the feed. It’s not necessarily going to be 100% Shopping, it could be Display ads created using your feed.

    When I see the performance of data feed ads versus creative assets, I better understand what direction to push the campaign in.

    Getting data from Performance Max can be frustrating.

    But there are insights you can obtain from a campaign level.@MenachemAni of @JXTGroup shares a couple of smart tips here to derive more insights from PMax.

    More tips from Menachem here: https://t.co/kDtdfvPDgt#ppcchat pic.twitter.com/aQP9vFVoc1

    — Optmyzr (@Optmyzr) November 4, 2022

    While you won’t be able to see landing page performance reports in Performance Max, you can still revisit the “all campaigns” level and filter for Performance Max. This will show you which pages on your website Performance Max is driving traffic to. 

    From there, exclude pages from being served in the campaign (via campaign settings), or exclude certain products or categories from the data feed so that it stops sending traffic to those pages.

    There’s much you can do to sculpt where ad spend goes, but this information isn’t native or accessible to newer advertisers.

    Mistake 7: Using the wrong bid strategy at the wrong time

    Performance Max is a fully automated bidding zone and manual bidding doesn’t enter this conversation. So across all campaign types, our goal is going to be getting on Smart Bidding with a target ROAS – the closest to profitable campaigns.

    For brand new campaigns outside of Performance Max, we usually recommend starting with Manual CPC or Maximize Clicks for the first couple of weeks. It might not convert as well, but the goal is to drive traffic so the system starts to see what people are clicking and converting on.

    Then we typically switch to Maximize Conversions, which is where we start Performance Max campaigns because it’s the lowest level in that funnel.

    A target ROAS tells Google you have a sales goal so it can push to meet that benchmark. Starting with it makes it difficult to gather enough data fast enough, which keeps you in the costly learning phase longer than necessary.

    Our approach is to first make sure Google is spending the full budget and driving a nice amount of traffic, then to make sure we’re getting as many conversions as possible for that amount of traffic, and finally to push it to a place of profitability.

    Google claims that a change in bid strategy puts the campaign back in a learning phase. But a change to your actual target – CPA for Maximize Conversions and ROAS for Maximize Conversion Value – should allow Google to adapt and continue. That said, I recommend changing targets in increments of no more than 10-20%.

    The name of the game with Performance Max is “don’t shock the system.” Any drastic change will force it to look for new sources of converting traffic, resetting the learning phase. We’ve seen situations where it took up to six weeks to get campaigns back to a good place.

    Getting comfortable with Performance Max

    I get why there are mixed feelings around Performance Max.

    When I started my search marketing career in 2003, I was resistant to change too. Any time Google introduced a new way to do things, I’d look for reasons it didn’t make sense.

    But when you’ve seen as much change as I have in these two decades, you realize that ad platforms will keep moving forward. Google has a vision, they run the show, and it’s our job as search marketers to find ways to make it work for our clients and us.

    Are there problems with automation, absolutely. But denying it, especially when we still have the opportunity to revert, means you ultimately end up behind the industry.

    It's coming so we need to adapt and be a part of the conversation (and hopefully heard) #ppcchat

    — Amalia Fowler (she/her) (@AmaliaEFowler) March 16, 2021

    In some ways, what we do is like a Performance Max campaign. We put in the work upfront to learn something new, hoping we’ll reach a place where things run smoothly without our constant intervention.

    The first step is accepting change, even if you don’t agree with it. The longer you fight it, the more you’ll have to catch up with those who already began looking for solutions.

    So don’t try to hack the system or look for shortcuts. Accept the new status quo, put in the work to evolve, and claim a place for yourself in the future of search engine marketing.

    The post How to avoid 7 mistakes that tank retail Performance Max campaigns appeared first on Search Engine Land.

    Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing




    How to optimize Core Web Vitals in 2023 by DebugBear

    Written on January 17, 2023 at 8:54 am, by admin

    Google’s Core Web Vitals first became a ranking factor back in 2021. In February 2022, the change was fully rolled out to all mobile and desktop searches.

    Since then, Google has also worked on delivering new technologies to optimize web performance as well as experimenting with a potential new performance metric.

    What are the Core Web Vitals, and what do they mean for rankings?

    The Core Web Vitals are a set of three user experience metrics:

    Google collects data for these metrics from real users as part of the Chrome User Experience Report. Pages that do well on these metrics rank higher in search results.

    Use priority hints to speed up your website

    Last April, Chrome released Priority Hints, a new HTML feature that gives website owners a way to mark the most important resources on a page. This is especially useful for images that cause the Largest Contentful Paint.

    By default, all images on a page are loaded with low priority. That’s because before the initial render of the page, the browser can’t tell whether an image element will end up as the hero image or as a small icon in the website footer.

    Therefore it’s common for LCP images to be loaded with low priority at first and then switch to high priority later on. That means the browser will wait longer before starting to download the image.

    This request waterfall shows an example of that. Note the long gray line where the browser knows about the image but decides it doesn’t need to start loading it yet.

    Adding the fetchpriority="high" attribute fixes this problem. The browser starts loading the LCP image as soon as it’s discovered, causing the Largest Contentful paint to happen much sooner.

    Run high-quality site speed tests

    There are many free site speed tools available across the web. However, many that are based on Google’s Lighthouse tool use something called simulated throttling, which can lead to inaccurate metrics being reported. This also applies to Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.

    You can use the free DebugBear website speed test to get accurate performance data for your website. The reports include both detailed lab test results and real user data from the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX).

    The new Interaction to Next Paint (INP) metric

    Core Web Vitals will evolve, and in 2022 Google released an experimental new metric called Interaction to Next Paint. It measures how long it takes for the user to update after a user interacts with the page.

    A user interaction often triggers JavaScript to run on the page, which updates the page’s HTML. Then those page changes need to be rendered by the browser to display the updated content to the user.

    Interaction to next paint seeks to address two limitations of the First Input Delay metric:

    More than 90% of sites currently do well on the First Input Delay metric, far more than is the case for the two other Core Web Vitals. INP may therefore replace First Input Delay in the future, as it provides a better assessment of how good the user experience of a website is.

    Take advantage of better image support in Safari

    Downloading images takes up a lot of bandwidth, so browser makers are constantly working on new image formats and platform features. Unfortunately, it takes a while for these features to be fully supported in all major browsers.

    Luckily there has been some progress in Safari last year. Safari was the last major browser to start supporting the new, more compact AVIF image format. Safari now supports native image lazy loading using the loading="lazy" attribute.

    Identify and eliminate render-blocking resources

    Render-blocking resources can have a big impact on the speed of your website. Many CSS stylesheets and JavaScript requests block rendering, which means no content will show on your website until these files have been downloaded.

    To help website owners optimize page load time Google has started on better tooling to report render-blocking resources. For example, the new Performance Insights tab in Chrome DevTools indicates which requests are render-blocking.

    Monitor Core Web Vitals over time

    Ready to put some of these tips into practice?

    Using a tool to continuously monitor your website lets you verify that your performance optimizations are really working and ensures you get alerted when performance gets worse. You can also look back at past test results to understand what changed.

    DebugBear can monitor the Core Web Vitals of your website and those of your competitors over time and provides the in-depth reports you need to optimize your website. The reports also let you demonstrate the impact you’ve had on clients and the rest of your team.

    DebugBear also keeps track of the Lighthouse scores for performance, SEO and accessibility. You get a detailed breakdown of what audits you need to improve. Start your free 14-day trial today and meet the Core Web Vitals this year.

    The post How to optimize Core Web Vitals in 2023 appeared first on Search Engine Land.

    Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing




    This day in search marketing history: January 17

    Written on January 17, 2023 at 8:54 am, by admin

    Google Speed Update: New ranking algorithm designed for mobile search

    In 2018, Google announced the “Speed Update” – a new ranking algorithm designed for mobile search – would go live later in the year.

    The “Speed Update,” as we’re calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries. It applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.

    Google’s Zhiheng Wang and Doantam Phan, Using page speed in mobile search ranking

    In 2010, Google said page speed was a ranking factor only on desktop searches. Google promised to look at mobile page speed for years before this announcement.

    Starting in July 2018, Google said it would be looking at how fast mobile pages are and use that as a ranking factor in mobile search.

    Read all about it in: The Google Speed Update: Page speed will become a ranking factor in mobile search.

    Google also answered several questions for Search Engine Land, which we published in: FAQs on new Google Speed Update: AMP pages, Search Console notifications & desktop only pages.

    Also on this day 

    Google Search Console launches desktop page experience report

    2022: The report offered metrics, such as the percentage of URLs with good page experience and search impressions over time, to quickly evaluate performance and see what improvements were needed for specific pages.

    OneSearch, Verizon Media’s new search engine, sounds awfully familiar

    2020: DuckDuckGo, anyone? The new search engine would serve results powered by Bing and run contextual ads rather than behaviorally targeted ads that rely on cookies.

    Updated study: Links are still incredibly important for ranking in Google

    2019: The aggregate link data, using 27,000 queries, showed a strong correlation between links and ranking.

    Bing Ads will serve all Yahoo search ads in new Microsoft-Verizon Media deal

    2019: The extended partnership would make all Yahoo search inventory available through the Bing Ads platform. Bing Ads would continue to serve all AOL search inventory.

    Google shares tips for success in Google News search results

    2019: These 11 tips were largely established best practices – a good refresher, rather than new approaches.

    Survey: Smart speaker ownership steals time from smartphones, TV, radio

    2018: The study suggested there are about 40 million devices in US homes.

    Survey: 60% of voice users want more answers and fewer search results

    2017: Making calls, searching, texting and map lookups were the most common use cases for voice.

    Google Issues Bad Ads Report: 59 Percent More Ads Pulled, But Fewer Bad Advertisers In 2013

    2014: Google said it pulled more than 350 million bad ads from its systems.

    AdWords Cross-Device Conversions: How 1-800-FLOWERS Is Using The Data To Be More Customer Centric

    2014: 1-800-Flowers saw the overall conversion contribution from AdWords rise 7% when counting orders that started on one device and ended on another. 

    Google Alerts Get A Shiny New Redesign

    2014: The emails got a similarly clean look-and-feel to the card-style layout that had become prevalent in Google search results, Google Now, on Google’s mobile apps and elsewhere.

    Search In Pics: Bing Hawks Towels, YouTube’s Emmy & Android Sugar Cubes

    2014: 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.

    Bing Adds 5X More Facebook Content To Social Sidebar

    2013: This included Facebook status updates, comments and shared links in addition to the Facebook content already present (Likes, photos, etc.).

    Adobe: Paid Search Opportunities Lie In Tablet Targeting And PLAs

    2013: Paid search as a whole had a good holiday season, Adobe found, with spend by online retailers up 16% year-over-year.

    Ever Wanted To Be Siri? Apple Seeks A Writer

    2013: The ideal candidate: someone who combined a love for language, wordplay, and conversation with demonstrated experience in bringing creative content to life within an intense technical environment.

    “Who Sent Me Chocolates?” – Company Tries Sweet Twist To Tap Into Google Traffic

    2013: They were not the first company to suggest you Google something to click on the first result. But they seemed to be the first to send out personalized messages in this fashion.

    AdGroup-Level Impression Share Metrics Coming To AdWords

    2012: Previously, impression share metrics were available only at the campaign level, which didn’t help when advertisers were trying to determine which particular ad group should be allocated more budget.

    Google To Join Anti-SOPA “Blackout Day” With Home Page Protest

    2012: While Google wouldn’t go dark, Google did link to anti-SOPA information on its homepage.

    Yahoo’s Co-founder Jerry Yang Resigns

    2012: Yang, who co-founded the company in March 1995, officially stepped down from its Board of Directors and all other positions with the company. 

    Google Links To Competitors Next To YouTube Videos

    2011: Google began showing links to different video sites and search engines in its search results. The links appeared next to YouTube videos, but only on music-related searches. 

    Robbing Peter To Pay Paul: Report Says MSN Suffering For Focus On Bing

    2011: Microsoft’s use of its popular portal MSN as a traffic driver for Bing was compromising some of MSN’s partner relationships, angering internal sales staff and even costing the company revenue.

    Spanish Want Google To Police Libel On The Internet

    2011: The Spanish data protection authority demanded that Google remove links to articles online (e.g., newspaper articles) that contain defamatory content.

    Seznam.cz Disputes Google’s No. 1 Ranking In Czech Republic

    2011: Seznam called the news “misleading” and said they were based on “a rather unobjective interpretation of Toplist statistics.”

    Google’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Logo

    2011: Google had a special Doodle on Google.com for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

    Yahoo & Microsoft Execs Meet Again

    2009: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer met with Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock, restarting speculation about the on-again, off-again merger/deal talks.

    Google’s Video Sites Gain Market Share

    2008: Americans viewed nearly 9.5 billion online videos during the month and Google was the leading destination, with 3 billion videos viewed (31.3% share of all videos viewed), 2.9 billion of which were on YouTube (30.6%).

    OpenID Gaining Critical Mass, Yahoo Announces Support

    2008: Yahoo’s 248 million registered users became part of the Open ID system.

    The Library of Congress Teams Up With Flickr

    2008: The Flickr community was asked to tag photos to help users search for those pictures and give the Library of Congress a more complete and comprehensive method of organizing those photos.

    Google.org To Announce Five Strategic Initiatives Today

    2008: $25 million in new grants and investments to initial partners.

    Truveo Creates New Election Videos Site

    2008: It collected candidate videos as well as commentary and news footage.  

    Q&A With Gabe Rivera, Creator Of Techmeme

    2007: Gabe talked about the service, how it had grown, how it operates and future plans.

    Linkbait Articles & Is It Linkbait Or Link Bait?

    2007: A rundown on a few linkbait articles and the “to linkbait” or “to link bait” decision we had to make.

    Google AdSense Updates Program Policies & Competitive Ads Policy

    2007: Running anything in an ad unit that resembled the AdSense ad unit appearing anywhere on the same site became against the terms. 

    Google Pushing Google Checkout More

    2007: New Google Checkout customers got $10 from Google to spend at Google Checkout merchants.

    Wired Looks At Yahoo Failures Over The Years

    2007: From not buying Google, to Panama and more.

    Are Lower Case Titles In Yahoo Coming From Anchor Text

    2007: It was a bug. Yahoo fixed the issue about a week later.

    Star Your Favorite Questions at Yahoo Answers

    2007: Yahoo allowed users to vote for their favorite questions by adding a star next to interesting or high-quality questions.

    Industry Moves: Peter Horan Goes To IAC

    2007: Peter Horan was the About.com CEO until its acquisition by the New York Times. and then headed up small business portal AllBusiness.com

    Mapshark: A Search Engine For Mashups

    2007: It was built using Google’s Custom Search Engine to find interesting and useful mashups.

    Boxxet Offers “Best Of” Collections On Popular Topics

    2007: It combined aspects of computer automation with community and social commentary and ranking systems to create “box sets” of web-based content for specific topics.

    Search Engine Land: Top Stories & Stats, Jan. 16, 2007

    2007: A look at the top stories, along with tips, takeaways and suggestions.

    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 16 | Search Marketing History | January 18 >

    The post This day in search marketing history: January 17 appeared first on Search Engine Land.

    Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing




    This day in search marketing history: January 16

    Written on January 16, 2023 at 4:50 am, by admin

    Top Story

    In 2017, Google’s Gary Illyes explained what crawl budget is, how crawl rate limits work, what crawl demand is and what factors impact a site’s crawl budget.

    As Illyes explained, most sites don’t need to worry about crawl budget.

    “Prioritizing what to crawl, when, and how much resource the server hosting the site can allocate to crawling is more important for bigger sites, or those that auto-generate pages based on URL parameters,” Illyes said.

    More from Illyes:

    Read all about it in Google explains what “crawl budget” means for webmasters.

    Also on this day 

    Google Ads bug again for Gmail on desktop Safari browsers

    2022: This impacted Google Ads that were served in Gmail for users accessing their email using the Safari desktop browser.

    Google January 2020 core update almost done rolling out

    2020: Google confirmed: “the update is mostly done…”

    Google Search Console unparsable structured data report data issue

    2020: Some users may have seen a spike in unparsable structured data errors due to an internal Google misconfiguration.

    Google Search Console’s URL inspection tool adds HTTP response, page resources, JS logs and rendered screenshot

    2019: The tool added the ability to see a specific URL’s HTTP response code, the page resources, the JavaScript logs and a rendered screenshot.

    Bing Ads launches page feeds for easier Dynamic Search Ads management

    2019: Page feeds eliminated the need to create targets for specific URLs or groups of URLs in DSA campaigns, making it easier to set up and manage.

    Google ordered to submit search index to state sponsorship in Russia

    2019: A law passed in 2018 mandated that search engine results be filtered through the federal state information system (FGIS).

    Katy Jurado Google doodle marks 94th birthday of film star from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema

    2018: Jurado was drawn in a powerful pose against a backdrop inspired by the film “High Noon.”

    Google Image Search testing YouTube videos

    2017: Google was embedding playable YouTube videos for certain queries.

    Martin Luther King Jr. Day Google doodle promotes King’s message of unity

    2017: The Doodle, by guest artist Keith Mallett, captured one of the major themes of King’s speeches and writing: “All life is interrelated.”

    Google Still Doing At Least 1 Trillion Searches Per Year

    2015: Google was sticking with the figure it gave in 2012 but stressed it’s “over” that amount. How much? Google wouldn’t say.

    Google’s Knowledge Graph May Show For 25% Of All Search Queries

    2015: The figure was important because it meant searchers often didn’t need to leave Google to visit a publisher’s site. 

    2015 Oscar Nominations Now Showing In Google Knowledge Graph & Bing Carousel

    2015: Searches for [Oscar nominee] and [Oscar nominations] on Google and Bing delivered results for the best picture candidates.

    Local SEOs Sound Off On Google+ Local Hijackings

    2014: Local SEOs and people familiar with Google+ Local theorized about on how this happened and shared suggestions o how to guard against future hijackings.

    Bing: It’s A Myth That Keyword Rich Domain Names Improve Search Rankings

    2014: The domain and keywords in that “domain send less and less” ranking signals to the overall Bing ranking algorithm.

    RKG Report: PLAs Fuel AdWords Growth, Bing Ads Spend Rises Sharply In Q4

    2014: Paid search spend among RKG’s retail-heavy client set rose 23 percent year-over-year. Overall click volume increased 19 percent, and CPCs ticked up just 3 percent.

    Covario: Global PPC Click-Through Rates Hit New Highs, Spend Up 17 Percent YoY In Q4

    2014: Based on results from their high tech, consumer electronics and retail clients, PPC spending increased 17% year-over-year and 13% over Q3 2013.

    Google Now Cards Hit The Desktop For Mac, Windows and Chrome OS Users

    2014: The Google Now cards ran through the latest Google Chrome build (Chrome Canary). Users had to be logged into Chrome.

    Dian Fossey Commemorated With Google Logo To Mark The Famous Zoologist’s 82nd Birthday

    2014: The logo included illustrations of the Silverback gorillas Fossey studied during her time in Rwanda, along with a picture of the Rwanda mountains where Fossey set camp for most of her 18 years with the gorillas.

    Report: PLAs Drove 28% Of Google Non-Brand Ad Clicks In Q4

    2013: The non-brand ROI for Google was 22% higher than that for Bing.

    Play The Frank Zamboni Google Doodle

    2013: The interactive Doodle allows searchers to play the Zamboni game by cleaning the ice after it is being used by children, hockey players and ice dancers.

    How To Blackout Your Site (For SOPA/PIPA) Without Hurting SEO

    2012: Google’s advice was to use a 503 HTTP status code to tell spiders that the website was temporarily unavilable.

    Google Honors Martin Luther King Jr. Day With “I Have A Dream” Logo

    2012: The Doodle included a couple lines from his famous speech.

    Google Plans To Buy Its Way Into Real Estate

    2010: Actually … Google’s goal was to acquire one to two companies a month. Not necessarily just small real estate companies.

    Why Don’t Google & Yahoo Offer Twitter Search?

    2009: if you want to find Twitter’s powerful, compelling material, you went to Twitter. Not to Yahoo. Not to Google, the king of search. 

    Microsoft’s Early Mistakes & Missed Opportunities With Paid Search

    2009: From bCentral Keywords, to not purchasing Overture, and its failed attempts to buy Yahoo.

    Google Names Marchex First ‘Google AdWords Authorized Reseller Technology Platform’

    2009: The purpose of this designation was to allow Google to recommend an approved technology partner to AdWords resellers if those partners didn’t have the requisite scalable technology.

    Kogan ‘Indefinitely’ Delays Android Phone Launch

    2009: Due to technology compatibility issues.

    Search In Pictures: Googlers Dancing, Yahoo’s New CEO & Dinner Impossible At Yahoo

    2009: 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.

    December 2008: Search Engine Land’s Most Popular Stories

    2009:  Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular stories from December 2008.

    Google Writes Google Sitemaps FAQs

    2008: Google responded to some of the most asked questions on the Sitemaps protocol and how Google supported it.

    Google “Online Marketing Challenge” Has 724 College Teams Signed Up To Be Local SEMs

    2008: When Google tried to turn college and business school students into search marketers.

    Microsoft And EDGAR Online In Content, Ads Deal

    2008: Microsoft became the exclusive third-party provider of display, contextual and video advertising for EDGAR Online and its global audience of more than 2 million unique visitors per month.

    Yahoo’s Senior VP Of Entertainment Business Leaves

    2008: Media executives at Yahoo were leaving one after another.

    Hungry For Yahoo? Feed Yourself From Ya-Hoo! Baking Co.

    2008: “not affiliated with Yahoo!, Inc. the search engine company.”

    Google No Longer Linking To Yahoo, MapQuest Maps

    2007: Previously, a search for an address would have yielded a choice among Google Maps, Yahoo and MapQuest.

    comScore: Google Wins Again & IE7 Doesn’t Stop Microsoft’s Slide

    2007: When Google had just a 47.3% search market share.

    New Google Checkout Promo; New Google Trust Worries

    2007: Google added the ability to filter product search results from merchants using Google Checkout – and promoted the new feature within its main search results.

    Disclosing When Queries Are Autocorrected

    2007: It seemed like Google had moved beyond suggesting spelling corrections to automatically doing them for you. 

    MetaGlossary – Two Million Terms, Phrases And Acronyms

    2007: It worked in a similar manner to the Google define: function, though it tended to be more comprehensive.

    Wikiseek: Leveraging Wikipedia For Web Search, Poorly

    2007: A look at the disappointing service along with a revisit to how it was different from Search Wikia.

    Vizu Seeking To ‘Democratize’ Market Research

    2007: It offered an interesting model, creating financial incentives for publishers to show polls on their sites and a relatively inexpensive way for marketers to get quick user data.

    comScore: Email Top Reason For Mobile Internet Access

    2007: “33% strongly agree they ‘feel lost’ without their cell phone.”

    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 15 | Search Marketing History | January 17 >

    The post This day in search marketing history: January 16 appeared first on Search Engine Land.

    Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing




    This day in search marketing history: January 15

    Written on January 15, 2023 at 12:44 am, by admin

    Facebook Graph Search arrives

    In 2013, Facebook announced a new experience that it called Graph Search.

    Facebook Graph Search relied heavily on Likes and other connections to determine what to show as the most relevant search results for each user.

    At launch, Facebook Graph Search only included people, photos, places and interests.

    Facebook Graph Search wasn’t a traditional web search engine like Google or Bing. It was a new type of search – a social search engine. Although Facebook was already using Bing for web search results at that time.

    Dig deeper:

    Also on this day 

    LinkedIn launches LinkedIn Marketing Labs on-demand courses for advertisers

    2021: The courses cover the basics including an introduction to LinkedIn Ads, how to use LinkedIn ad targeting, and reporting and analytics for LinkedIn ads.

    Amazon Sponsored Products ads now support dynamic bidding, bid adjustments

    2019: Advertisers could opt into automated bidding and tailor bids for the search ads by page placement.

    EU copyright directive nearing final form as Google tests stripped-down news SERPs

    2019: The directive sought to “harmonize” copyright law across Europe.

    DuckDuckGo map and address searches now powered by Apple Maps

    2019: The company had been using OpenStreetMap.

    Google to fix reverse image search bug

    2018: “Pages that include matching images” section was not showing image thumbnails as it should.

    Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2018 Google doodle honors Dr. King & his dream for a better world

    2018: The image was designed by guest artist Cannaday Chapman and created in collaboration with the Black Googlers Network.

    Google Tests “What’s Hot” & “What’s Nearby” As Android Search Options

    2016: In addition to recent searches, Google inserted a “What’s Hot” and “Nearby” option in the pull-down menu.

    Search In Pics: Justin Trudeau At New Google Canadian Office, Google Expeditions Subaru & Fallout 4 Statue

    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. 

    Google Knowledge Graph Now Showing Social Profiles For Brands

    Google began showing the social profile links for Pixar, Apple, Starbucks, Google and many more brands.

    Search Is Number One Content Discovery Tool For Mobile Users

    2015: Fifty four percent of respondents said search was the top way they found mobile content/websites

    Smartphones Account For 40% Of US Search Ad Spend In Q4 [Marin]

    2015: Desktop’s influence, while still dominant, continued to wane

    Google Updates Its Structured Data Testing Tool, Documentation & Syntax Support

    2015: Google had a new and improved Structured Data Testing tool, updated its documentation and guidelines, while adding more markup support.

    Ability To Share Ads Via AdWords Shared Library Is Going Away

    2015: The feature would be eliminated on Feb. 11.

    Google Wants Webmaster Feedback On Web Search & Webmaster Tools

    2015: Google asked: “What would you like to see from Google Websearch & Webmaster Tools in 2015?”

    Google Events Knowledge Graph Adds Ticket Links, Delegated Events, Comedian Events & Venue Events

    2015: Google made four updates to the events knowledge graph, after launching the markup back in March 2014.

    Google Updates Maps App Adding Restaurant Filters & More

    2015: Google Maps App added cuisine type filters and more features for iOS and Android users.

    Google’s Matt Cutts: We Don’t Have Different Algorithms For Different Web Position Slots

    2014: Google’s Matt Cutts answered this question: “Are results in different positions ranked by different algorithms?” Spoiler alert: The answer was no.

    Rand Fishkin Steps Down As The CEO Of Moz, Sarah Bird New CEO

    2014: The end of an era – this was Fishkin’s final day as CEO of Moz.

    Report: Search Engines Responsible For 40% Of Holiday Traffic To Retailer Websites

    2014: While still representing the largest share, Experian reported search engines experienced a 13% drop in the amount of upstream traffic sent to retailers when comparing year-over-year traffic data.

    Bing Ends 2013 With All-Time High In US Market Share, But Google Also Up [comScore]

    2014: Google’s share of search queries was up 0.6 percent in December 2013, to 67.3 percent

    EU Wants More Search Concessions, Google Defies French Authority

    2014: EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said Google needed to deliver additional, revised proposals within weeks to avoid a formal antitrust proceeding.

    Is Lowe’s The First Brand To Adopt Jelly?

    2014: What we do know: they answered at least one question about how to mount art on a brick wall.

    Links From Press Releases Do Have Ranking Benefit Despite What Google Says

    2013: That time when Matt Cutts blog started ranking for [sreppleasers] in Google.

    Report: Global Paid Search Spending Up 18% In 2012

    2013: That growth trend was down just slightly from the 21% annual increase reported for 2011.

    77% Of Online Health Seekers Start At Search Engines [Pew Study]

    2013: That was significantly more than the 13% who began at health portals like WebMD, general information sites like Wikipedia (only 2%) and social networks (1%).

    Google’s 6th “Doodle 4 Google” Contest: “My Best Day Ever…”

    2013: The winner would earn a $30,000 college scholarship, a $50,000 technology grant for their school, and have his or her logo displayed on the Google homepage.

    Yext “Reinvents The Local Business Listing” With New Rich Content Options

    2013: And they called it … PowerListings+.

    89% Find Search Engines Do Good Job Finding Information, But “Noise” Is Issue

    2011: 13% said they couldn’t find what they were looking for. The answers were there, the “signal” that people want to tune into. They were just surrounded by a lot of noise.

    comScore: Bing Share Up – Will It Overtake Yahoo? Plus, Ask.com Sale Speculation Returns

    2010: ComScore’s search share figures from December 2009: Yahoo, 17.3%, Bing, 10.7%. (Google? It was at 65.7%.)

    Amazon Slaps UK Affiliates Using Search Marketing Techniques

    2010: Amazon said it would no longer pay referral fees to Associates who sent users via keyword bidding or other paid search on any other search engine or their extended search networks

    OneRiot Launches RiotWise Ad Network For Real-Time Search

    2010: The launch followed a pilot phase that the company said allowed developers to monetize mobile apps, desktop clients, social search engines and similar applications.

    Carol Bartz’s ‘Gut’ May Stop Yahoo Search Sale To Microsoft

    2009: Bartz said her instinct or “gut” was not necessarily to sell, although she would need to immerse herself in the issues and economics to make a better determination.

    Microsoft Job Cuts May Come Next Week

    2009: The cuts were expected to be “far less than the 15,000 positions” first thought.

    Yahoo Shows Wikipedia Some SearchMonkey Love

    2009: The Wikipedia SearchMonkey App was turned on by default for all Yahoo search users, which made it the sixth app that all Yahoo searchers would see (with LinkedIn, Yelp, Yahoo Local, Citysearch and Zagat).

    TweetNews: Yahoo Programmer Melds News Search & Twitter

    2009: TweetNews was a new search engine that used hot Twitter topics to bring more relevance and freshness to news search.

    Google Directory Update Showing “Real” PR Scores?

    2008: Google Directory scores were much higher than those shown on the Google Toolbar.

    Microsoft And MediaCart Bring Ad Targeting To Grocery Store Shopping Carts

    2008: Microsoft teamed up with MediaCart to offer in-store behavioral ad targeting and took the concept of “location-based services” to the store aisles using RFID tags.

    Google Maps Being Used To Engage Political Volunteers, Activists

    2008: How candidates, campaign staffers and other third parties were using Google Maps and the Maps API to showcase their messages and organize political volunteers and activists in upcoming primaries.

    Wireless Spectrum Bidders Approved, Auction Begins January 24

    2008: Among the bidders: Google, AT&T, Verizon and MetroPCS. 

    Study Says Get In Top 5 Not Top 10 & Search Engines May Need To Highlight Official Sites

    2007: Among the findings: search marketers needed to be more concerned about getting into the top five rather than the top ten, if they wanted to be seen.

    More Spotting Google’s Related Searches At Bottom Of Page

    2007: More searchers were seeing a series of eight suggested searches as links, under the heading of “Searches related to:” followed by the original word you searched for.

    Looking At Microsoft’s Continued Long Game In Search

    2007: “It’s tiring to hear the Microsoft leadership just rip at Google rather than deliver successes that speak for themselves.”

    Microsoft Live & Yahoo Push For Firefox Users, Plus Revisiting The IE7 Search Battle

    2007: How the various search engines were trying to get users to make them their default choice.

    SEO Blogs Under Hack Attack

    2007: Graywolf’s blog was hacked, then Stuntdubl went down.

    Hacking Google To Help It Improve Security

    2007: “It’s your worst nightmare – someone reads parts of your Google emails, views your docs, modifies your spreadsheets, checks out your reading habits on the Google personalized homepage or Google Reader, and goes through your search history.”

    Googlers Give Overwhelmingly To Democrats; Google’s PAC Gave More To Republicans

    2007: While 98% of Google employee money went to Democrats in the last election, the company-controlled Google NetPAC gave 61% of its contributions to conservative candidates. 

    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 14 | Search Marketing History | January 16 >

    The post This day in search marketing history: January 15 appeared first on Search Engine Land.

    Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing




    This day in search marketing history: January 14

    Written on January 15, 2023 at 12:44 am, by admin

    R.I.P. AMP

    In 2022, we revealed what happened when Search Engine Land shut off AMP.

    TL;DR: “We have seen very little disruption to our traffic and have reaped the benefit of having a clearer picture of our audience analytics.”

    We didn’t see any year-over-year declines in traffic that we could tie to AMP aside from the loss of pageviews to a handful of pieces that routinely spike for organic traffic.

    Why did Search Engine Land shut off AMP? As we explained in We’re turning off AMP pages at Search Engine Land, it was due to competition in Top Stories (after AMP was no longer required for inclusion in Top Stories) and waning support by social media platforms.

    Read all about it in What happened when we turned off AMP.

    Also on this day

    Shopify chat bug leads to titles with (1) in Google’s search results

    2022: It was a widespread issue, not a Google bug, related to a chat feature in Shopify that had this unintended consequence in search.

    Google Ads enables bid simulator for Target ROAS, budget simulator for Maximize clicks, conversions

    2020: You could see the projected impact of making bid or budget changes in your campaigns that used these smart bidding strategies.

    Google buys Pointy to bring SMB store inventory online

    2020: Pointy had solved a problem that vexed startups for more than a decade: how to bring small, independent retailer inventory online.

    Nofollow couldn’t save the Google webmaster blog from comment spam

    2019: Google removed the ability to leave comments on Google Webmaster blog because “most of the time they were off-topic or even outright spammy.”

    How Google’s Search Chief Has Been Living The “Mobile First” Life For Over A Year

    2016: Amit Singhal, Google’s senior vice president of search, did almost all of his searches for more than a year on mobile devices.

    Bing Ads Updates Keyword Planner With Impression Share Comparisons And More

    2016: The new features: more competitive insights and benchmarking, customizable ad group and keyword bids, a new source for keyword suggestions and time range customization up to 24 months for keyword search volume.

    Bing Updates Its Logo With Uppercase “B” & New Teal Blue Color

    2016: “It felt like the right time to freshen things up,” said Microsoft spokesperson.

    Google Street View Goes “Miniatur” To Capture Hamburg Model Train Exhibit

    2016: Google documented the attraction with tiny Street View cars as though it were a real place.

    Google News Now Will Crawl & Index Images Hosted Off Your Domain Name

    2015: In the past, if your images were hosted off your website’s domain, it was very unlikely Google would crawl them for Google News.

    Q4 Paid Search Ad Revenue Up 24 Percent YoY In The Americas [Kenshoo]

    2015: Return on investment rose as revenue outpaced the rise in spending.

    Google History Added A Section For Your Google Now Cards

    2015: You could track, over time, what Google Now Cards Google showed you each day.

    Google Translate App Gets Improved Picture & Conversational Translation

    2015: The update brought both camera and conversation mode translation to the iOS app for the first time, as well as vast improvements to those features on the Android version of the app.

    Google Opens A Visitor Center

    2015: Historically, Google had never allowed for random people to come and visit or tour the offices.

    Thousands Of Hotel Listings Were Hijacked In Google+ Local

    2014: Thousands of hotels listed within Google+ Local appeared to have had links leading to their official sites “hijacked” and replaced with ones leading to third-party booking services.

    Google Image Search Adds Usage Rights To Search Tools

    2014: The feature wasn’t new. You just no longer had to dig into the “advanced image search” features to get them.

    Two Videos Of What It Would Be Like If Google Was A Real Living Person

    2014: Two video parodies make fun of what a Google would be if it was a real guy.

    Yelp Turns Up The Heat: 285 Consumer Alerts Issued Over Fake Reviews

    2014: A pop-up alert appeared on a Yelp business profile page and warned consumers that a Yelp sting operation had caught the company trying to acquire reviews by buying them, offering gifts or discounts, or some other way that Yelp doesn’t allow.

    Wayback Machine Now Has 240 Billion URLs

    2013: Prior to this update, The Wayback Machine provided access to about 150 billion URLs.

    Welcome AJ Kohn & Ginny Marvin To Search Engine Land, Marketing Land

    2013: Kohn joined us as our Special Projects Correspondent. Marvin joined as a Contributing Writer, focusing primarily on paid advertising topics (she would go on to become Editor-in-Chief from October 2018 to December 2020).

    DuckDuckGo Relaunches With New Visual Design

    2012: Founder Gabriel Weinberg has been taking feedback and tweaking the design for at least three-plus weeks in the site’s community forum, where he announced the new look and layout.

    Google’s John Hanke Speaks About New Mobile Incubator

    2011: After six years at the helm of Google Maps, Hanke said he was “restless” and was a bit tired of running a large organization.

    Google, Bing Up While AOL Hits All-Time Low: comScore December Search Data

    2011: Google hit 66.6% – a record high for Google in comScore’s numbers – while AOL hit a historic low of 1.9%.

    More See Horizontal Look For Top Three Google Ads

    2011: In the new format, the headline was combined with the first description line, or the two description lines were combined.

    South Korean Police File Criminal Charges Over Google’s WiFi Data Gathering

    2011: Police examined the data that Google collected between October 2009 and May 2010 and determined that it broke two South Korean laws.

    Bing Set To Advertise During Golden Globe Awards

    2011: Both ads played on the Bing “decision engine” idea by having aspiring actors explain why they decided to get into acting, followed by a message that “pre-congratulates the Golden Globe winners of tomorrow.”

    Yahoo’s Irving: “Hell Yes” Yahoo Is Committed To Flickr

    2011: “Q. Is Yahoo! committed to Flickr? A. Hell yes we are! We love this product and team; on strategy and profitable.”

    Google Search Suggestions For Mobile Get Locally Relevant

    2010: Query suggestions varied based on user location.

    Experian Hitwise: Google Passes 72% U.S. Market Share

    2010: Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.com all saw their search share drop from November to December.

    100 Day Reminder: AdWords API v13 Sunsetting

    2010: Another warning.

    Google Integrates “Real-Time” Messages Into Place Pages, Makes BlackBerry Mobile App More Useful

    2010: Businesses could use their Place Pages to promote time-sensitive (real-time) events – as long as they could find the feature.

    Shashi Seth Now At Yahoo From AOL, Cooliris & Google

    2010: As the new Senior Vice President of the Yahoo Search Products team, Seth would manage Yahoo’s Search team and all things related to Yahoo Search.

    Chinese Gov’t Offers Bland Statement On Google, Google.cn Employees Given Indefinite Holiday

    2010: China’s government suggested it likely wasn’t going to allow Google to operate unfiltered or negotiate with the search engine.

    Yahoo Adds Network Distribution & Improved Importing To Search Ads

    2010: Network Distribution allowed advertisers to select if they wanted to advertise on Yahoo’s entire network or just on either the Yahoo Search network or Yahoo Search Partner network.

    Where Have All The Old Tweets Gone?

    2010: The massive number of new tweets coming in was to blame. The search index behind Twitter Search couldn’t hold it all.

    After The Hack, Should I Still Trust Google & The Cloud With My Data?

    2010: Would the entire GoogleHack episode develop into a major reversal for the growth of cloud computing? (Spoiler alert: No.)

    Google Pledges $1 Million To Haiti Relief Efforts, Bing & Yahoo Add Donation Info

    2010: The major search engines responded by linking information about disaster relief efforts from their homepages.

    Google Local Business Ads Score New Features

    2009: New links appeared at the bottom of the ad’s info window: Get Directions, Street View, and/or Save to My Maps.

    Google Creates Smart Sitemap Generator Tool

    2009: It used web traffic, log files and other methods to find new or modified URLs. 

    Google Ends Google Video Uploads, Shutters Notebook, Catalog Search, Dodgeball & Jaiku

    2009: Google ceased developing a variety of products as part of a continuing move to keep efforts focused on products with greater usage

    Google Apps Authorized Reseller Program

    2009: The program was aimed at developers, hosting companies and others to take on the responsibility of billing, support and training, in exchange for a 20% discount on the services.

    Adobe & Yahoo Discontinue PDF Contextual Ad Program

    2009: Blame the failure on the economic conditions.

    Consumer Groups Trying To Preempt Behavioral Targeting For Mobile Ads

    2009: A complaint sought to preempt the development of behavioral targeting and profiling in mobile advertising.

    Harvard Prof: Deceptive Ads ‘Widespread’ On Yahoo’s Right Media

    2009: The ads were either are false or failed to make legally required disclosures.

    Yahoo Shuts Down Content Match In UK

    2009: Yahoo matched the advertiser’s ads by the contextual relevancy of the page’s content to the keywords the advertisers purchased.

    Google Cuts 100 Recruiters; May Replace Up To 70 Engineers Due To Office Closures

    2009: Google implied the cuts would be due to the engineers not being willing or able to relocate to Google’s Mountain View headquarters.

    An Apology To Wired & The Search Marketing Community

    2008: The article generated some serious spam issues for Wired, generated discord within the search marketing community, and injured the search marketing industry in general.

    Google Loves The iPhone, But Google’s Eric Schmidt Won’t “Talk” About It

    2008: Google CEO Eric Schmidt was a member of the Apple board and was on stage for the iPhone’s introduction.

    Liberty Media Corporation Bought 14 Million Shares In IAC

    2008: The 14 million shares came out to about $339.5 million, but gave Liberty Media Corporation about a 30 percent stake in the parent company of Ask.com.

    IncrediMail Gets Crushed Financially By Google AdSense Ban

    2008: The ban seemed to have caused their stock price to drop 45% in one day.

    Professor Bans Google & Wikipedia In Class Room

    2008: University of Brighton professor said using Google and Wikipedia doesn’t encourage students to use their “own brains” enough

    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 13 | Search Marketing History | January 15 >

    The post This day in search marketing history: January 14 appeared first on Search Engine Land.

    Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing




    AI content: Is it helpful or spam?

    Written on January 13, 2023 at 8:42 pm, by admin

    When Google announced the helpful content update, many in the SEO industry expected AI-generated content to get hit hard. 

    I was expecting AI-generated content to get wiped out by this supposedly sweeping update, comparable to 2011’s Panda algorithm update. Yet, no major impact was recorded. 

    Soon after, Google released the October 2022 spam update and that’s when we saw websites using AI content affected, although not as dramatically.

    What happened? Let me take a few steps back.

    Another vicious Panda attack?

    Back in 2011, content farms were a serious problem. Many companies like Demand Media made a fortune by mass-producing low-quality articles.

    They created thin content stuffed with all kinds of keyword variations taken from keyword research tools and generated similar articles for each slightly differing version of a popular search query. 

    Underpaid and often outsourced workers from overseas wrote about topics they had no idea about, often creating gibberish.

    Panda was a significant algorithm update that even legitimate blogs were affected. How do I know? My own popular SEO blog also got penalized. I lost most of my major top 10 rankings for phrases like [url seo], [image seo] or [advanced seo] overnight, and haven’t been able to recover them ever since.

    Google was under increasing pressure to deal with content farms, especially as the search engine’s then-contender, the now-defunct Blekko, promoted itself as a content farm-free alternative to Google.

    Welcome to the future (of search)

    We’re living in 2023 and there are still no proper flying cars and jetpacks. What we do have are breakthroughs in automation, particularly for the manufacturing and services sectors.

    On the web, it’s even more obvious. Automation helps us every day with a plethora of repetitive tasks and beyond.

    The work we do has changed a lot in recent years. Boring and tedious tasks are being replaced by the creative industries. Many even play for a living by being professional skateboarders or gamers, making money as content creators and influencers.

    When it comes to SEO, a lot of tasks can get automated, but the results vary. The overall focus of modern SEO is on human-to-human engagement – think of audience building and outreach.

    My content creator bias

    As a writer, I’ve become increasingly anxious in recent years due to the rise of AI. My fear stemmed not from an imagined Terminator-like apocalypse (even though that might still happen), but more from AI’s potential impact on my own line of work.

    Would AI content soon replace actual writers like myself? We don’t know yet. It hasn’t happened as of now. What we do know, though, is that some bloggers use AI content tools to create content themselves. 

    Saying that AI might replace writers is like saying that typewriters or computers will replace writers. Can a tool replace the person who uses the tool? Maybe for menial tasks. But is writing a menial task? 

    In a way, I am already using AI just by writing this article. Google Docs offers suggestions to fix my grammar – although not as many as Grammarly (which was too invasive for me) but more than what Microsoft Word provided in the past.

    Get the daily newsletter search marketers rely on.

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    See terms.

    A look at automation in SEO

    In SEO, there are many ways to automate repetitive tasks and streamline workflows using various tools.

    Keyword research

    No single person can compile and assess the data for proper keyword research. Even if you do not use AI or conventional keyword research tools, you at least use Google to check those keywords “manually,” while Google uses advanced algorithms, AI and all types of automation to access keyword databases. 

    There is indeed unethical or questionable keyword research automation, which involves crawling large numbers of Google results without authorization and causing heavy load on their servers. 

    That said, this is only relevant for large-scale technical SEOs, as most mere mortals will resort to common keyword research tools that might already include AI input.

    Auditing websites

    You can get a fully automated website audit from many SEO tools. Even though they can’t match the expertise of an SEO consultant, some are very helpful and often free. 

    Tools like Semrush, WooRank or HubSpot offer website auditing to inform your SEO strategy. Do not shy away from using them whenever they are helpful. 

    The only drawback is that some tools may cause a heavy load on a website as they crawl it in its entirety by requesting and parsing hundreds or thousands of pages, at once or in quick succession. I’m not aware of AI tools used to audit website issues but they would make sense for this use case.

    Checking links (both internal and external)

    Checking internal links or external links from sites that link to you and sites you link to is a classic way of using SEO tools long before AI was sophisticated enough to help with SEO tasks. Internal links can break or simply divert website authority to orphan pages or less important resources. 

    A well-optimized website has a structure that allows the overall authority to flow freely. AI tools could easily find and track links in ways that go beyond “push button” or “cron job” types of checks. As always, it’s important not to cause too much load on other websites. 

    Checking rankings

    Checking rankings is similar to checking links, but with a twist. Google search results must be crawled using automated tools, which is against their terms of use. If you use ranking checkers from your local computer, your IP might get blocked by Google.

    Thus, this is quite risky and should only be an option when you have nothing to lose or you’re advanced technology that either balances the usage of Google resources or obfuscates your tracks to cover up where the load comes from. 

    I know that some SEO tool providers have access to large server farms to fool Google into believing that legit human users are accessing their services. AI could help to alleviate the issue by causing less load or by hiding the activity better. 

    What about automated content?

    Automating content creation is not an ideal use case. AI tools do not have the firsthand experience Google requires and is expected by readers. They merely rewrite existing knowledge using their “own” words.

    In the past, lots of spammers have tried to trick Google into believing that they have content-rich sites by spinning articles and rewriting them with synonyms. Google has long since filtered this from the SERPs.

    The new generation of content automation tools run by AI

    Many AI content tools proliferate in the market. They have well-designed websites, and some even quote SEO experts who recommend them.

    I just searched the web for AI content and found lots of services offering it. Some of these tools are.

    Proof Content

    Proof Content promotes itself with the slogan, “Data-driven content for brands with something to say,” and claims their AI content is “automated,” “tailored,” and “speedy.”

    They use “human editors” so content is not 100% automated. One of their results examples highlights success by an “increase of 127% SEO traffic growth YOY.”

    Frase

    Frase emphasizes speed even more while still promising improved quality, “Better content, faster.” 

    They also clearly talk to SEO-driven marketers by declaring they can “create SEO content fast with AI,” adding that “going from keyword to SEO-optimized article has never been easier.”

    GrowthBar

    The GrowthBar AI content generator is even called growthbarseo.com in the domain name so there is no doubt that it is made to create SEO content. It also says so in its value proposition: “Make SEO … content that Google loves with AI”. It also incorporates a keyword research tool and a Chrome extension.

    There is no ambiguity when it comes to the most important use case of these tools – content creation for SEO purposes.

    What do the quoted experts say?

    Brandan Hufford is quoted on the Frase page as saying: 

    Kevin Indig is cited on the same page:

    Thomas Melching encourages the use of GrowthBar with the following: 

    Mark Sandusky praises GrowthBar, saying: 

    Can they all be wrong? As they also do not hide their usage of AI content tools they are apparently not afraid of their projects being penalized as spam or thin content.

    So, is AI content helpful or spam? 

    Can we clearly say whether AI content is helpful or spam? Well, we can’t. It depends.

    In my opinion, AI content can be both helpful and spam. 

    The motivation and the effort invested in it are some factors to consider. If you invest zero effort and let the AI do 100% of the work, the risk of getting low-level content farm drivel is high.

    It really depends on quality over quantity. 

    One thing is for sure, churning mass-produced, low-quality content makes all your content less than stellar. It doesn’t matter whether you use AI or inexperienced writers to inflate your website disproportionately, the outcome is the same. 

    Less is more when it comes to content production. Regular publishing is fine as long as it’s not flooding.

    WordLift has an in-depth overview of how “generative AI” can work for SEO content purposes and beyond.

    The generative AI landscape for SEO automationImage credit: WordLift

    As of now, it mostly works well for easy content-related tasks (green) like:

    Human intervention

    The key to making AI work in content creation is to double down on quality.

    Implement quality control and ensure editorial content involves actual human editors. Do not let AI write and decide by itself. People must stay in charge. 

    This is also the feedback I got from SEOs using AI for content creation. Their content is never completely automated and there are quality checks to ensure compliance with Google’s standards.

    Google Search Advocate John Mueller has been pretty clear about AI content being “still” against Google’s webmaster guidelines in April 2022.

    Using AI ethically in SEO

    The question of whether AI content is helpful or becomes spam essentially boils down to the ethics behind it. What is the purpose of the automation process? 

    Do you want to flood Google with potentially useless content just to make money from ad or affiliate revenue? Well, guess what, you are likely to spam.

    Do you want to get your hands free from the menial work of rephrasing the basics that AI can gobble up from the web automatically to make sure your contribution is akin to poetry and one of a kind that nonsentient AI can’t replicate? Bingo!

    Can creativity get fully automated?

    Only truly intelligent AI could actually create as a human being does. Otherwise, it’s merely combining “facts” from elsewhere.

    Many science fiction works have dealt with the possibility of artificial intelligence becoming fully alive. Most of those are scary dystopian visions. Some aren’t. 

    There is a movie that is somewhere in the middle of those two extremes called “I, Robot” starring Will Smith. Based on a novel by Isaac Asimov, a respected science fiction writer, the film captures both the essence of humanity and true artificial intelligence pretty well. Asimov comes close to answering this question. (You can read the novel on Archive.org for free.)

    The post AI content: Is it helpful or spam? appeared first on Search Engine Land.

    Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing




    Google’s December 2022 helpful content update is now done rolling out

    Written on January 12, 2023 at 4:42 pm, by admin

    Google has confirmed that the December 2022 helpful content update is now finished rolling out. The update took 38 days to roll out, starting on December 5, 2022 but was first noticeable on December 6th, and ending on January 12, 2023. Google has posted it was completed today, January 12.

    As a reminder, Google’s helpful content update is a sitewide signal. It targets websites with a relatively high amount of unsatisfying or unhelpful content, where the content is first written for search engines.

    What was new with this update. The December 2022 helpful content update (aka system) is a global update, impacting all languages and not just the English language. This will help Google’s systems detect more forms of low-quality content created for search engines and primarily not for people.

    Google also told us this system was updated with additional signals to help Google identify more content created primarily for search engines versus people.

    What to do if you are hit. Google has provided a list of questions you can ask yourself about your content. Read through those questions as we posted over here, and in an unbiased manner, ask yourself if your content is in sync with this update.

    Please note if this update has hit you, it can take several months to recover if you do everything right and make changes to your content over time.

    More on the helpful content update. Google’s helpful content update specifically targets “content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people.”

    This algorithm update aims to help searchers find “high-quality content,” Google told us. Google wants to reward better and more useful content that was written for humans and to help users.

    Content written for the purpose of ranking in search engines – what you might call “search engine-first content” or “SEO content,” has been frequently written about lately and discussed across social media.

    In short, searchers are getting frustrated when they land on unhelpful webpages that rank well in search because they were designed to rank well.

    Google’s new algorithm aims to downgrade those types of websites while promoting more helpful websites, designed for humans, above search engines.

    Google said this is an “ongoing effort to reduce low-quality content and make it easier to find content that feels authentic and useful in search.”

    Why we care. If you notice any ranking and visibility changes in Google search over the past two weeks or so, especially if those were big changes, you can likely attribute it to this update. Read Google’s advice, make the necessary changes, and hope for a recovery in the upcoming months.

    We hope you all benefited from this update and if not, we hope you recover quickly.

    The post Google’s December 2022 helpful content update is now done rolling out appeared first on Search Engine Land.

    Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing




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