Eric Schwartzman on the Myth of Organic SEO and what he learned delving into the realms of black hat and negative SEO:
Google is doing updates daily to its [search] algorithm. We’re just hearing about the ones that have PR value.
The reason that they want to keep us in line [with their ideal SEO best practices] is because they want it to be less expensive to have to process what’s going on on the internet to decide what to index and what to serve.
This is about more than [just] SEO.
The thin gray line
Google’s big drop is a horizontal line.
Ads may be easier to distinguish from organic results again with the return of a dividing line between the two on search results pages.
And everything old is new again?
Looks like Google realized Signals-based thresholding was annoying to everyone:
Google signals will be removed from the reporting identity on February 12, 2024. This change will apply to all of your Google Analytics 4 properties and will only affect reporting features. Google Analytics will still collect Google signals, when enabled, to be used in demographics and interests reporting. Google signals will also still support audience and conversion use cases, like remarketing and conversion optimization in linked Google advertising products.
🚨 GA4 Error Warning
Starting on (roughly) November 30, some UTM data has stopped populating in GA4.
I can’t see anything more granular than campaign level data from my UTM tags. A friend reports the same issue.
It appears the Google team is working on a fix.
In case you haven’t heard:
Consider this your final warning: Google is going to start wiping inactive accounts on Friday, December 1.
It only impacts personal (non-Google Workspace) accounts.
To avoid The Purge, just do something in your account to make it look active.
Google Ads added more algorithm signals (robot food) to Performance Max campaigns.
Search themes in Performance Max allow you to provide Google AI with valuable information about what your customers are searching for and which topics lead to conversions for your business.
It’s keyword (up to 25) targeting for PMax. Both a way to help bridge the gap in instances of minimal or missing data for Big G to pull from your site and (I imagine) to make more search marketers comfortable with the new campaign type.
It’s found via the Signals card in a campaigns asset groups tab.
It’s going to be really interesting to watch how AI impacts product development. Especially with Google’s new search feature.
Use generative AI to create an image of what you’re looking for. Then use image search to find similar items that actually exist.
One day this could evolve into generating an image of exactly what you want and sending it to a factory to be made for you.
The shopping experience will soon be very different.
Just heard from a Google rep that it takes up to 7 days for data to properly populate GA4’s attribution models.
Did you know shopping season is starting? Looks like Google does.
Big G has rolled out some new features that could have a bigger impact than just this Q4.
First, a deals page for shoppers:
Search “shop deals” to access
Make sure to audit your deals in Merchant Center, Chrome now has tools that will show shoppers when “an active promotion is available.”
But the big one, no more pricing games to make deals seem better than they are. Chrome’s new shopping insights “will show that product’s typical price range and a price history graph for up to the last 90 days.” Plus price drop alerts.