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andreacaskey · 2 years

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Performance Max campaigns are now widely available and will include Smart Shopping and Local campaigns in 2022

After launching as a beta in October 2020, Google Ads has rolled out Performance Max campaigns to all advertisers, the company announced Tuesday. The company also announced that Smart Shopping and Local campaigns will be rolled into Performance Max sometime in 2022.

What are Performance Max campaigns? First unveiled at Advertising Week 2020, Performance Max campaigns are designed to enable advertisers to place their ads across all Google-owned and operated properties, instead of creating specialized ads for specific channels. Thus, Performance Max campaign ads are eligible to run across all inventory, including Search, Discover, Display, Gmail, Maps and YouTube, and are meant to complement standard Search campaigns.

Similar to other automated campaign types, advertisers provide the copy and image and/or video assets and Google’s machine learning systems serve the responsive ads across the channels. Bids are placed using Smart Bidding based on the advertiser’s goal.

The Google Ads Insights page. Image: Google.

Performance Max campaigns are also part of the Google Ads Insights page, which shows currently trending searches, auction insights and interest predictions tailored to the account.

Smart Shopping and Local campaigns to be “upgraded” to Performance Max. “To help you increase sales, Smart Shopping and Local campaigns will both upgrade to Performance Max in 2022,” Google said in the announcement. This means that, at some point next year, Smart Shopping and Local campaigns will no longer exist in their current state and advertisers may have to switch to Performance Max campaigns, which are eligible to appear in more channels.

“We see Performance Max as a single, unified campaign type and we wouldn’t be delivering on the performance promises of that if it didn’t include Smart Shopping campaigns and Local campaigns, which is why they are going to be upgraded [included in Performance Max] moving forward,” a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land.

Why we care. Since the beginning of the pandemic, consumer behavior has seen non-stop disruption as consumers adapt to new circumstances. Responding to those new and evolving behaviors can be challenging for brands and may necessitate new strategies, which also take time to implement. Google has positioned its automated campaigns, such as Performance Max, as a way to help advertisers stay ahead of trends by leveraging Google’s machine learning. It is even boasting a 13% average increase in incremental conversions for advertisers that use Performance Max. As always, it is best to test new features (or in this case, a campaign type) to evaluate whether it’s right for your brand and your audience.

Testing will also be especially important for those currently relying on Smart Shopping and Local campaigns, since they’ll be rolled into Performance Max next year. Google is not making the change this year because advertisers are likely to already have a roadmap in place for the 2021 holiday shopping season.

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andreacaskey · 2 years

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Google says more detailed descriptions will improve your job posting pages

Google said it has “uncovered an opportunity to improve your job posting pages” by simply adding more details in the description property of the job posting structured data.

By doing this, your job posting pages may see a boost in visibility in Google Search.

More details on providing more details. Bobby Panczer, Software Engineer at Google Search, said “in the description section of a posting in the jobs experience on Google Search, we only present text that is included in the description property. That’s why it’s important to include information about job qualifications, skills, benefits, etc. in the description field.”

If you want to ensure that searchers can view the full job description in the jobs experience on Google Search, “review the description field and make sure it includes all information that you may have included only in specific fields (like the qualifications property),” Bobby Panczer said.. He added that “you don’t need to remove the more specific fields; just make sure that you also include the same information in the description property itself.”

Why we care. Many companies are looking to hire and expand their workforce, while some companies are looking to fill open positions. Here is one more way to get exposure for your job openings.

Google is going out of its way to say that you should put more details in your descriptions property field, so it would make sense that you take that advice and make sure your job structure data has the full details, so that you can maximize your job posting pages exposure in Google Search.

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andreacaskey · 2 years

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Google Chrome makes Omnibox prefetch faster for your default search engine

Google made the Chrome Omnibox search box event faster saying the search results are four times more likely to be shown within 500 milliseconds.

Chrome Omnibox search faster. Google said “searching in Chrome is now even faster, as search results are prefetched if a suggested query is very likely to be selected. This means that you see the search results more quickly, as they’ve been fetched from the web server before you even select the query.” Google said it is four times faster, “our experiments found that search results are now 4X more likely to be shown within 500 ms,” Google wrote.

What is the Omnibox. It is what you see as the search box on the Chrome browser, but more technically the Omnibox is an API method that allows you to register a keyword with Google Chrome’s address bar. The omnibox API provides a third party extension a way to customize the suggestions displayed in the drop-down, when the user enters a keyword defined by the extension.

Here is a screenshot of this:

Default browser required. Google said for the prefetching to work and make the Omnibox results faster, the search engine you select must be set as the default. Google said this can only happen “if Google Search is your default search engine.” This also means that other search engines can also enable this “by adding information to the query suggestions sent from their servers to Chrome, as described in this article,” the company said.

So third party search providers can leverage this speed bump too, if they want.

Why we care. A lot of users use Chrome, and many of them use the Omnibox built into Chrome. Often Google shows search results in the Omnibox, as well as local snippets, facts and other information. Maybe, making the results faster can lead to more searches and traffic to your website.

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andreacaskey · 2 years

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Microsoft Advertising updates include Smart Shopping campaigns rollout and GTM integration

Each month Microsoft Advertising releases its products updates and new releases to help search marketers take advantage of the Microsoft Advertising Network. This month’s new updates include Smart Shopping rollouts for everyone who has access to shopping, new Video Ad options, and insights into why ads are rejected.

Smart Shopping campaign rollout. “In this time of market uncertainties and competition, creating engaging online shopping experiences that can be effectively scaled and optimized is of utmost importance, especially for small business owners,” said Kevin Salat in an announcement today. Smart Shopping campaigns allow advertisers to use Microsoft’s automation tools to optimize their shopping campaigns to target customers who are more likely to convert at higher revenue values. These campaigns are “a combination of traditional shopping campaigns, automated bidding, Universal Event Tracking (UET) and remarketing. With these powerful automation tools enabled for Smart Shopping, you can help serve the right ad to the right user at the right time to boost conversion rates and reduce your costs,” said Salat.

Automated Universal Event Tracking (UET) setup with Google Tag Manager. This month’s announcement includes an automated integration with Google Tag Manager. To take advantage of this feature, users will need to sign into Google and select the Tag Manager account and container via Microsoft Online. This updates your permissions and Microsoft Advertising can “set up the UET tag with additional parameters by copying the setup used by your existing Google tags (for example, if you already include Product ID and Page Type for Dynamic Remarketing in your Universal Analytics tag).”

Inline Appeals give visibility into Merchant Center rejections. “With the Inline Appeal offering in the Microsoft Merchant Center interface, you’ll get visibility into any editorial rejections of offers for the respective policy violations in the Store, providing you with a very organized summary overview of key policy violations driving major rejections,” Salat said in the announcement. This new feature also means you can appeal or request a review for any rejections directly from the Merchant Center interface. Advertisers no longer have to email Ad Support directly and wait for email responses.

Source: Microsoft Advertising

Other big additions:

Expanded targeting. The Microsoft Audience Network is expanding its footprint to 18 new markets, available to all customers in mid-November.

CPC and CPM pricing. On the Microsoft Audience Network, you can now choose between CPC or CPM Pricing, so you can select the right pricing model for each campaign.

New Pilot: Seasonality adjustments for automated bidding. “If you have a particular seasonal event, promotion, or other variation for your business, you can help inform our algorithms with more signals of expected performance changes (conversion rate variance, e.g.) and help you maximize performance around critical times for your business,” wrote Salat.

Dynamic Search Ads expanding to Latin America and Asia-Pacific. These ad types will be available in Latin America and Asia-Pacific markets in late November.

Why we care. Many of these changes are coming right in time for the holiday shopping season. Microsoft Advertising has said they focus on automating the repetitive tasks of search advertising so that marketers can focus on the creative and strategic endeavors and these features and updates enforce that concept. The idea is to help marketers and especially small businesses save time and money when it comes to advertising. The automation in both setup and execution of campaigns can do that, but, as always, marketers should keep a keen eye on anything automated to ensure it aligns with their campaign goals and metrics.

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andreacaskey · 2 years

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How to Easily Create Quality TikTok Ads

Want to level up your TikTok ads? Looking for inspiration? In this article, you’ll discover tips and tools that will help you create engaging TikTok ads without expensive design tools. Why You Should Use Native Tools to Create TikTok Ads TikTok is all about making it easier for creators to develop powerful video content for the platform […]

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andreacaskey · 2 years

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20211102 SEL Brief

The post 20211102 SEL Brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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andreacaskey · 2 years

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Holiday shopping SEO: Last-minute tips and techniques for e-commerce sites

This post first ran on Sept. 19, 2020 but was updated to include new information.

Before the holiday shopping season approaches, online retailers should be readying and refreshing content, category and product pages to maximize search visibility as interest surges, and auditing their sites to ensure a smooth user experience.

While there may only be a few weeks left before Black Friday, there is still plenty of time to implement the tips and techniques below to ensure that you’re getting the most out of the work your teams have already put in and that you’re not committing errors that could potentially hurt your business during this critical season.

Take advantage of free product listings

Google opened up its Shopping search results to unpaid, organic listings in April 2020, and Bing followed suit in August. Getting your products into these results can mean free exposure to the millions of people that use Google and Bing Shopping to look for holiday gifts.

Google’s organic Shopping listings as they appear on desktop.

To be eligible to show up in Shopping results, you’ll need to upload product feeds into Google and Microsoft Merchant Center, respectively. If you operate a physical store, there is a separate program in Google Merchant Center (GMC) called “Local surfaces across Google,” which can be used to show product availability in Google search, Google Images, Google Shopping, Google Maps and Google Lens.

Plus, on November 1, 2021, Bing implemented new shopping tabs to help customers find exactly what they’re looking for (and maybe some things they didn’t know they needed) in time for the holiday shopping season. “Shoppers can start their search when by browsing our Departments, with over 1,000 categories – such as Home Furnishings and Electronics – to choose from. These pages highlight trends, price drops, and coupons available in each department,” according to the announcement. Other tabs include Stores, Editors Picks, Deals, Trending Products, and Prices Drop.

Source: Microsoft Bing

RELATED: FAQ: All about Google Shopping and Surfaces across Google

Keep track of campaign performance. Tracking your campaigns can enable you to make more strategic decisions in the future. Unfortunately, reporting for these organic listings isn’t as sophisticated as paid campaigns.

Reporting was not available when Bing’s free product listings launched, but the company rolled out basic metrics (clicks and impressions) later last year.

In GMC, the Performance report shows clicks from Surfaces across Google. In Google Analytics, clicks from free Shopping listings are categorized as “google / organic” traffic, meaning that it’s not possible to tell how your organic Shopping listings are doing compared to your traditional organic search listings. As a workaround, Kirk Williams of ZATO Marketing offers a tagging process to track user behavior after the click.

Add structured data to signal relevance and inform shoppers

Product Schema. “Google has introduced countless new Shopping features directly in search results,” said Karen Bone, SEO director at digital marketing and SEO agency Ayima, pointing to structured data-powered features like product Knowledge Panels and the Popular Products carousel, and their prominence in search results pages. “Without incorporating your products to be featured, your classic ranking position may not be enough to drive traffic,” she said.

A standard search result listing (above) for a video game, compared to a listing for the same game that uses structured data (below) to make star rating, review and price information available in the search results. Source: Dave Davies.

“[Product Schema is] the easiest way to clarify to Google that you should rank for phrases like “buy X,” said Dave Davies, CEO at Beanstalk Internet Marketing, adding that this structured data type can help draw the attention of prospective customers and provide them with useful information to base their decisions off of, as well as potentially improve your click-through rates.

The Popular Products carousel. Mobile users may also encounter Google’s Popular Products carousel if they’re hunting for apparel and fashion products. This mobile result type enables users to filter through product categories, view different colors, read reviews and compare prices without having to click through to a retailer’s site (although they will have to click on a store link to complete the purchase).

The Popular Products carousel in Google mobile search results.

You can get your products into this carousel by marking them up with product Schema and/or submitting a product feed in Google Merchant Center. You can read more about the exact feed and Schema requirements, as well as how you can optimize for this feature, in our FAQ article on Google’s Popular Products.

Refresh and reposition your evergreen content

Keep your content working throughout the year. Evergreen content can be a resource for prospective customers year-round and continue to serve your business year after year. “Don’t create campaign pages for holiday and then retire them immediately after,” said Bone, recommending instead that merchants create evergreen content, such as gift guides, that they can link to internally throughout the year and feature more prominently towards the holidays shopping season. “Allow that content to gain links and work for you each year, rather than removing it and starting fresh year over year,” she said.

Accommodate the holiday consumer. Segmenting your queries and repositioning your evergreen content accordingly is crucial to its success during the holidays.

“Ask yourself, during the holidays, are the same people making the buying decisions?” said Davies, “A good example is video games: During much of the year, the primary buyer will be the player, but during the holidays, the stats reveal it’s an extremely popular gift.”

In this example, if you have content geared at ranking for queries related to “top games,” you’ll want to adjust the content for the holidays to address the questions of the new consumer (the gift purchaser). Shifting content this way will help you take advantage of existing rankings, Davies said.

“On these pages, you want to consider not the big pitch you can make to a consumer already salivating for the latest Call Of Duty, but rather the questions that their parents, relatives, etc. will have,” he said, “What is it rated? Why does it have that rating? What do other parents think? These types of questions.”

In addition to refreshing your content, you should also revise your descriptions, headlines and page titles; for example, a title such as “A Parent’s Guide to 2021’s Top Video Games” is more likely to attract clicks from parents than “2021’s Top Video Games.” Reworking your content with these factors in mind can help you attract more clicks during the holidays and convert the traffic you’re getting.

Create category and product pages specifically for holiday shoppers

Shoppers are likely to be searching for specific deals and you’ll want to ensure they can find yours as easily as possible. Extending your holiday shopping-focused optimizations to product and category pages will help you achieve this goal.

Create category pages that reflect how shoppers are searching. “Optimize your high-value category pages with the proper keywords for each holiday,” Jackson Lo, SEO lead, international growth at Shopify, said, “You can do this by updating your category title tags, meta descriptions and page content to include relevant keywords and products.”

Best Buy’s search listing reflects a specific, popular search query during Black Friday.

“For instance, ‘black friday deals on tvs’ is a very popular search term customers use during Black Friday,” he said, pointing to Best Buy’s category page that has been optimized for this specific intent.

Collaborate to avoid missed opportunities. As you create new product and/or category pages, work with your PR and social teams to help drive backlinks to those pages. “Often, marketing teams will create new campaign pages, without consulting SEO teams, and authority is diluted or lost,” said Bone, advising that if your business creates virtual flyers, ensure the links to those flyers are easily accessible. “These are often picked up by third-party sites and are a great source of backlinks and creating excitement to shop your deals,” she said.

Things that can hurt your visibility and sales during the holiday season

In addition to assessing what can be optimized during the lead-up to the holiday shopping season, your teams should also audit your site to ensure it works as intended and postpones any major projects until this crucial sales period is over.

Check for errors that may affect conversions. “For instance, check to make sure there aren’t any important pages blocked by robots.txt from being crawled or indexed, broken category or product URLs or slow-loading pages,” Lo said. Tackling these errors early on can lead to a better experience for your customers, which may translate to more sales.

Scrutinize your user experience. Auditing your user experience can help you keep visitors on the right path. For example, if you have a standalone FAQ page for a particular product category, shoppers can get sidetracked on a page that isn’t conversion-oriented, Davies said. “Answer that question front-and-center in the conversion journey,” he said; in this example, you can do so by moving the FAQ section into the category page.

Save site migrations and other major projects for later. A site migration is a significant undertaking, and certainly one that should be shelved until after the holidays. While they can be performed correctly, any number of mistakes, even as simple as communications oversights between SEOs and developers, can result in errors that can potentially and negatively impact your search visibility.

If a botched migration affects your site’s ability to process transactions, you’ll be spending precious time leading up to the holidays fixing it, which means fewer resources spent on optimizations and potentially lost customers. Even after a site has been migrated, rankings for important pages may fluctuate and search engines may have to index new URLs, so save site migrations and other projects that could affect your visibility and user experience for later.

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andreacaskey · 2 years

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Sarah Bird, CEO of Moz, leaving Moz after 14 years

Sarah Bird, the CEO of Moz, said that it is “time for me to move on and make space for new voices, new leaders,” on the company blog. After 14 yeas with the company, almost 8 of those years as the CEO of Moz, and the previous years as Moz’s President and COO, she is leaving the company.

Sarah Bird took over as the CEO in January 2014, after Rand Fishkin, the co-founder, stepped down from that role. Rand Fishkin explained that Sarah Bird was the President and COO of the company and was taking over as the CEO then. She has been with the company for 6 years and has been acting in many ways as the company’s CEO, prior to her taking on that role. In 2017, Rand Fishkin left day-to-day operations of the company.

Moz has been through many ups and downs over the years but most recently in June of this year, just about five months ago, Moz was acquired by iContact. While Sarah Bird did not specifically say much about the reason she is leaving outside of saying “I’m going to take the winter off to reflect, rest, and cherish my loved ones. I don’t know what the future holds for me, but I know it will be a grand adventure.” One can guess that she accomplished her goal of getting Moz acquired and is now moving on to a new role.

We wish Sarah Bird much luck with her next adventure and we wish Moz and its employees much success with its new leadership, which has yet to be disclosed.

Sarah Bird said “I feel good knowing that I’m leaving Moz, and all of you, in good hands.”

Why we care. Moz is one of the more reputable toolsets in the industry, we hope to see future leaders in the search community represent the company going forward.

For members of the search community at Moz, many of whom have been featured here or at SMX, we hope the future has exciting things in store for you at Moz.

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andreacaskey · 2 years

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Google Ads’ new conversion goals group conversion actions for account- and campaign-level bidding optimization

Google Ads is introducing conversion goals, which group conversion actions into categories based on conversion type and can be used to optimize bidding at the account or campaign level, the company announced Monday. Alongside conversion goals, the company also announced a troubleshooting tool called Tag Assistant and explanations for Search campaigns.

Conversion goals. There are three types of conversion goals:

Standard goals — Conversion actions added by the advertiser, which are then automatically grouped into conversion goals based on their conversion category type (e.g., “Purchases,” “Contacts” or “Submit lead forms”).

Account-default goals — The standard conversion goals (above) that you have designated as your account default. When you create a new campaign, all account-default goals in your account are selected for optimization by default.

Custom goals — Goals that advertisers can create and add any combination of primary (used for bidding) and secondary conversion (not used for bidding) actions.

“For example, let’s say you’re an online clothing retailer. Going forward, you can set a purchase as your account-default goal so that all of your campaigns can optimize for that outcome,” Google said in the announcement, “Within this purchase goal, you’ll also be able to define which specific conversion actions, such as ‘completed sale’, should be used for bidding.” Advertisers can decide which individual conversion actions are used for bidding optimization when the goal it belongs to is used for bidding.

Advertisers will begin seeing their conversion actions grouped by these new conversion goals when they create new campaigns over the coming weeks. Existing conversion, conversion optimization and bidding settings will not be changed.

Tag assistant. Your conversion actions play an important role in facilitating the aforementioned conversion goals. To that end, Google is also introducing Tag Assistant, a tool that can help you diagnose issues with your conversion actions, such as unverified conversion actions, inactive tags or no recent conversions.

The new Tag Assistant in Google Ads. Image: Google.

Additionally, the Tag Assistant shows which conversion actions are being properly measured in real time.

Explanations for Search campaigns. Google has also added explanations for Search campaigns. “With explanations, you can view the reason for any change in conversion value in a single click,” the company said.

An example of an explanation in Google Ads. Image: Google.

Explanations are currently available for search campaigns using manual CPC, enhanced CPC, enhanced CPC for value, target CPA, maximize conversions, maximize clicks bidding, maximize conversion value and target ROAS, as well as app campaigns using target CPA.

Why we care. Conversion goals may simplify conversion management and improve campaign performance by giving Google’s machine learning more data to work with.

The Tag Assistant can help advertisers troubleshoot unverified or inactive conversion actions, which can help them more accurately record conversions.

And, explanations may help advertisers learn why account performance has changed, in one place, without having to cross-reference reports. This may also be useful for identifying potential reasons behind those performance changes.

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andreacaskey · 2 years

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Google on Penguin algorithm; aims to ignore spammy links but can lead to distrusting your site

When Google released the real-time Penguin algorithm update, which some SEOs code-named 4.0, back in 2016, Google told us this version devalues or ignores most spammy links. For the most part, Google’s Penguin algorithm no longer penalized for bad links because it would aim to neutralize the spammy links and just not count them, as opposed to penalizing for them.

John Mueller, a Search Advocate at Google, said on Friday in a video question and answer session that Penguin does try to ignore the spammy links. However, in the cases where Google cannot because there is a “very strong pattern” of spammy links pointing to the site, Penguin may penalize and distrust the site as a whole and not act in the granular way it was designed for.

John Mueller said this at the 37:06 mark in this video he posted on Friday on the Google Search Central YouTube channel.

What was said. The question John was asked was “Is the Penguin penalty still relevant at all or less relevant spammy toxic backlinks are more or less ignored by the ranking algorithms these days.”

John responded, “I’d say it’s a mix of both.” He explained, “For the most part when we can recognize that something is problematic and any kind of a spammy link and we will try to ignore it.” “If our systems recognize that they can’t isolate and ignore these links across a website, if we see a very strong pattern there, then it can happen that our algorithms say well we really have kind of lost trust with this website and at the moment based on the bigger picture on the web, we kind of need to be more on almost a conservative side when it comes to understanding this website’s content and ranking it in the search results and then you can see kind of a drop in the visibility there.”

John is saying, that in some cases, Google’s Penguin link algorithm can demote the whole site based on the links and not just ignore the specific spammy links. But it seems like it has to be very high levels of spammy links.

“But for the most part like the web is pretty messy and we recognize that we have to ignore a lot of the links out there. So for the most part I think that’s fine. Usually, you would only see this kind of a drop if it’s really a strong and a clear pattern that’s associated with the website,” John added.

John came back on Twitter to clarify that “this is the case for many spam & low-quality signals” in the Google algorithms. He explained, “we’ll work to ignore the irrelevant effects, but if it’s hard to find anything useful that’s remaining, our algorithms can end up being skeptical with the site overall.” “Our spam algorithms are pretty nuanced and they do look at a number of factors,” he added.

Disavow links. So do we need to disavow links now, even when Google said we really don’t need to? The answer is no, you don’t need to disavow links. You can John Mueller said, “I’d either ignore it or use the disavow file (for the worse domains).”

The video. Here is the video embed where John said this:

youtube

SEO consultants chime in. I asked a few SEO consultants their opinion on what John said in this video and here is what they had to say:

Lily Ray, the Senior Director, SEO & Head of Organic Research of Amsive Digital told us, “John’s advice here shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to SEOs who have dealt with companies engaging in large scale link building initiatives using tactics that violate Google’s guidelines, only to encounter massive declines in ranking and traffic.” “Google doesn’t always send out a manual action when the sites run into trouble. But in many cases, sites can either struggle to rank or feel that they’ve received an algorithmic penalty without any formal notification. Often, when you take a look at their backlink profile and talk to the company about their SEO strategy, you might discover that most of the links are paid links, guest posts, footer links, exact match anchor text, etc. on websites no one has ever heard of. In these cases, I believe it’s important to reconcile Google’s trust issues with your site by disavowing the paid/offending links, as well as earning new, trustworthy links organically,” she added.

Glenn Gabe, SEO consultant at G-Squared Interactive told us, “Rolling out Penguin 4 was a great move by Google in 2016, since it devalued link spam versus penalizing it. But as John explained, if Google’s algorithms cannot find any useful links (which would be an extreme situation), and there is a strong and clear pattern of spammy links, then it can be skeptical with the site, and Google can lose trust with the site overall. As a result, the site can see a drop in search visibility. The problem is that many site owners believe they are being attacked via negative SEO (and that those link attacks are working — and it’s the reason they have seen drops over time). Google has explained in the past that negative SEO attacks don’t work and that its algorithms can just ignore the link spam (especially for sites with a normal mix of links). So for many of those sites fearing negative SEO attacks, the situation John covered in the latest Search Central Hangout would not really apply. In my opinion, if a site has an overwhelmingly spammy link profile (almost all of the links are unnatural and spammy), without any other quality links, then that obviously can be problematic. But for most sites that have a normal mix of links, what John is explaining should NOT be a problem. Unfortunately, I’m already hearing from site owners about this… when their sites definitely don’t fit into the situation John explained in the video.”

Dr. Marie Haynes, the CEO of MHC inc told us, “Google’s communication on what site owners need to know about Penguin has been frustrating. At a Pubcon conference in late 2016 Gary Illyes told us that it was indeed possible for Penguin to algorithmically cause harm saying, “If Penguin sees signs of manipulation, it can decide to discount ALL the links, which can be pretty bad for a site.” Our belief is that while this can happen, it is reserved for cases where there is an obvious history of links being built solely to manipulate PageRank on an astronomical scale. While we have seen improvements for some sites after filing a thorough disavow, even if no manual action is present, the only cases that we feel we can attribute improvements to disavow work are for sites with a history of years of very manipulative link building.”

Why we care. Ultimately, when it comes to link building, you should be careful. Don’t buy links, don’t look for cheap and easy ways to get links to your site. Make sure to review Google’s documented link schemes help document and stay far away from those methods.

When working on client sites that may have link issues, you need to decide if you really need to disavow links or not and then which links you should disavow. At the same time, Google is likely already ignoring most of the bad links, so you may not have to worry too much about it.

It may just be easier to avoid the practice of link building and build a website and content that other sites naturally want to link to without you asking them.

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andreacaskey · 2 years

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3 YouTube Ad Targeting Options to Expand Your Reach

Want to reach more of the right people with your YouTube ads? Wondering which targeting options you should try? In this article, you’ll discover three ways to target people with your YouTube ads. #1: Target Audiences by YouTube Remarketing Lists If you’re just getting started with YouTube advertising and aren’t sure who to target, why […]

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andreacaskey · 2 years

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20211101 SEL Brief

The post 20211101 SEL Brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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andreacaskey · 3 years

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Instagram opens Stories link sticker to all users

Instagram has made the link sticker available to all users this week. The feature lets you link out to third-party sites, stories, products, and more via the Stories option in the app.

Source: Instagram blog

Previously only available to select accounts. Instagram began testing the sticker option as a replacement to “Swipe Up” linking in Instagram Stories around August. Plus, the features were only available to verified accounts or those that met a 10,000 follower threshold. Facebook, Instagram’s parent company, has been emphasizing how the platform is crucial for small, local, and retail businesses — especially as a rallying cry against Apple’s App Tracking Transparency initiative.

However, the social media managers for these types of businesses have always advocated that making the Swipe Up link option, and now the sticker link option, available to everyone and not just select users, would be one of the best ways to support SMBs and commerce businesses.

the fact that you need 10k followers on instagram to get the swipe up feature on your stories really sucks for us small business owners

— artbylitzy

(@artbylitzy) June 26, 2019

.@facebook and @instagram, You know what would make you look like more of a small business advocate? Offering the swipe up story option for all small businesses regardless of follower count.

— Christina's chaos magic (@ThatChristinaG) December 17, 2020

The Stories link feature opening up to everyone is a huge opportunity for SMBs, retail, social justice orgs, and more. Instagram says that those misusing the Stories link feature to share misinformation or harmful websites will lose access.

How to start using link stickers. To add a Link sticker to your Stories:

Capture or upload content to your story

Select the sticker tool from the top navigation bar

Tap the “Link” sticker to add your desired link and tap “Done”

Place the sticker on your story — like our other stickers — and tap on the sticker to see color variations

“We’re also working on ways to customize the sticker so it’s clear what someone will see when they tap your link,” according to the announcement.

Why we care. Instagram users have long been lobbying for this functionality as the platform says it supports small businesses, but previously did not allow them to link their products, stores, and services through Stories. The feature is now available to everyone just in time for the holiday shopping season. If your business has a decent following on Instagram, make sure to incorporate it as part of your social strategy to help move those loyal communities down the funnel toward a purchase.

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Core Web Vitals: SEOs look back and shrug; Thursday’s daily brief

Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, what if Microsoft hadn’t fumbled so hard with smartphones?

Today is Bill Gates’ 66th birthday, and regardless of how you feel about him, his successes and failures have helped shape the environment that we market in. Bing is the default for Windows, making the search engine an important consideration for some B2B marketers or for brands with audiences that primarily use desktop devices. I also regularly see PPC experts praise the efficiency that Bing Advertising offers, although they acknowledge the tradeoff in search volume.

Returning to my question at the top, Gates once said that, “The greatest mistake ever is whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is — that is the standard [non-Apple] phone platform. That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win.” Gmail, Google Maps and Search were among the top 20 free apps in Apple’s app store last year, even though iPhones are pre-loaded with Apple’s own mail and map applications (Google pays Apple to be its default search provider on iOS). If Microsoft had succeeded, Google’s ecosystem might not be the powerhouse it is today and perhaps search marketing would look less like a monopoly, or maybe just a different monopoly.

George Nguyen, Editor

Core Web Vitals: SEOs aren’t sold the work was worth it

Image: Google.

Since its announcement in May 2020, the page experience update generated much speculation among SEOs. This was because it made user experience more of a Google ranking factor than it had been before and because it was announced more than a year ahead of its rollout. Before it went live, Google told us that “Page experience remains one of many factors our systems take into account. Given this, sites generally should not expect drastic changes.”

Now that the update has completely rolled out, SEOs are reflecting on how it actually played out for their brands. Although opinions vary, the general consensus seems to be that the page experience update didn’t result in major rankings fluctuations, but ROI isn’t just on the SERP — “Performance optimization may not be a silver bullet for rankings, but we don’t optimize just for that,” said Detlef Johnson, Search Engine Land’s SEO for developers expert. “[Core Web] Vitals, as determined by Google, are the tip of the spear that you can sharpen to cut through the network to load the experience faster, which can lead to more add-to-cart actions because it builds confidence and trust,” he added.

Priority Hints, a new, experimental feature to help site owners and Chrome browsers prioritize which resources to load first, can help you deliver a faster experience to your users. It can be used to boost the priority of the LCP image, causing LCP to happen sooner and thus improve the associated metric — in a test on Google Flights (shown above), Priority Hints improved LCP from 2.6 seconds to 1.9 seconds. Conversely, you can also lower the priority of above-the-fold content that may not be as important, like the second, third or fourth images in a carousel.