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BuzzFeed CEO on Secret to Succeeding with Facebook by @martinibuster

2/28/2018

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BuzzFeed CEO on Secret to Succeeding with Facebook by @martinibuster

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Facebook’s new algorithm change has affected a Facebook page called LittleThings that was popular for it’s viral content. It is reported that the business owners claimed their traffic decreased by 75%. It remains to be seen how many other businesses that depend on Facebook will begin to wither as the toll from the algorithm takes effect. Jonah Peretti of BuzzFeed recently offered his insights on how to thrive in the capricious and constantly changing social media environment and to avoid becoming another social media business casualty.

Screenshot of a video of Jonah Peretti, CEO of BuzzFeed, discussing building a viable business with social media.Jonah Peretti, CEO of BuzzFeed, discussed building a viable business with social media.

Jonah Peretti, CEO of BuzzFeed recently commented in a live interview that it was important to diversify revenue streams:

“…what we saw and didn’t fully realize when we first undertook this… distributed content model was that… we would need to move to a multi-revenue approach to generate enough revenue on these platforms.”

Perhaps failing to build a multi-revenue business model contributed to the collapse of the LittleThings viral Facebook page. The entire business model revolved around the Facebook Page doing the same thing over and over, with followers sharing and reacting to the viral content.

Single Focus Business Models are Vulnerable to Change

A similar thing happened to businesses when Google introduced the Panda Algorithm. Business models based on mass producing content (content farming) lost substantial traffic. This is what happens when businesses fail to diversify their revenue streams, fail to cultivate multiple sources of traffic and fail to experiment with creating different kinds of content.

It is important to always be trying new things, just like BuzzFeed does, in order to cultivate new sources of business. This is the quality of adapting, to constantly be in a state of change and innovation. Some directions are fruitful, many may not.

The Importance of Continuing to Adapt

The CEO of BuzzFeed also emphasized that a secret to Internet business longevity is the ability to adapt:

“I think a lot of people are asking Facebook for stuff… I think that traditional media companies… have an expectation that they can take something that works in print or take something that works on their website, stick it on Facebook and get a big check from Facebook and that’s what they want and they don’t really want to change or adapt.”

LittleThings focused on doing one thing over and over. They were successful at that one thing. But their business model did not represent the kind of content Facebook wanted in their news feed. And when the news feed algorithm changed, the LittleThings Facebook audience collapsed.

You Can’t Go Wrong Engaging Your Audience

What Facebook is asking from content creators is to create content that engages people, that Facebook members will discuss with each other. Jonah Peretti stressed that focusing on the user reaction is at the top of considerations. It’s not important that a user shares or reacts to content. His goal was for content to engage readers offline, as well as online.

“What I want to do is build new bottles for content that are truly social. And that’s at least with what I want to do is with Facebook and that’s what we’ve always done. We always think how do we make content that people will engage with and share and if we make a tasty video will they actually cook the food. If we do a nifty thing. Will they spend a weekend doing a DIY project, when we do BuzzFeed lists do they tag their friends and joke and laugh with their friends… So we want to figure out how do you make content truly social.”

Takeaways – How This Impacts Online Business

BuzzFeed’s CEO is right on the money to focus on user experience and engagement. Facebook’s new feed algorithm is focused on meaningful interaction, something Facebook has been after for at least a year. There’s are lessons in this event for anyone doing business via social media or through a website. It’s important to diversify traffic streams, diversify monetization streams, and to diversify content (or product) models. But perhaps the most important lesson is to focus on user experience and engagement. It’s not always enough for a user to like or share a page, it sometimes may be important to motivate them to engage in an activity in the real world, offline.

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February 28, 2018 at 05:15PM
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SearchCap: Google expands featured snippets voice search ranking study & Rand Fishkin moves on

2/28/2018

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SearchCap: Google expands featured snippets, voice search ranking study & Rand Fishkin moves on

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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Google expands featured snippets, voice search ranking study & Rand Fishkin moves on appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.




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February 28, 2018 at 03:00PM
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Daily Search Forum Recap: February 28 2018

2/28/2018

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Daily Search Forum Recap: February 28, 2018

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Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

Other Great Search Forum Threads:





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February 28, 2018 at 03:00PM
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Study: 11 voice search ranking factors analyzed

2/28/2018

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Study: 11 voice search ranking factors analyzed

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Backlinko has done an extensive analysis of “voice search ranking factors” and identified 11 variables tied to appearing in Google Home results. The company examined 10,000 results delivered over the smart speaker.

What Backlinko found was consistent with what many others have been saying but there were also a few surprises. For example, the study discounts the impact of Schema to some degree and page authority.

Here’s a partial, paraphrased list of the ranking factors:

  • PageSpeed is a significant factor; voice search results typically come from faster-loading pages.
  • Google relies heavily on very authoritative domains for results, but pages not as much.
  • Content that ranks well on the desktop tends to rank in voice search. This might be a correlation rather than causal however.
  • Shema may not be a factor: 36 percent of pages voice search results came from pages using Schema.
  • Roughly 41 percent of voice search results came from Featured Snippets.
  • Voice search results are generally 29 words; however Google sources voice results from long-form content.
  • HTTPS is critical.

Google has made page speed an explicit mobile ranking factor. Backlinko found that the page-load time for a voice result was almost 2X faster than traditional webpages. Not a surprise. What may be a surprise are the findings around Schema.

The company found that Schema was used on slightly more than a third of pages delivered over Google Home, somewhat more than in general results. Accordingly it discounted Schema as a voice search ranking factor:

Although voice search result pages tend to use Schema slightly more often than your average web page, the difference is not significant. Also, 63.6% of voice search results don’t use Schema at all.  Therefore, it’s unlikely that Schema has a direct impact on voice search rankings.

Below are Backlinko’s findings around Schema distribution in voice search results.

There are plenty of reasons to use Schema generally so this finding shouldn’t be seen as an argument against it. And many will question the validity of this finding. It may also be that Schema pages don’t appear more because they aren’t more prevalent and there are other important variables.

Among them, links matter for voice results as well. Domain authority was high but page authority was relatively low by comparison:

We discovered that the average Domain Rating of a voice search result was 76.8 . . . we found that the link authority of voice search result pages were significantly lower. In fact, the mean Page Rating of a voice search result was only 21.1.

Backlinko speculated that the voice algorithm was relying upon domain authority (over page authority) because that provided a higher level of confidence in the accuracy of results.

Long form content was also correlated with voice results. “Google voice search results predominately come from pages with a high word count,” the study asserts. In addition, “FAQ pages tend to perform particularly well in voice search.” Keywords were somewhat less important: “only 1.71% of voice search results use the exact keyword in their title tag.”

The company advises, “[D]on’t worry about creating individual pages that are each optimized around individual keywords. Instead, write in-depth content that can answer several different voice search queries on a single page.”

Finally, content that ranks well on the desktop appears to also rank well in voice results. This is logical. Nearly 75 percent of voice results on Google Home “came from a page ranking in the top 3 for that keyword.”

SEOs should review the post and do their own evaluations of the findings and recommendations.

While it’s not clear whether smart speakers will siphon off some query volume or merely be additive to the overall pie, at least two studies have shown that owners of Alexa and Google Home devices are spending somewhat less time with their smartphones.

Regardless, virtual assistants are emerging as an important consumer discovery tool and marketers need to take these platforms seriously and adapt accordingly. In Google’s case, the Assistant (which powers Google Home) is now available on 400 million devices.


About The Author

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog,

Screenwerk

, about connecting the dots between digital media and real-world consumer behavior. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on

Twitter

or find him at

Google+

.





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February 28, 2018 at 02:15PM
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Google Search Update: Featured Snippets for Multi-Intent Queries by @MattGSouthern

2/28/2018

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Google Search Update: Featured Snippets for Multi-Intent Queries by @MattGSouthern

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Google is updating search results with a new type of featured snippet which is designed for queries that have multiple interpretations.

Multifaceted featured snippets may appear for queries such as “ears popping on a plane,” where the individual may be searching for either causes or remedies.

”Sometimes the words we use to ask a question are broad and there could be several different interpretations of the question. With multifaceted featured snippets, we’re able to better understand your query and recognize when there could be multiple interpretations of that query.”

Examples of multifaceted featured snippets are shown below for the ambiguous query “garden needs full sun?,” which could be looking for one of two different answers.

Google will start by introducing multifaceted featured snippets with “multi-intent” queries, where the intent behind the query could be interpreted in different ways.

Eventually, Google plans to expand multifaceted featured snippets to cover more query types. For example, a query like “is my house worth fixing?” has several different components that could be equally important.

More Resources:





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February 28, 2018 at 11:57AM
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Unit economics: The foundation of a good SEM campaign

2/28/2018

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Unit economics: The foundation of a good SEM campaign

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A strong understanding of the economics of any business unit is absolutely critical to any digital marketing campaign managed against non-brand key performance indicators (KPIs) in a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign.

One would think any reasonably large and successful business would have a good handle on their unit economics, and that this knowledge will be shared down the chain of command to the mid and lower levels of the marketing team.

But time and time again, I have found this critical foundation is missing, miscommunicated, insufficient or is so outdated as to make it worse than worthless.  “Worthless” in this case means that bad data does no actual harm. “Worse than worthless” means the utilization of the wrong KPI goals resulting in media waste and — more importantly — missed revenue and profit opportunity.

In other words, the company’s health is at actual risk because the marketing team and the business team aren’t on the same page.  In some cases, members of the marketing team may be working at cross-purposes, using incompatible KPIs and metrics.

Silos standing in the way of marketing AI?

I had the privilege of attending a lunch recently with members of the Direct Marketing Club of New York, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), and other marketers, including MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki.

Although we attended the lunch to discuss the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to solve marketing problems, the consensus was many brands aren’t ready to empower decision-making with AI.

Their organizations were often so siloed that the inertia of departments and organization charts were a big factor slowing down the adoption of AI and machine learning in terms of optimizing marketing spend. A common theme across the table was the winners and disrupters in many industries are the ones without any legacy departmental structure. These included Tesla, the Dollar Shave Club, Casper & Purple, and even Amazon.

How does this all relate to pay-per-click (PPC) search engine marketing campaigns? Well, the influence of legacy structures affects your ability to grow yourself as a marketer and business person and directly influences your ability to communicate — with rational questions — up the chain of command (while following protocol), even if those communications might decrease your own departmental budget.

Rational questions for marketers to ask

Let’s use some common KPIs as examples of how things are often done now in SEM campaigns and how one might apply smarter business unit economics by asking some rational questions in the following scenarios:

PPC account (typically retail) managed by return on advertising spend (ROAS) with last click attribution

Rational questions to ask include:

  • Do we have any data that would predict which customers order more frequently?
  • Do we have any data on which variables in the PPC campaign tend to attract “new to file” customers vs. returning customers?
  • Do some categories of products have a significantly higher margin where a different ROAS KPI should be applied (so that the same dollar of spending generates more profit)?
  • Do certain products and their associated keywords result in higher lifetime customer value (LTV)? (The same question applies to geography, time of day, mobile vs desktop, etc.)
  • Should we deploy simple tests to understand the impact and attribution of other forms of paid and earned media (display, social, video/audio, etc.)? Any paid media that can be geo-targeted lends itself to such a test of incrementality. These kinds of tests often work better than attribution models that lack data points and are particularly important for search because often another marketing touch-point stimulates search behavior by the consumer. Therefore one can look not only at sales data but also at changes on brand search volume.  For example, if you double display spends in Albany, Denver, and Orlando, and both brand searches and sales happen to rise in those cities, you’ve isolated your interaction effect.  Do the same with any paid media you want to test.

PPC account managed based on last click attribution around cost per action (CPA) or lead gen

Not all businesses make the sale online, so marketing teams running campaigns used to generate leads and are given a cost-per-lead or CPA target to hit. Rational questions to ask include:

  • Are all leads we see equal? This issue goes beyond the “Glengarry Glen Ross” level of good leads and bad leads, encompassing both lead conversion rate to a sale and also the value of the sale (immediate), along with lifetime customer value.  Part of that LTV discussion could revolve around churn rates (think cell phone plans and subscriptions of all types, including product and services subscriptions).
  • Rather than the average cost per lead or CPA, can we be more nuanced in our optimization?

Fixed budget PPC account

Rational questions to ask include:

  • What’s the marginal contribution to the business originating from extra search, social or display media? Despite nearly all online media being auctioned off in near real-time, many larger organizations like to fix their spend by channel or category. This isn’t often the right strategy. To have a conversation about where the media dollars should be allocated, estimate the marginal cost of the next KPI unit in search, social and display.  Yes, you’ll need to address all the intricacies of the interaction effects between other media and search, but PPC search is very inelastic (small changes in bidding often don’t result in position and volume change, whereas in display, depending on whether it’s retargeted or otherwise targeted, the ability to “buy your KPI” may be easier.
  • Should we just add budget or take from another channel when we find opportunities? If you could buy dollar bills for $.90 (including the effort to do the transaction), would you cap your budget?  Of course not.  Neither should any business. Sometimes, when the KPI includes a LTV factor, there may be cash flow constraints that also have a time-value of money (it may take you a year to get your one dollar), but otherwise the more the better for “ninety cent dollar bills!”

There’s probably another column that could be written on the nuances of applying unit economics to marketing, but this should give you a solid start toward a good SEM campaign.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About The Author

Kevin Lee is Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of

Didit

a leading digital marketing and technology firm started in 1996. Didit has made 11 acquisitions to transform itself into a one-stop-shop full-service marketing firm from a SEM/SEO boutique. Kevin continues to invent new technology platforms for Didit and for clients. Kevin also co-founded We-Care.com generating over $8 million for nonprofits via cause-marketing. As a true Digital Marketing pioneer, Kevin gives back to the industry via 4 books, speaking engagements, and 780+ published columns. Kevin received his MBA from Yale University and lives in Scarsdale with his wife

Dr Allison Kahner

and two kids.





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February 28, 2018 at 11:53AM
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Richer Google Analytics User Management

2/28/2018

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Richer Google Analytics User Management

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Today we are introducing more powerful ways to manage access to your Analytics accounts: user groups inside Google Analytics, and enforceable user policies. These new features increase your ability to tightly manage who has access to your data, and amplify the impact of the user management features we launched last year.

User Groups

User groups can now be created from and used within Google Analytics, simplifying user management across teams of people. This is a big time saver if you find yourself repeatedly giving out similar permissions to many people, and simplifies granting permissions as individuals rotate into or out of a team.

To start with user groups, visit either Suite Home or Google Analytics, navigate to the user management section, and click the “+” button. You will then see an option to add new groups, which will walk you through creating a user group, adding people to it, and assigning permissions to the group. Here is a full list of steps to make a user group.

Google Analytics User Management page highlighting the new option to create a user group

Enforced User Policies


Google Analytics 360 Suite user policies let you define which users will have access to your Analytics accounts, and which do not. When a user violates a policy, you will be warned of this through the user management section in Google Analytics or Suite Home and have the option to remove that user from your organization.

We have enhanced these policies so you can choose to block policy-violating users from being added to your Analytics accounts. While policies aren’t enforced by default, you have the option to block violator additions.  When you create or edit your organization’s user policy, you will see a toggle switch like the one below:

User policy setup showcasing the new enforced policy option
User groups and enforced user policies are supported in Google Analytics today, and support for more products is coming, as we continue to plan features that help customers better manage access to their critical business data.

Posted by Matt Matyas, Product Manager Google Analytics 360 Suite




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February 28, 2018 at 11:36AM
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Multifaceted featured snippets begin rolling out in Google search results

2/28/2018

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Multifaceted featured snippets begin rolling out in Google search results

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Google has been rolling out many new search features over the past few months related to images, featured snippets, and the knowledge graph. Today the search giant released another feature called “multifaceted featured snippets.”

Multifaceted featured snippets will be surfaced for queries that are sufficiently broad enough to allow for more than one interpretation of what was submitted. In these instances, the SERP returned will include more than one featured snippet, with the original query rewritten as the questions the algorithm assumes the user may have intended, and the results displayed in the multifaceted snippet will reflect those new questions.

From the announcement:

There are several types of nuanced queries where showing more comprehensive results could be helpful. We’re starting first with “multi-intent” queries, which are queries that have several potential intentions or purposes associated. The query “tooth pain after a filling,” for example, could be interpreted as “why does my tooth still hurt after a filling?” or “how long should a tooth hurt after a filling?”

For example:

Google Multifaceted Featured Snippet

Multifaceted Featured Snippets vs. Multi-Perspective Answers

Back in December, Bing began rolling out AI-powered multi-perspective answers as part of its “Intelligent Search” set of new features, which includes Intelligent Answers, Intelligent Image Search and Conversational Search. Multi-perspective answers are just one of the “Intelligent Answers” features that has been live since the rollout. These results surface two (or more) authoritative sources on a topic, and will typically include differing perspectives/answers to the query.

Bing leverages its deep recurrent neural network models to determine similarity and sentiment among authoritative sources, and extracts the multiple viewpoints related to a topic — providing the most relevant set of multi-perspective answers (covered in more detail here).

Bing – Multi-perspective Intelligent Answers

Google’s multifaceted featured snippets may appear not too dissimilar from Bing’s multi-perspective answers, in that they also provide multiple rich results for a single query, but they are instead based on the presumed multiple intentions of a query (resulting in both multiple queries and results) vs. multiple viewpoints resulting from a single query. With these types of broad queries, many interpretations of what the user is actually asking can exist.

Multifaceted snippets aim to provide a more comprehensive and actionable set of results for these multi-intent query scenarios. They differ from multi-perspective intelligent answers in that they presume a different question might be being asked altogether, and surface responses for each of the queries the algorithm assumes the user may have actually intended, as the screenshot below demonstrates:

Multifaceted Featured Snippet

Google plans to expand multifaceted featured snippets throughout 2018 to include other nuanced query types — beyond those that could have multiple intentions — and lists guidance-seeking queries as one example.

From the post:

“For example, guidance-seeking queries like “is it worth fixing my foundation?” have several components that could be important, such as cost, duration, methods and financing. We’ll continue to experiment with multifaceted featured snippets over this year to expand coverage.”

With both Google and Bing having fully adopted deep learning methods and using artificial neural networks to drive search advancements, we can expect to see a steady stream of changes in search results enhancements and improved information discovery.

As always, Google encourages users to submit feedback on these new search features as you encounter them in the SERPs. Read Google’s full announcement here.


About The Author

Michelle Robbins, SVP Content & Marketing Technology, oversees editorial direction as Editor in Chief for Third Door Media's digital publications,

Search Engine Land

,

Marketing Land

and

MarTech Today

, directing a full-time staff of reporters and editors managing contributed content. She is responsible for developing the content strategy across all properties and aligning those initiatives with the programming and audience goals for Third Door Media's two leading marketing conference series,

Search Marketing Expo

and

The MarTech Conference

. In addition, Michelle oversees information technology operations, directing the marketing technology department. An experienced domestic and international keynote and featured speaker, she enjoys connecting with the community at SMX, MarTech and other industry events. Connect online with Michelle on Twitter

@MichelleRobbins

, and

Linkedin

.





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February 28, 2018 at 11:00AM
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Rand Fishkin Has Now Left Moz Starts SparkToro

2/28/2018

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Rand Fishkin Has Now Left Moz, Starts SparkToro

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We knew this day was coming, he announced he was leaving the company he founded with his mother and that day has come. He posted about it last night on his new company blog, SparkToro. The picture you see above is from there as well.

SparkToro is a software product and data service to help marketers, public relations professionals, and entrepreneurial teams learn more about the audiences they want to reach. And Rand is leading that up.

He wrote a very detailed and transparent blog post about his departure from Moz, a company he founded about 17 years ago (which wasn't named Moz back then).

On a scale of 0-10, where 0 is “fired and escorted out of the building by security” and 10 is “left entirely of his own accord on wonderful terms,” my departure is around a 4. That makes today a hard one, cognitively and emotionally. I have a lot of sadness, a heap of regrets, and a smattering of resentment too. But I am, deeply, deeply thankful to all the people who supported me and Moz over the last two decades. The experience of building a company like this, of helping to change and mature an industry, of learning so much about entrepreneurship, marketing, and myself has been an honor and a privilege.

I wrote a little bit about how instrumental Rand is to the industry in the past. This is a sad moment for the industry but also should lead to new exciting things.

Rand - thank you for everything and we are looking forward to seeing what you come up with in the future.

You can drop a note on Rand's blog post or on his tweet wishing him well.

Today's my last day at Moz. Blog post: https://t.co/HWCe8lLSea pic.twitter.com/Kaockw2Oku

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) February 28, 2018

Forum discussion at Twitter.





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February 28, 2018 at 06:48AM
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Why You Shouldnt Panic About Unofficial Google Updates by @martinibuster

2/28/2018

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Why You Shouldn’t Panic About Unofficial Google Updates by @martinibuster

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Google has a habit of not confirming updates to their algorithm even though web publishers see that the search result are changing. Is Google purposely hiding what they are doing in order to protect their algorithm? I have collected evidence that arguably shows there is an answer to explain why Google denies something is going on when publishers insist nothing unusual is happening.

Facts Point to Updates

Every time there is an unofficial update, there are generally four symptoms that seemingly indicate an update is happening:

  1. SERP weather reports indicate ranking changes
  2. eCommerce retailers testify to ranking changes
  3. Black hat affiliate publishers report lost rankings
  4. SEO professionals publish reports of possible quality issues affected by the rankings

Those are four signs that an update to Google’s algorithm has happened. Yet in almost every one of those so-called “Phantom” events, Google has denied that anything important has updated with the algorithm. Given that so many publishers and SEOs report that an update has happened, it’s almost certain that Google is denying an update in order to protect their algorithm. It’s the logical conclusion.

Google is Protecting their Algorithm is the Logical Conclusion

Centuries ago it was understood that the sun revolved around the earth. You could see it with your own eyes. The idea that sun revolved around the earth was a logical conclusion supported by the evidence. The problem of course was that, unknown to medieval citizens, there was a considerable amount of evidence missing. So the 100% logical conclusion that the sun revolved around the sun was wrong.

As the true history about our understanding about the suns orbit illustrates, logical conclusions can be wrong. It’s also a scientific fact that logical conclusions can be wrong.

Understanding that logical conclusions are unreliable will help further the understanding that perhaps Google is telling the truth and not trying to protect their algorithm.

1. SEO Weather Reports are Unreliable

It is a proven fact that SEO weather reports are unreliable. Every single SEO Weather Report missed the rollout of Google’s Panda Algorithm. The introduction of the Panda algorithm was one of Google’s most disruptive algorithm updates ever. Yet SEO weather reports at the time missed it.

SERoundtable published an article featuring comments from both John Mueller and Gary Illyes stating that SEO weather reports are inaccurate and that SEO weather tools are inadvertently amplifying small effects because of the methodology used.

2. eCommerce Retailers Experience Ranking Changes

It is a fact that that on every day of every month there are sites losing rankings. There is volatility in the SERPs every single day, 365 days of the years. WebmasterWorld.com has for the past several years hosted a monthly Google Update discussion where web publishers discuss their ranking changes.  Not a day goes by, year after year, without a web publisher sharing that their rankings have changed. You can verify this on Google’s own product forum as well.

3. “Black Hat” Affiliate Sites Lost Rankings

The business model of so-called “black hat” affiliate websites is to rank sites with methods that violate Google’s guidelines, and keep creating new sites as the older sites lose rankings. This is called the churn and burn business model. It’s similar to how fish reproduce in the wild, by producing millions of eggs to compensate for the loss of most of them to predation.

It’s not notable if a so-called “black hat” affiliate site loses ranking. What’s notable is if a single day goes by and a “black hat” site does not bite the dust. The chatter of sites losing rankings does not cease. Chatter on black hat forums about ranking losses are a daily occurence, not the exception. So it cannot be cited as evidence of a Google update. You can tell because there is almost always disagreement as to whether it was links or content that Google was targeting.

Bill Slawski, a leading search marketing professional (of GoFishDigital.com) had this to say about diagnosing effects from a Google update:

Most Times it’s not Google. I remember at Cre8asiteforums, when an update at Google would be announced, how many people would show up with some slow traffic, and ask if they were penalized.

It often leads to asking them if they had made any changes to their site, if their competitors had made changes to their sites, if the industry had changed in some way (or people started searching using different language or wordings.)

The last thing to look at was whether the impact was due to a change on the search engines level, because it rarely was.

4. Anecdotal SEO Agency Reports

When a so-called update happens, SEO professionals publish reports based on the issues reported by clients coming to them for help. This is an unreliable source of data because it’s a self-selecting sample.

Remember, Google updates their algorithm every single day. There are tests. There are refinements to existing algorithms. Most major algorithm updates only affect low single digit percentages close to one percent or less.

Thus, it’s easy to assume that most of the daily refinements to Google’s algorithm likely affect a limited amount of queries close to a fraction of one percent and at worst, in the low single digits percentage-wise.

Is Google Protecting their Algorithm?

Google has traditionally been open about algorithm updates. Every major infrastructure and algorithm change has been announced after it was implemented. Tellingly, except for update Penguin and Update Florida, most Google udpates passed unnoticed until they were announced.

Evidence for Phantom Updates

It’s obvious that many of these updates are, as Googlers have insisted, false reports. Google updates and refines their algorithm every single day. Web publishers experience ranking changes every single day. SEO Weather reports are unreliable. The evidence that the so-called Phantom Updates were not actual updates is compelling.

What to Do if Your Rankings Change?

The first thing to do is understand what a Core Algo Ranking Update is and how to diagnose ranking changes. Some of the changes could be due to a test and often the search results return to normal within ten days, sometimes as long as a month. The important thing is to not panic and start making changes before a proper diagnosis of what actually changed.

 

Images by Shutterstock, Modified by Author





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February 28, 2018 at 06:45AM
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