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Dear <<First Name>>,
A more significant trend that I think should be on your radar.
The major tech platforms are moving toward understanding segmenting various audiences and serving up content to them organically (and now with paid display) based on their topics of interest. As a marketer, you can no longer be successful without a clear understanding of your target audience and their specific content needs.
I was reminded of this trend when reading about Google Chrome’s update to stop supporting third-party cookies.
Apple Safari already limited cookie tracking in 2018 and Mozilla Firefox blocked third-party cookies in 2019. Google is now limiting their support of them starting this month. Instead, Google will use browser-based machine learning to log your browsing history and lump people into groups alongside others with similar interests. The AI system is called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC). The machine learning system takes your web history, among other things, and puts you into a particular group based on your interests. It works similarly to how Netflix’s algorithm works out what you might like to watch. In essence, your viewing history is similar, but not identical to, plenty of others.
There are potential ethical issues involved in Google’s proposed solution (and EFF describes them here). Still, Google is trialing its FLoC this month (March 2021) but will only use websites that have tracking enabled or are already serving display advertising. Keep in mind that "Google would still be able to use the insights it obtains from users' activities on Google Search and YouTube to select personalized ads on Google’s properties, so the personalization for Google users continues."
OK, with that macro-perspective in mind, let’s get to the updates.
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Google Announcements and Updates
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Passage ranking is now live in the US
Here’s the announcement:
Note that there is nothing that you can do here to trigger this for your site based on Google’s documentation, but I think clean HTML markup and well-structured pages couldn’t hurt, and I’ve seen Google pull Featured Snippets from pages that have that structure.
A site’s topical expertise impacts ranking
Google’s John Mueller said they could recognize if a site has a good reputation on a specific topic area. It turns out that you can get a sense of your topical authority by looking at topical citation flow in Majestic, which looks like this:
New manual actions aimed at Google News and Discover
Here are the recent manual actions for Google News and Google Discover:
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Discover policy violation: Adult-themed content
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News and Discover policy violation: Dangerous content
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News and Discover policy violation: Harassing content
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News and Discover policy violation: Hateful content
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News and Discover policy violation: Manipulated media
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News and Discover policy violation: Medical content
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Discover policy violation: Misleading content
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News and Discover policy violation: Sexually explicit content
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News and Discover policy violation: Terrorist content
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News policy violation: Transparency
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News and Discover policy violation: Violence and gore content
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News and Discover policy violation: Vulgar language and profanity
Google Human Raters can spot and apply penalties to your site, and you would see those penalties inside Google Search Console.
Brand Associations in Google Search Console
This new feature lets you link your Google Search Console account to any other Google property (Analytics, YouTube, etc.) and “can unlock more functionality for your site.” Every webmaster should go ahead and associate all of your Google properties together. There’s more about the new feature here.
Google Video On Image SEO
Google's John Mueller released a video on image SEO best practices and tips. Most of it is the guidance we’ve seen before, though these elements were new (to me):
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Bing Announcements and Updates
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Not a Bing announcement per se, but it turns out that DuckDuckGo gets some of its results from Bing, so even more reason to ensure that Bing indexed all of your pages.
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Improving Page Speed Articles (Core Web Vitals)
Note that Core Web Vitals (CWV) will be associated with an algorithm update (estimated to be rolled out May 2021), which applies site-wide. BUT rankings are page by page. So getting your CWV under control is a site-wide optimization task you’ll see for individually ranked pages.
Other resources to help you benchmark and improve your CWV:
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Google: There is no SEO Benefit to Audio Versions of Text Posts
Unlike photo and video, Google doesn’t do anything special with audio content that is not part of a podcast, and it’s not processed separately by Google. However, if it’s a podcast, Google can index it via your podcast feed and surface it in Google’s podcast search and the podcast one box.
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New GMB Tool:
A Google Sheets tool to help you build and schedule your Google My Business Posts, Q+As, and manage GMB Reviews via the Google My Business API.
New Google My Business Guidelines For Co-Working Spaces
The update mentions that if your business location is out of a co-working space, it must have signage, accept customers, and have staff at the site to be eligible to have a Google My Business listing with a coworking address. This change is an improvement over the outright ban on coworking spaces as business locations.
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No more Google Analytics data from YouTube Channels
There is much more robust reporting for channels in YouTube analytics, though the analytics "meat" is in the advanced mode, and some of it is not easily exportable. You can read the announcement here.
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How much of your Direct traffic is Google Discover?
Yes. Google Discover is recorded as “Direct” in your analytics, though you can add a filter to your Google organic traffic in Google Analytics to find out how much:
If you line up your Discover reporting from GSC and it matches direct spikes in Google Analytics - that’s probably the source of your direct traffic spike. Also, until last month, Discover traffic from when a user opens a Chrome tab on Android or iOS was *not* shown in the Google Search Console reporting, and now will be.
How to clean up the February bot traffic in Google Analytics:
➡️ Full thread here.
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Google's 5-Step Formula for Team Success
I found a great article that talks through Google’s research into what makes a great team, and it turns out the elements of success are tied to a level of emotional intelligence. The article also goes into how to increase those elements in your team.
How to become a better listener
I found this via a Twitter thread and thought it was worth sharing and here are the best bits:
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Tell yourself that you are open-minded (at the beginning of the conversation)
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Try to pay intense attention to the space between the words that are uttered (this is a critical step because it's very effective & not obvious)
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Don’t try to interpret anything beyond what is said (when you listen carefully, the interpretation just happens without effort)
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Once they are done talking, take a few seconds or minutes to collect your thoughts (I usually just ask, “may I take a minute to reflect on what you’ve said?”)
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Get comfortable with the silence that ensues
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Start your response by summarizing what you heard
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Focus on the most salient point you want to make
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When you’re done, ask “what do you think?” or “do tell me if I am wrong” or similar (remember, your tone & the surrounding context matters)
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And listen again
➡️ Full thread here.
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Here are the newly released SEO tools that are worth checking out:
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SEOAsked.com - This is a directory of quotes from Googlers from SEO’s questions. This site makes my homegrown Trello board, where I save these quotes for audit documents (and client questions). I’m so stoked that someone built this.
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FYI: Chrome is now hiding all URL paths and showing the domain name for all URLs unless you hover over your address bar. See Lily Ray’s tweet.
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Here’s a timeline of changes to Structured Data
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Quick Google Search Console Insights [free Google Sheet]
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Google is going to offer heart and respiratory rate measurements using just your smartphone’s camera. I think this is creepy. I wonder what they will do with this data? They already have patents filed around keeping the user’s voice and emotional state in mind when providing search (or voice) results. If you are not taking into account your customer’s emotional state when creating personas already, I highly suggest you doing so.
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Would you like to share a great resource? If you want to be featured, have a great resource, want to sponsor, or provide feedback for this newsletter, just reply to this email and let me know.
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This month I also released a new podcast episode on the Digital Marketing Victories podcast. If you're interested in public speaking tips, or how to speak persuasively on Zoom meetings, or need suggestions about how to improve your soft skills but are introverted, this episode is for you! Digital Marketing Victories Podcast: Episode 8 with Brenden Kumarasamy.
That’s it for this month. I hope you’re as excited about the spring flowers (and cherry blossoms) as I am!
Until next month,
Katherine
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Katherine Watier Ong
CEO
WO Strategies LLC
katherine@wostrategies.com
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