This is one of the biggest things I’ve taken away from recent Google search algo updates: topical relevance.
Write about topics related to your brand, don’t chase trends and clickbait.
Google is stupid. It’s not smart. It’s math. It’s counting things.
So it it’s counting more little leagues than it’s counting electrical distribution equipment, there you go: topical confusion.
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.