Today in Digital Marketing - 1,900+ Search Engine Ranking Factors Leaked Online

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Tuesday, January 31st. Today, what can marketers learn from the massive leak of search engine ranking factors? The TikTok trend e-commerce merchants hate, Instagram's founders are building a new social media app, the industry holds its breath for Meta's Q4 results, and PayPal launches a feature you should set up immediately. I'm Todd Mathen. That's ahead today in digital marketing. There are a few things that are protected so closely that entire staffs are devoted to keeping the secrets.

Starting point is 00:00:33 The recipe to Coca-Cola, the unreleased songs from Michael Jackson's catalog, and Google's source code. Imagine if Google got hacked and hackers managed to download the code that controlled search engine ranking, the secret sauce that we filthy marketers have been trying to infer since forever. Well, that sort of happened yesterday. The proprietary source code for ranking was leaked online last night, but sadly, it wasn't for Google. It was for Yandex, a major search engine popular in Russia. But given the population of that country, that's a lot of searches. Yandex is somewhere around the fourth or fifth most popular search engine in the world, as measured by market share.

Starting point is 00:01:14 So why do we care about Yandex if Google is king? Because the two share more than you might think. Yandex was purpose-built as a clone of Google. And Yandex employs a ton of ex-Google software engineers. SEO specialists in Russia use the same tactics for both engines. Even the underlying algorithms are similar. Google's machine learning foundation, which it calls RankBrain, is replicated at Yandex and called MatrixNet there. They use a page-ranked system similar to Google.

Starting point is 00:01:44 In fact, some of the code is identical, since Yandex uses many of Google's open-source tools, like TensorFlow and BERT. In total, the leak contains more than 1,900 ranking factors. Ecommerce executive Alex Burak posted some of the code last night. He said, quote, the approach and the majority of ranking factors seem to be similar. In practice, comparing Google versus Yandex search results, they are a 70% match, unquote. So what can we learn from the code? One ranking factor is how old a link is. The longer a page has been online, the more weighting it's given. Percentage of organic traffic is a ranking factor, which means that buying PPC will indeed affect organic ranking.

Starting point is 00:02:26 Having numbers or lots of slashes in your URL will rank you lower. Host reliability is a factor. In other words, the fewer errors your web server has, the better for your ranking. User behavior is, of course, considered, like how much time a user spends on your site before going back to the search results. And crawl depth seems to be important. The further into your site a page is, the less results. And crawl depth seems to be important. The further into your site a page is, the less importance Yandex gives to it. And yes, this is about Yandex, not Google. But many SEOs this morning are poring over the code, knowing that there are certainly

Starting point is 00:02:57 best practices that are almost identical between the two. By the way, for its part, Yandex says it wasn't hacked at all, and it might have been an inside job, and it was old code anyway, and something, something, nothing to see here, folks. Today's premium newsletter has a link to Alex's analysis with dozens of ranking factors detailed. You can sign up at todayindigital.com slash newsletter or tap the link in the show notes. After years of brand partnerships with influencers telling consumers what to buy, Gen Z and millennials are now rejecting consumer culture with a new trend on TikTok called de-influencing. There's an interesting piece up on Fortune today looking at the influencer marketing shift that could be causing your customers to abandon their online shopping carts. The hashtag de-influencing currently has over 57 million views and counting. These videos often criticize the consumerist culture inherent in the app.

Starting point is 00:03:53 Some creators de-influence by telling them what not to buy. I am here to de-influence you. Do not get the Agminis. Do not get the Dyson Arab. Do not get the Charlotte Tilbury one. Do not get the Stanley Cup. Do not get Colin Hulu. Yikes. Okay, then. Quoting that Fortune piece, the trend has taken off in the beauty and fashion realms in particular, highlighting the degree to which audiences are losing trust in influencers,

Starting point is 00:04:15 seemingly peddling a different moisturizer or eyeshadow palette each week. On an app where authenticity is death, being seen as a shill for a product you don't actually use or like is the ultimate faux pas. It also dovetails with younger generations' growing interest in conscious consumerism and sustainability, and comes amidst the growing pains of rampant inflation and growing economic uncertainty. With less money to spend on non-essentials each month, TikTok users are growing tired of being sold overhyped products in every video they watch, unquote. One social media manager quoted in the piece suggested that the trend highlights the needs for brands to start rethinking their partnerships with influencers and the types of sponsorship deals they offer. While de-influencing is trending on TikTok, Amazon is paying influencers to create content for its TikTok competitor called Inspire. Inspire, which we've previously reported on, is the e-commerce giant's new in-app short-form video feed that lets consumers shop for products from content created by influencers, brands, and other customers. A report from Insider Intelligence today suggests that Amazon may be taking a cue from TikTok's success

Starting point is 00:05:29 and is feeling pressure to update its stodgy storefront in an effort to increase user engagement and drive consumer discovery. According to a recent survey by the market research firm, discovery is key to targeting Gen Z shoppers. Almost half of those users who made a purchase through social media said that finding a product they liked was the top factor driving them to make a purchase, while only a fifth of respondents ranked recommendations from influencers as a reason they made the purchase. Will luring influencers to the platform be enough, though? According to Insider Intelligence, quote, influencers are an important part of the recipe behind TikTok's success, but they can't alone fix Amazon's discoverability problems. But even if Inspire manages to replicate TikTok's formula perfectly, Amazon will still have

Starting point is 00:06:16 a hard time capturing its share of time spent because of the nature of its platform, unquote. It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal.

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Starting point is 00:07:26 Social media is about to get a new player with celebrity pedigree. Instagram's co-founders debuted Artifact today, a new social app that offers a personalized news feed that uses, you guessed it, AI to understand your interests. So like TikTok, but for text, maybe? As TechCrunch reports, a reborn Google reader, maybe? Artifact is described as a newsreader that uses machine learning to tailor to users' interests over time, while also adding social elements that lets users discuss articles with friends. A variety of articles will be featured, some from big publishers like the New York Times, while others may come from smaller sites. Other features will include comment controls, separate feeds for articles posted by people you follow, and of course, a DM inbox for discussing posts privately.

Starting point is 00:08:13 Artifact has not yet been monetized, but revenue sharing with publishers has been mentioned as an option. It is sadly not publicly available to play around with just yet, but you can sign up for a waitlist position at artifact.news. It is earnings week for major tech companies and all eyes are on Meta for a hint of how online ads are doing. After a brutal year in 2022,

Starting point is 00:08:40 CNBC reports that investors are hoping for some signs of a recovery this week as the biggest companies in our space report fourth quarter results and provide an update on whether brands are starting to spend more on ads after pausing their campaigns. Snapchat is scheduled to release results after market closed today, Meta tomorrow, and Google Parent Alphabet on Thursday. But market analysts expect more turmoil for the online advertising

Starting point is 00:09:05 space as a recession looms. A recent survey of ad buyers showed that companies expect their spending to rise this year just 3%. On top of macroeconomic woes, companies that rely on mobile data for ad targeting are still affected by Apple's tracking upheaval. Last year, Meta said that Apple's moves would reduce revenue for the company by $10 billion for all of 2022. Meta has been using its Facebook app to deliberately drain users' phone batteries, according to an ex-employee. Fortune reports that the former employee claimed that Meta's platforms drain the batteries of their users' smartphones through a process called negative testing. The tests are used to measure the impact of new features, like how quickly the app runs, image loading speed, and newsfeed scroll speed.

Starting point is 00:09:56 When asked to participate in the tests, the former employee said he refused out of concern about the risks involved in depleting users' power. He was fired shortly after, which, yeah, true, did coincide with the company's mass layoffs. His lawyers, however, contend this was not a coincidence. A Meta spokesperson told Fortune the claims are without merit, but a full PDF outlining the negative testing process has been leaked and is available to read online. If you still have battery life, that is. E-commerce just passed the $1 trillion mark for the first time in the U.S. With the strength of holiday spending, the analytics company Comscore reported yesterday that e-commerce in the U.S. surpassed $1 trillion in 2022, with the last quarter accounting for more than $330 billion, its biggest quarter ever.

Starting point is 00:10:47 This does not include travel spend. The trillion-dollar milestone is largely attributed to mobile sales. Mobile's share of total digital commerce increased by 25% in the quarter and now accounts for almost 40% of all consumer online retail spend. And finally, PayPal has introduced a new and honestly fantastic feature for those of you who use that service to collect revenue, automatic transfers. You can now have your balance sent to your bank account on whatever schedule you like from daily to monthly and a few stops in between. This is actually an important thing to do, as PayPal's terms let them freeze your account and all the funds in it,

Starting point is 00:11:29 more or less at their whim. There are countless stories of people's money being locked up because of a false positive from PayPal's enforcement bots. The best way to keep that from happening is to transfer funds out of PayPal the second any go in. And this new automatic transfer feature will certainly help. That said, PayPal recommends you leave some money in there for refunds or your own purchasing, and this new feature will let you leave a set amount in each time it transfers, if that's

Starting point is 00:11:54 something you'd like to do, especially if you're concerned about not being able to reach a human being to intercede if your account gets auto-locked, something you may be even more concerned about today, given that PayPal this morning announced it is laying off about 2,000 employees. That's roughly 7% of the company's workforce. You know, it struck me when we were working on that story at the top of the show about the Yandex search engine hack that it's been a while since we've done a call out for guest experts. As you probably know,

Starting point is 00:12:28 listen to the podcast, we don't do a lot of interviews. And most of it is that it's tough finding people who are genuinely experts in their particular field, and are also available within like an hour or two's notice. But if that's you, for some reason, if you are an actual expert in, I don't know, SEO, digital marketing, the online ad platforms, lead generation, something in our space. And by genuine expert, I mean, you know, you've been quoted by other media. Then we'd love to hear from you. Here's the form to fill out. It's at todayindigital.com slash experts.

Starting point is 00:12:59 Or you can go to the show notes and look for the link that says be a guest on our show. There's a little form to fill up there. And you never know. We may be calling and asking you to jump on a video call with us to do an interview. Again, the show notes. You're looking for the link that says be a guest on our show. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - 1,900+ Search Engine Ranking Factors Leaked Online

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