Atomic Media text

Home
Blog
SEO Services
Web Development Services
Free Stuff
Software Products
Contact

Atomic Media

You are currently browsing the Atomic Media blog archives.


Pages

  • About

    • Archives



    Categories

    seo news (13231)

    Blogroll

    Development Blog
    Documentation
    Plugins
    Suggest Ideas
    Support Forum
    Themes
    WordPress Planet

    Google Search Console’s video indexing report now live for all

    Written on August 22, 2022 at 6:18 am, by admin

    In May, Google teased a new video indexing report in Google Search Console, then in July the report started to roll out to some properties, the search company announced. Now, the report is fully live for all properties where Google can detect video on the site, the company just announced on Twitter.

    What is the video indexing report. The video indexing report shows how many indexed pages on your site contain one or more videos, and how many of those pages a video could be indexed. Google said the report can help you understand the performance of your videos on Google, and identify possible areas of improvement.

    What it looks like. Here is a screenshot of this report for one of my sites in Google Search Console:

    Google’s announcement. Here is the tweet where Google announced this:

    We have completed the roll out of the Search Console Video index report – if Google detects videos on your site, this report will appear on the left navigation bar in the coverage section. We hope this will help you understand how your videos perform on Search! ????‍???? https://t.co/XfQO5q42md

    — Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) August 22, 2022

    When the report shows. Google said if Google detects videos on your site, the Video indexing report will appear on the left navigation bar in the coverage section. If Google has not detected a video on your website, you will not see the report.

    What it tells you. The report shows the status of video indexing on your site. It helps you answer the following questions:

    In addition, if you fix an existing issue, you can use the report to validate the fix and track how your fixed video pages are updated in the Google index, Google explained.

    URL Inspection tool for video pages. Google also also enhanced the URL Inspection tool to allow you to check the video indexing status of a specific page. When inspecting a page, if Google detected a video in it, you will see the following in the results:

    Why we care. If you host videos on your site or embed videos on your site, you will want to check out this report to see if there are ways to improve those videos or help other videos to show up in Google Search. Videos are an important aspect of search traffic and visibility in Google Search.

    There are a lot more details on this new report in this Google help document.

    The post Google Search Console’s video indexing report now live for all appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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




    Google Helpful Content Update

    Written on August 20, 2022 at 12:08 am, by admin

    Granular Panda

    Reading the tea leaves on the pre-announced Google “helpful content” update rolling out next week & over the next couple weeks in the English language, it sounds like a second and perhaps more granular version of Panda which can take in additional signals, including how unique the page level content is & the language structure on the pages.

    Like Panda, the algorithm will update periodically across time & impact websites on a sitewide basis.

    Cold Hot Takes

    The update hasn’t even rolled out yet, but I have seen some write ups which conclude with telling people to use an on-page SEO tool, tweets where people complained about low end affiliate marketing, and gems like a guide suggesting empathy is important yet it has multiple links on how to do x or y “at scale.”

    Trashing affiliates is a great sales angle for enterprise SEO consultants since the successful indy affiliate often knows more about SEO than they do, the successful affiliate would never become their client, and the corporation that is getting their asses handed to them by an affiliate would like to think this person has the key to re-balance the market in their own favor.

    My favorite pre-analysis was a person who specialized in ghostwriting books for CEOs Tweeting that SEO has made the web too inauthentic and too corporate. That guy earned a star & a warm spot in my heart.

    Profitable Publishing

    Of course everything in publishing is trade offs. That is why CEOs hire ghostwriters to write books for them, hire book launch specialists to manipulate the best seller lists, or even write messaging books in the first place. To some Dan Price was a hero advocating for greater equality and human dignity. To others he was a sort of male feminist superhero, with all the Harvey Weinstein that typically entails.

    Anyone who has done 100 interviews with journalists see ones that do their job by the book and aim to inform their readers to the best of their abilities (my experiences with the Wall Street Journal & PBS were aligned with this sort of ideal) and then total hatchet jobs where a journalist plants a quote they want & that they said, that they then attributes it to you (e.g. London Times freelance journalist).

    There are many dimensions to publishing:

    • depth
    • purpose
    • timing
    • audience
    • language
    • experience
    • format
    • passion
    • uniqueness
    • frequency

    Blogs to Feeds

    For a long time indy blogs punched well above their weight due to the incestuous nature of cross-referencing each other, the speed of publishing when breaking news, and how easy feed readers made it to subscribe to your favorite blogs. Google Reader then ate the feed reader market & shut down. And many bloggers who had unique things to say eventually started to repeat themselves. Or their passions & interests changed. Or their market niche disappeared as markets moved on. Starting over is hard & staying current after the passion fades is difficult. Plus if you were rather successful it is easy to become self absorbed and/or lose the hunger and drive that initially made you successful.

    Around the same time blogs started sliding people spent more and more time on various social networks which hyper-optimized the slot machine type dopamine rush people get from refreshing the feed. Social media largely replaced blogs, while legacy media publishers got faster at putting out incomplete news stories to be updated as they gather more news. TikTok is an obvious destination point for that dopamine rush - billions of short pieces of content which can be consumed quickly and shared - where the user engagement metrics for each user are tracked and aggregated across each snippet of media to drive further distribution.

    Burnout & Changing Priorities

    I know one of the reasons I blog less than I used to is a lot of the things I would write would be repeats. Another big reason was when my wife was pregnant I decided to shut down our membership site so I could take my wife for a decently long walk almost everyday so her health was great when it came time to give birth & ensure I had spare capacity for if anything went wrong with the pregnancy process. As a kid my dad was only around much for a few summers and I wanted to be better than that for my kid.

    The other reason I cut back on blogging is at some point search went from a endless blue water market to a zero sum game to a negative sum game (as ad clicks displaced organic clicks). And in such an environment if you have a sustainable competitive advantage it is best to lean into it yourself as hard as you can rather than sharing it with others. Like when we had an office here our link builders I trained were getting awesome unpaid links from high-trust sources for what backed out to about $25 of labor time (and no more than double that after factoring in office equipment, rent, etc.).

    If I share that script / process on the blog publicly I would move the economics against myself. At the end of the day business is margins, strategy, market, and efficiency. Any market worth being in is going to have competition, so you need to have some efficiency or strategic differentiators if you are going to have sustainable profit margins. I’ve paid others many multiples of that for link building for many years back when links were the primary thing driving rankings.

    I don’t know the business model where sharing the above script earns more than it costs. Does one launch a Substack priced at like $500 or $1,000 a month where they offer a detailed guide a month? How many people adopt the script before the response rates fall & it offsets the costs by more than the revenues? My issue with consulting is I always wanted to over-deliver for clients & always ended up selling myself short when compared to publishing, so I just stick with a few great clients and a bit of this and that vs going too deep & scaling up there. Plus I had friends who went big and then some of their clients who were acquired had the acquirer brag about the SEO, that lead to a penalty, then the acquirer of the client threw the SEO under the bus and had their business torched.

    When you have a kid seeing them learn and seeing wonderment in their eyes is as good as life gets, but if you undermine your profit margins you’d also be directly undermining your own child’s future … often to help people who may not even like you anyhow. That is ultimately self defeating as it gets, particularly as politics grow more polarized & many begin to view retribution as a core function of government.

    I believe there are no limits to the retributive and malicious use of taxation as a political weapon. I believe there are no limits to the retributive and malicious use of spending as a political reward.

    Margins

    The role of search engines is to suck as much of the margins as they can out of publishing while trying to put some baseline floor on content quality so that people would still prefer to use a search engine rather than some other reference resource. Google sees memes like “add Reddit to the end of your search for real content” as an attack on their own brand. Google needs periodic large shake ups to reaffirm their importance, maintain narrative control around innovation, and to shake out players with excessive profit margins who were too well aligned with the current local maxima. Google needs aggressive SEO efforts with large profits to have an “or else” career risk to them to help reign in such efforts.

    You can see the intent for career risk in how the algorithm will wait months to clear the flag:

    Google said the helpful content update system is automated, regularly evaluating content. So the algorithm is constantly looking at your content and assigning scores to it. But that does not mean, that if you fix your content today, your site will recover tomorrow. Google told me there is this validation period, a waiting period, for Google to trust that you really are committed to updating your content and not just updating it today, Google then ranks you better and then you put your content back to the way it was. Google needs you to prove, over several months - yes - several months - that your content is actually helpful in the long run.

    If you thought a site were quality, had some issues, the issues were cleaned up, and you were still going to wait to rank it appropriately … the sole and explicit purpose of that delay is career risk to others to prevent them flying to close to the sun - to drive self regulation out of fear.

    Brand counts for a lot in search & so does buying the default placement position - look at how much Google pays Apple to not compete in search, or look at how Google had that illegal ad auction bid rigging gentleman’s agreement with Facebook to not compete with a header bidding solution so Google could maintain their outsized profit margins on ad serving on third party websites.

    Business ultimately is competition. Does Google serve your ads? What are the prices charged to players on each side of each auction & how much rake can the auctioneer capture for themselves?

    The Auctioneer’s Shill Bid - Google Halverez (beta)

    That is why we see Google embedding more features directly in their search results where they force rank their vertical listings above the organic listings. Their vertical ads are almost always placed above organics & below the text AdWords ads. Such vertical results could be thought of as a category-based shill bid to try to drive attention back upward, or move traffic into a parallel page where there is another chance to show more ads.

    This post stated:

    Google runs its search engine partly on its internally developed Cloud TPU chips. The chips, which the company also makes available to other organizations through its cloud platform, are specifically optimized for artificial intelligence workloads. Google’s newest Cloud TPU can provide up to 275 teraflops of performance, which is equivalent to 275 trillion computing operations per second.

    Now that computing power can be run across:

    • millions of books Google has indexed
    • particular publishers Google considers “above board” like Reuters, AP, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, etc.
    • historically archived content from trusted publishers before “optimizing for search” was actually a thing

    … and model language usage versus modeling the language usage of publishers known to have weak engagement / satisfaction metrics.

    Low end outsourced content & almost good enough AI content will likely tank. Similarly textually unique content which says nothing original or is just slapped together will likely get downranked as well.

    Expect Volatility

    They would not have pre-announced the update & gave some people some embargoed exclusives unless there was going to be a lot of volatility. As typical with the bigger updates, they will almost certainly roll out multiple other updates sandwiched together to help obfuscate what signals they are using & misdirect people reading too much in the winners and losers lists.

    Here are some questions Google asked:

    • Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?
    • Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service, or visiting a place)?
    • Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?
    • After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
    • Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience?
    • Are you keeping in mind our guidance for core updates and for product reviews?

    As a person who has … erm … put a thumb on the scale for a couple decades now, one can feel the algorithmic signals approximated by the above questions.

    To the above questions they added:

    • Is the content primarily to attract people from search engines, rather than made for humans?
    • Are you producing lots of content on different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results?
    • Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics?
    • Are you mainly summarizing what others have to say without adding much value?
    • Are you writing about things simply because they seem trending and not because you’d write about them otherwise for your existing audience?
    • Does your content leave readers feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources?
    • Are you writing to a particular word count because you’ve heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don’t).
    • Did you decide to enter some niche topic area without any real expertise, but instead mainly because you thought you’d get search traffic?
    • Does your content promise to answer a question that actually has no answer, such as suggesting there’s a release date for a product, movie, or TV show when one isn’t confirmed?

    Some of those indicate where Google believes the boundaries of their own role as a publisher are & that you should stay out of their lane. :D

    Barrier to Entry vs Personality

    One of the interesting things about the broader scope of algorithm shifts is each thing that makes the algorithms more complex, increases barrier to entry, and increases cost ultimately increases the chunk size of competition. And when that is done what is happening is the microparasite is being preference over the microparasite. Conceptually Google has a lot of reasons to have that bias or preference:

    • fewer entities to police (lower cost)
    • more data to use to police each entity (higher confidence)
    • easier to do direct deals with players which can move the needle (more scale)
    • if markets get too consolidated Google can always launch a vertical service & tip the scale back in the other direction (I see your Amazon ad revenue and I raise you free product listing ads)
    • the macroparasites have more “sameness” between them (making it easier for Google to create a competitive clone or copy)

    So long as Google maintains a monopoly on web search the bias toward macroparasites works for them, as people can not see what they do not see & do not know what does not exist, or what exists but is hidden to them.

    I think when people complain about the web being inauthentic what they are really complaining about is the algorithmic choices & publishing shifts that did away with the indy blogs and replaced with with the dopamine feed viral tricks and the same big box scaled players which operate multiple parallel sites to where you are getting the same machinery and content production house behind multiple consecutive listings. They are complaining about the efforts to snuff out the microparasite also scrubbing away personality, joy, love, quirkiness, weirdness, and the stuff you would not typically find on content by factory order websites.

    Let’s Go With Consensus Here!

    The above leads you down well worn paths, rather than the magic of serendipity & a personality worn on your sleeve that turns some people on while turning other people off.

    Text which is roughly aligned with a backward looking consensus rather than at the forefront of a field.

    If you believe this effort will enhance info literacy, and that it represents evolved search, you’re an idiot.

    Sharyl Attkisson gave us the head’s up that they’d push censorship controls as “media literacy” several years ago.— john andrews (@johnandrews) August 13, 2022

    History is written by the victors. Consensus is politically driven, backward looking, and has key messages memory holed.

    Did he just say that? Yep. pic.twitter.com/gu9Fk7t1Sv— Kevin Sorbo (@ksorbs) August 18, 2022

    Some COVID-19 Fun to “Fact” Check

    I spent new years in China before the COVID-19 crisis hit & got sick when I got back. I used so much caffeine the day I moved over a half dozen computers between office buildings while sick. I week later when news on Twitter started leaking of the COVID-19 crisis hit I thought wow this looks even worse than what I just had. In the fullness of time I think I had it before it was a crisis. Everyone in my family got sick and multiple people from the office. Then that news COVID-19 crisis news came out & only later when it was showed that comorbidities and the elderly had the worse outcomes did I realize they were likely the same. Then after the crisis had been announced someone else from the office building I was in got it & then one day it was illegal to go into the office. The lockdown where I lived was longer than the original lockdown in Wuhan.

    The reason the response to the COVID-19 virus was so extreme was huge parts of politically interested parties wanted to stop at nothing to see orange man ejected from the White House. So early on when he blocked flights from China you had prominent people in political circles calling him xenophobic, and then the head of public health in New York City was telling you it was safe to ride the subway and go about your ordinary daily life. That turned out to be deadly partisan hackery & ignorance pitched as enlightenment, leading to her resignation.

    Then the virus spreads wildly as one would expect it to. And draconian lockdowns to tank the economy to ensure orange man was gone, mail in voting was widespread, and the election was secured.

    I actually appreciate Sam Harris for saying this out loud. This is what the vast majority of the anti Trump crowd believes, but most of them won’t say it. At least when it’s said, you can see it for what it is.pic.twitter.com/NmOqshoZlS— Dave Smith (@ComicDaveSmith) August 18, 2022

    Some of the most ridiculous heroes during this period wrote books about being a hero. Andrew “killer” Cuomo had time to write his “did you ever know that I’m your hero” book while he simultaneously ordered senior living homes to take in COVID-19 positive patients. Due to fecal-oral transmission and their poor outcomes his policies lead to the manslaughter of thousands of senior citizens.

    You couldn’t go to a funeral and say goodbye because you might kill someone else’s grandma, but if you were marching for social justice (and only social justice) that stuff was immune to the virus.

    Ron DeSantis on public health experts making an exception to lockdowns for George Floyd protests: “That’s when I knew these people are a bunch of frauds”

    pic.twitter.com/PzjPc80Q3g— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 5, 2022

    Suggesting looking at the root problems like no dad in the home is considered sexist, racist, or both. Meanwhile social justice organizations champion tearing down the nuclear family in spite of the fact that “mandatory collectivism has ended in misery wherever it’s been tried.”

    Of course the social justice stuff embeds the false narrative of victimhood, which then turns many of the fake victims into monsters who destroy the lives of others - but we are all in this together. Absolutely nobody could have predicted the rise of murder & violent crime as we emptied the prisons & decriminalized wide swaths of the criminal code. Plus since many criminal codes are ignored people stop reporting lesser crimes, so the New York Times can tell you not to worry overall crime is down.

    In Seattle if someone rapes you the police probably won’t even take a report to investigate it unless (in some cases?) you are a child. What are police protecting society from if rape is a freebie that doesn’t really matter? Why pay taxes or have government at all?

    What Google Wants

    The above sidebar is the sort of content Google would not want to rank in their search results. :D

    They want to rank text which is perhaps factually correct, and maybe even current and informed, but done in such a way where you do not feel you know the author the way you might think you do if you read a great novel. Or hard biased content which purports to support some view and narrative, but is ultimately all just an act, where everything which could be of substance is ultimately subsumed by sales & marketing.

    “The best relevancy algorithm in the world is trumped by preferential placement of inferior results which bypasses the algorithm.”

    I was a fool to dismiss Aaron for years as a cynic. He was an oracle, not a conspiracy theorist: https://t.co/V68vIXXNPI— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) November 20, 2019

    The Market for Something to Believe In is Infinite

    Each re-representation mash-up of content in the search results decontextualizes the in-depth experience & passion we crave. Each same “big box” content factory where a backed entity can withstand algorithmic volatility & buy up other publishers to carry learnings across to establish (and monetize) a consensus creates more of a bland sameness.

    That barrier to entry & bland sameness is likely part of the reason the recent growth of Substack, which sort of acts just like a blog did 15 or 20 years ago - you go direct to the source without all the layers of intermediaries & dumbing down you get as a side effect of the scaled & polished publishing process.

    Courtesy of SEO Book.com




    What is helpful content, according to Google

    Written on August 20, 2022 at 12:08 am, by admin

    Google’s new helpful content update is meant to reward content that is written for humans. 

    So how exactly does Googe define “helpful content”?

    In short, according to Google, helpful content:

    This is important to know because your definition of “helpful content” is likely different from Google’s.

    Here’s everything we know about what Google considers helpful content. 

    What is helpful content?

    What follows is all the guidance and questions Google has provided to assess whether your content is helpful, around the helpful content (HCU), product review (PRU), core (CU) and Panda updates (PU).

    Google’s guidance around helpful content generally breaks down into four areas. Helpful content:

    1. Is created for a specific audience

    2. Features expertise

    3. Is trustworthy and credible

    4. Meets the want(s) or need(s) of the searcher

    Digging deeper into intent

    There are the classic search intents you likely know (informational, navigational, transactional), but also several micro-intents you should think about when creating content. 

    Google has broken down search behavior into four “moments” in the past:

    The QRG breaks down user intent into these categories:

    Additionally, search behavior is driven by six needs, according to a 2019 Think With Google article:

    One final way to think about audience intent is Avinash Kaushik’s See, Think, Do, Care framework. Though it’s not “official” Google advice specific to an algorithm update, Kaushik was Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist when he wrote this.

    Google highlights ‘helpful content’ in featured snippets

    The term “helpful content” rarely shows up on Google’s documentation. But it does show up on Google’s How Search Works page, in reference to Featured Snippets:

    “Featured snippets are where we prominently display a page’s description — what we call a snippet. We use this format when our systems determine it might help people more easily discover what they’re seeking, both from the description and when they click on the link to read the page itself. It’s especially helpful for those on mobile or searching by voice.”

    Google wants to help searchers find the answer or information they are looking for as quickly as possible – sometimes without ever leaving the search results page. 

    Your content should be the best answer that someone is searching for. 

    In short: helpful content should be the best answer – and provide that answer as quickly as possible.

    The post What is helpful content, according to Google appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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




    TikTok announces three new shopping ad features

    Written on August 20, 2022 at 12:08 am, by admin

    Just one month after TikTok supposedly abandoned plans to bring shopping ads into the US, the social media video platform announced that it’s launching a new commerce ad suite called Shopping Ads. They will be testing three new ad formats including Video Shopping Ads, Catalog LIsting Ads, and LIVE Shopping Ads. 

    Video Shopping Ads

    Video Shopping Ads will be placed in the For You page and allow advertisers to highlight products in their feed TikTok video ads. TikTok says Shopping Ads provide a dynamic experience based on the shoppers intent to purchase. Video Shopping Ads will automatically create a landing page and are available to select advertisers for testing. 

    Catalog Listing Ads

    Catalog Listing Ads allow advertisers to feature their product catalogs across the app and expand their reach. Advertisers can promote their products across shoppable surfaces such as “recommended” or “Related Products.” Catalog Listing Ads are being tested in the US. 

    LIVE Shopping Ads

    LIVE Shopping Ads enable advertisers to direct users from the For You page to their live event so they can join and buy products. LIVE Shopping Ads are being tested where TikTok Shop is available including the UK, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. 

    Get the daily newsletter search marketers rely on.

    Processing…Please wait.

    See terms.

    What TikTok says. TikTok says that 70% of the users it surveyed said it was easy to make purchases through shopping related ads. 56% of those said TikTok helped them discover new products and brands, and 48% of users expressed an interest in making a purchase through TikTok. 

    TikTok partners. TikTok has partnered with Smartly.io as their ads & campaign partner. They have also partnered with Productsup for their catalog feed. For commerce, they currently integrate with Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Ecwid. 

    Why we care. There was no insight into why TikTok changed its mind about bringing shopping ads into the US. After the disastrous launch in the UK, we were convinced that it just wasn’t in the cards. But if you’re an advertiser interested in testing out these new features, check your account for eligibility.

    The post TikTok announces three new shopping ad features appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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




    A 3-phased approach to proactive online reputation management

    Written on August 20, 2022 at 12:08 am, by admin

    I’ve helped several brands with their online reputation management (ORM) during my digital marketing career. 

    Unfortunately, most of this work involved trying to help the brands recover from a crisis.

    Even more unfortunate was that the damage to their reputations could have been greatly mitigated with some proactive effort.

    What follows is a basic, three-pronged approach to a proactive ORM strategy.

    1. Own your name

    Often, what looks like a reputation problem is more of an SEO problem related to entity optimization. Because the search engines seek to understand brands as entities, it’s important to amplify the signals that help them know who you are and what you do.

    For most businesses, using Organization schema is a significant first step in letting the search engines know who you are. 

    This simple tagging system hides in the source code of a page on your website and acts as a data feed to show information about your brand or business. 

    At a minimum, the following information should be tagged:

    Another aspect is to claim your business name on major social media sites. Even if you don’t use a channel, it’s a good idea to grab your brand to keep someone else from trying to impersonate you.

    If your brand is big enough, it would be beneficial to ensure your Wikipedia page is correct and up-to-date or, to have one created if there isn’t one already.

    Directly making and editing pages by brand representatives is frowned upon and problematic, so hiring an agency specializing in this type of work would be best.

    If you are part of a brand with well-known leaders, claiming domain names and social media sites under their names should also be considered. 

    Politicians, especially, seem to forget this step and often have to contend with parody and impersonator sites set up by their opponents.

    Lastly, owning your main website’s .com, .net and .org versions is a great idea.

    Global brands may wish to extend this to ccTLDs where the business operates or may operate in the future. 

    For even more insurance, it is helpful to buy domains with negative messaging like:

    You may think those last examples are a bit extreme, but I’ve seen brand detractors go to great lengths and spend much of their own money to set up hater websites on domains like these.

    Get the daily newsletter search marketers rely on.

    Processing…Please wait.

    See terms.

    2. Own your story

    In SEO, we say, “content is king.” This concept is also true in ORM. 

    Owning your story often means creating content on your website that will potentially outrank any negative content that others may post online. 

    The more content you can rank in branded searches on owned and controlled channels like your website or social media accounts, the more you can push negative content off Page 1 of search results and out of view of most searchers. 

    As the old joke goes, the best place to hide a dead body is on Page 2 of Google search results because no one will find it there.

    In extreme cases, it might become necessary to create content to hit on a specific topic around which a brand detractor has generated a lot of content.

    When this happens, bringing in an ORM and SEO expert would be helpful if you don’t have that expertise in-house.

    What looks entirely innocuous for the casual website visitor is a targeted volley against negative content. For example, don’t strike back directly if a hater created content around alleged food poisoning targets your restaurant. 

    Create content on your website highlighting the brand’s commitment to food safety and the number of passed inspections conducted by health officials.

    3. Own your reviews

    Some businesses revolve around reviews. For them, this can be life or death. 

    I’ve worked with many brands that had trouble recruiting. The reason? Too many negative reviews on Indeed and Glassdoor. 

    If you think your company doesn’t live and die by reviews, I recommend you take heed anyway.

    One primary key to reviews is to respond to each one. Respond to positive reviews with a quick “thank you” and move on. Negative reviews take a bit more work.

    Many negative reviews are the result of missed expectations. You can often diffuse the negativity of the review by how you respond. A simple apology, an offer to make things right, and an invitation to give you another chance can mitigate the hit of a negative review. 

    It’s important not to be too defensive or shift the blame for the problem back onto the complainant. This will nearly always backfire. 

    Hint: Don’t respond when you’re angry!

    Some businesses, especially those in regulated industries, must be careful how they respond. 

    Thus, a response guide is critical to help everyone stay within guidelines while responding effectively to reviews. An invitation to contact a customer support rep via phone or secure message would be appropriate.

    Prepare for a crisis

    Another critical process in proactive ORM work is to prepare for a crisis before it begins. 

    Set up documented procedures to guide the entire company when a situation occurs. At a minimum, the plan should include:

    If you can also include potential scenarios that might come up, all the better.

    The more you prepare, the easier it is to walk through a challenging time.

    Already in a crisis? Please don’t panic

    A vital part of any ORM strategy must include reviews of all content written about the brand. This information can be an invaluable part of a business. 

    Your customers are the best focus group you can get. They don’t have to pay for them to tell you about your business.

    You can do this efficiently by setting up Google Alerts to notify you anytime your brand or key people are mentioned by name.  

    Taking criticism and plowing it back into product and service improvements can help ensure your reputation stays positive. 

    According to speaker and author Jay Baer, some brands even reward their detractors because of the valuable information they provide.

    A great resource to help you get started in a proactive ORM program is Repped: 30 Days to a Better Online Reputation by Andy Beal. Considered by many to be the “godfather” of online reputation management, Beal’s book is filled with great information and helpful tips to get your business moving in the right direction.

    The post A 3-phased approach to proactive online reputation management appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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




    How to maximize insights from Performance Max

    Written on August 20, 2022 at 12:08 am, by admin

    You’ve set up your Google Ads Performance Max campaigns for success.

    Now you need insights into performance, keyword themes, where your dollars are being spent and more.

    The problem?

    Getting data and insights from Performance Max can be frustrating.

    Here are some tips and tricks we’ve uncovered so far.

    Insights: Performance trends

    While more granular data is limited, take advantage of the Insights tab.

    There is some useful info on overall trends.

    You can view week-over-week or month-over-month data.

    Insights: Keyword themes

    Additionally, while you cannot see actual search terms, you can see keyword themes as well as basic performance data.

    Listing groups vs display: Where are your dollars being spent?

    Compare overall campaign spend in the Campaigns tab vs. overall spend of all Listing Groups

    This will help you understand the spend breakdown between Video/Display and ad units created with the datafeed.

    Note: If you find that Display/Video traffic is not converting as well as your datafeed, you can turn off URL expansion in the campaign settings.

    You can also try running a Smart Shopping style Performance Max campaign:

    For eCommerce: Something worth testing for Google Shopping, especially if you've seen success with Smart Shopping historically: Launch a pMax campaign with no assets aside from the datafeed.

    Note: You'll likely need to create a new Asset Group. https://t.co/4EUj1KQuwx

    — ???????????????????????????????? ???????????? Ⓜ Google Ads ???? (@MenachemAni) July 21, 2022

    Segment: Your data

    In the campaigns tab, you can filter by campaign and segment by:

    Landing pages: What pages are getting traffic/conversions?

    Note: This report is not available within a Performance Max campaign, you’ll need to access it from the All Campaigns tab and filter your PMax campaigns only.

    All Campaigns > Landing Pages > Filter by Campaign

    Locations: Where is the traffic and sales coming from?

    In the Locations tab, you can drill down performance by:

    Reports: Use custom reports to roll up your data

    Go to the reports tab and build a custom table showcasing performance by:

    Note: Placements can be excluded on the account level:

    So, I have to post a retraction of yesterday's snarky TikTok video. There IS a way to see AND exclude placements for Performance Max campaigns.

    I wrote up how to do this here, and also wrote this really complex apology-song to Google ???? #performancemax #ppcchat

    — Kirk Williams (Out of Office) (@PPCKirk) August 3, 2022

    The post How to maximize insights from Performance Max appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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




    Google’s new helpful content update targets sites creating content for search engines first

    Written on August 18, 2022 at 9:01 pm, by admin

    Google is about to launch a new and large search algorithm update, called the helpful content update.

    The helpful content update will target websites that have a relatively high amount of unsatisfying or unhelpful content, where the content has been written for search engines rather than humans.

    This update, which will start rolling out soon, will have a meaningful impact on the search results, Google told Search Engine Land.

    What is Google’s helpful content update?

    Google’s new 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.”

    The purpose of this algorithm update is 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.”

    When will Google’s helpful content update launch?

    The update will start rolling out next week. The helpful content update will take up to two weeks to fully roll out, Google said.

    We will post a new story when it begins rolling out and when it is completed here on Search Engine Land. Google will also post on its updates page when it launches and when it is done rolling out.

    What types of content will the helpful content update impact?

    While these algorithms do not specifically target any specific niche, Google said these types of content may be impacted the most:

    This is because content written in those areas has historically been written more for search engines than humans.

    Based on Google’s analysis, those areas may be more impacted by this Google helpful content update than other areas.

    I asked Google for a specific example of a search where the helpful content update would make an impact. Here’s what Google told me:

    Google’s Search Liaison Danny Sullivan was asked on Twitter to elaborate more about what Google meant by “online education.” Sullivan’s response:

    “Generally tutorial, things meant to teach something, not really formal courses. But again, it’s not focused on any particular area. That’s just one example where we see notable improvement but there are others and any query about any thing might benefit.”

    Danny Sullivan tweet

    Helpful content update is a sitewide algorithm

    Unlike many Google algorithms that get applied on a page-by-page basis, this new helpful content update will be sitewide.

    That means that if Google determines your site is producing a relatively high amount of unhelpful content, primarily written for ranking in search, then your whole site will be impacted.

    This will not just impact individual pages or sections of your site, but rather, it will impact the whole site.

    Google won’t say exactly what percentage of the pages on your site need to be helpful versus unhelpful to trigger this classifier but they did say it is sitewide and will impact the whole site, even if you have many pages that are helpful.

    Again, if you have helpful pages but a relatively high amount of your content is unhelpful, even your helpful content or sections of your site will be hit by this update.

    Google said “removing unhelpful content could help the rankings of your other content.”

    How to build human-first content – Google’s advice

    Google, like with previous updates, like the Panda update, core updates, and product reviews update, has provided a list of questions you can ask yourself about your content, in order to build content that is rewarded by the helpful content update.

    Google shared these questions around building human-first content:

    And when it comes to avoiding search-engine first content, Google laid out these questions:

    It could take months to recover

    This algorithm will run automatically, Google said. The scores or classifiers will continue to update all the time.

    But if a site gets hit by this helpful content update, it can take several months for the site to recover.

    A site needs to prove itself over time that it no longer publishes content with the sole reason to rank in search engines, a search engine first content experience, and that takes time.

    So it seems there will be some type of waiting period – maybe a validation period – that sites need to go through, to show Google’s algorithms that the site is providing helpful content to humans first.

    This validation period is automated and while Google updates the scores for its classifiers on your site on an ongoing basis, making a change today, likely won’t be reflected in Google’s rankings for several months, Sullivan told Search Engine Land.

    According to Google:

    Google is using machine learning to identify unhelpful content

    Google is using a new machine learning algorithm that is able to evaluate and identify unhelpful content.

    The algorithms should get better over time between the automated machine learning improvements and Google engineers tweaking and improving the overall algorithms on a regular basis.

    Google said the helpful content update looks at a variety of signals about the page and site to determine the ranking of a page.

    Google was not specific with us on exactly which signals are used, as you would imagine.

    Quality raters validated

    Google said the search company validated these new results with its quality raters and confirmed that using this system improves Google’s search quality. This is done for most, if not all, ranking and user experience improvements Google makes to search.

    Again, the quality raters do not directly influence the rankings but rather help confirm to Google’s search engineers if the algorithms are making improvements to the overall search quality.

    U.S. English searches only

    This update will initially launch for English-language searches globally.

    Google plans to expand to other languages in the future.

    Search-only right now

    Google told us this update targets only Google search right now. However, Google may look to cover additional products (e.g., Google Discover) in the coming months.

    Will the helpful content update be as significant as Panda?

    For many SEOs who lived through the Google Panda update of February 2012, it forever changed how SEOs recommended you write content going forward. Now Panda is built into the core update, so it is still being used today.

    This update sounds a lot like the past Panda update.

    I suspect, like with Panda, SEOs will look back at Google’s helpful content update and say it caused a fundamental shift in SEO content strategy. Time will tell, and we will see how large of an update this is over the course of the next few weeks.

    Why we care

    Google’s helpful content update will likely be a significant update that SEOs will look back at as the catalyst of change in terms of the advice SEOs gives clients when building content.

    Granted, it is too soon to tell how large of an impact this update will have on Google’s search results, your site or your clients’ sites.

    As the update rolls out, make sure to watch your analytics and, if necessary, reevaluate your content strategy around the advice Google has provided above.

    We’ll continue to report on all the latest developments around the helpful content update.

    Get the daily newsletter search marketers rely on.

    Processing…Please wait.

    See terms.

    You can read Google’s official announcement, here: More content by people, for people in Search.

    The post Google’s new helpful content update targets sites creating content for search engines first appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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




    Google to release August 2022 product reviews update in coming weeks

    Written on August 18, 2022 at 9:01 pm, by admin

    Google will be releasing another product reviews update, the August 2022 product reviews update, in the coming weeks, the search company also announced along with the helpful content update.

    Google said they are launching another update “in the coming weeks to make it even easier to find high-quality, original reviews.” Google said this is another refinement to the product reviews ranking system that aims to “make sure you find the most useful information when you’re researching a purchase on the web.”

    Timing. Google will post on its updates page when it launches and when it is done rolling out, we will also post a new story when it begins rolling out and when it is completed here on Search Engine Land.

    Google did tell us they are targeting to roll it out the week of August 29th but the date may change.

    Previous updates. This is the fifth version of the product reviews update, a search ranking algorithm update targeted at ranking product review-related content on the web that is most helpful and useful to searchers. The first product reviews update was launched on April 8, 2021, the second was launched on December 1, 2021, the third has been released on March 23, 2022, and now the fourth has been released on July 27, 0222. The fourth one was named the July 2022 product reviews update and released on July 27, 2022 and completed on August 2, 2022.

    Google product reviews update. The Google product reviews update aims to promote review content that is above and beyond much of the templated information you see on the web. Google said it will promote these types of product reviews in its search results rankings.

    Google is not directly punishing lower-quality product reviews that have “thin content that simply summarizes a bunch of products.” However, if you provide such content and find your rankings demoted because other content is promoted above yours, it will definitely feel like a penalty. Technically, according to Google, this is not a penalty against your content, Google is just rewarding sites with more insightful review content with rankings above yours.

    Technically, this update should only impact product review content and not other types of content.

    What is impacted? Google said this update may in the future impact those who “create product reviews in any language,” but Google said the initial rollout will be “English-language product reviews.” Google added they have seen “positive effects” from this update in the past and the search company “plans to open up product review support for more languages” in the future.

    Please note that these updates can be very big, almost as big as core updates.

    Previous advice on the product reviews update. The “focus overall is on providing users with content that provides insightful analysis and original research, content written by experts or enthusiasts who know the topic well,” Google said about this update. That is similar advice to the core update recommendations mentioned above, but here is a list of “additional useful questions to consider in terms of product reviews.” Google recommends your product reviews cover these areas and answer these questions. Do your product reviews…

    Google also linked to its blog post from earlier this year named providing better product information for shoppers.

    Google added three new points of new advice for this third release of the products reviews update:

    Not a core update. Google also previously said that product review updates are not the same as core updates. This is a standalone update they’re calling the product reviews update. This is separate from Google’s regular core updates, the company told us. Nonetheless, Google did add that the advice it originally provided for core updates, “about producing quality content for those is also relevant here.” In addition to that advice, Google provided additional guidance specific to this update.

    Why we care. If your website offers product review content, you will want to check your rankings to see if you were impacted. Did your Google organic traffic improve, decline, or stay the same?

    Long term, you are going to want to ensure that going forward, you put a lot more detail and effort into your product review content so that it is unique and stands out from the competition on the web.

    Also, those impacted by previous core updates, that put in the work, may be rewarded by this August 2022 product reviews update.

    The post Google to release August 2022 product reviews update in coming weeks appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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




    Google adds additional CTV buying options in Display & Video 360

    Written on August 18, 2022 at 9:01 pm, by admin

    Google is adding three new options for brands advertising on CTV. 

    Audience guarantees based on Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings (DAR). The Nielsen DAR is used to understand how many unique viewers CTV and video ad buyers reach within their core audiences and prove campaign impact across digital media platforms. Google is releasing Nielsen audience guarantees to make it easier to plan and measure CTV, Display, and Video 360. 

    When advertisers are setting up their guaranteed deal, they can select specific ages and demographics and pay only for the ad impressions that reach their target audience as measured by Nielsen DAR. 

    Advanced Programmatic Guaranteed. Google audiences for Programmatic Guaranteed will now be available across Google Ad Manager, Xandr and Magnite. Google said they hope to add more soon. 

    Google has already expanded reach capabilities with Google audiences on CTV campaigns when bidding on open auction inventory. With the new update, you can also use affinity, in-market and demo segments while buying Programmatic Guaranteed deals across a variety of participating publishers, which should give advertisers additional flexibility in audience strategies for CTV. 

    Google is also aware of frequency capping and once your campaign frequency goal is reached for certain users, whether via open auction, Programmatic Guaranteed, or a combination of the two, Display & Video 360 will stop showing ads to those users.

    Consolidated CTV workflow across YouTube and other CTV apps. Google is implementing a consolidated workflow to help advertisers plan, manage, and measure performance across YouTube and CTV inventory. Google is also allowing YouTube ads to be purchased within Display & Video 360’s insertion order dedicated to connected TV ad buying.

    Having YouTube and CTV inventory side-by-side makes it easier to optimize for common goals, Google said. 

    Get the daily newsletter search marketers rely on.

    Processing…Please wait.

    See terms.

    Google brings Display and Video 360 to CTV. At Google Marketing Live in May, Google announced they were introducing audiences for CTV inventory in Display & Video 360, which display ads across Hulu, Peacock, YouTube and most other ad-supported CTV apps.

    “We’re committed to helping you deliver high quality ad experiences to all streamers by bringing the best of digital ad technology to the TV screen. One of the most effective digital strategies is creating relevant connections with your core audience. So we’re introducing Google audiences for CTV inventory in Display & Video 360, which will work across Hulu, Peacock, YouTube and most other ad-supported CTV apps,” writes Jake Jolly, Senior Product Manager, Display & Video 360.

    Why we care. Expanding audience reach, limiting frequency and creating a consolidated workflow are positive updates to Google’s effort to expand into connected TV. If your brand is using Display or Video 360 to advertise on connected TV, take advantage of these new features to expand your reach, test new audiences and measure your CTV ad efforts with the Nielsen DAR.

    The post Google adds additional CTV buying options in Display & Video 360 appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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




    Google releases Ads API version 11

    Written on August 18, 2022 at 9:01 pm, by admin

    Google has just released the newest version of the Ads API, version v11_1. 

    What’s changed. Here are the major changes according to Google’s release notes.

    Assets

    Audiences

    Bidding

    Campaigns

    Experiments

    Planning

    Recommendations

    Get the daily newsletter search marketers rely on.

    Processing…Please wait.

    See terms.

    What is the Google API. The Google API allows developers to interact directly with the ads platform, making large or robust accounts and campaigns easier to manage. With the ads API, you can:

    Why we care. Developers who use the Google Ads API should make note of the new updates and plan management of their accounts accordingly.

    The post Google releases Ads API version 11 appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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




    SEO San Diego
    Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS)
    Copyright ©1999-2026 ADM, Inc.