Today in Digital Marketing - Damage Done

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Thursday, May 30th. Today, damage done. What next for the relationship between Google and the marketing industry after a huge leak exposes Google's SEO secrets? The news is not good for brands that rely on Facebook for traffic. Instagram is adding its strongest mute button yet. And another Google tool heads to the graveyard, this one a messaging tool used for business. I'm Todd Maffin, that's ahead today in digital marketing. After silence for two days, Google has confirmed that a massive trove of leaked confidential search documents are real. The leak contained 2,500 pages of internal API documentation, some of which seemed to be counter to advice it had publicly given marketers about how to rank higher. Rand Fishkin, the SEO veteran who first published the leaked documents, told Gizmodo, quote,

Starting point is 00:00:56 I think the biggest takeaway is that what Google's public representatives say and what Google's search engine does are two different things, unquote. Most industry people understood that Google reps had to be somewhat vague about the specifics of what makes a page rank higher. But what bothered many people in the SEO space this week was that the leaked documents revealed ranking levers that Google reps in the past have said didn't matter at all. One of those elements is called small personal site. The documentation doesn't reveal the weighting behind a site given that label, so we don't know whether Google gives such sites a penalty or a boost or by how much, but this is a good example of a lever Google has said in the past it doesn't factor into how a site ranks.

Starting point is 00:01:44 Quoting Gizmodo, quote, it's like the NFL's referees rewrote the rules of football halfway through the season, and you're just finding out while playing the Super Bowl, unquote. As I mentioned yesterday, Google confirmed the documents were real, but said, quote, we would caution against making inaccurate assumptions about search based on out of context, outdated, or incomplete. Again, Rand Fishkin, quote, this response is a perfect example of why people don't like or trust Google. It's a non-statement that doesn't address the leak,

Starting point is 00:02:33 provides no value, and might as well have been written by an AI trained on the past decade's most soulless corporate messaging, unquote. The timing of all this, of course, couldn't have been worse for Google. It came as the company aggressively rolled out its AI summaries for search queries, a product that pretty much everyone except Google says is not ready for prime time.

Starting point is 00:02:54 On the consumer side, it's giving out ridiculously inaccurate advice like adding glue to pizza and seemingly being unable to distinguish authentic content from satire sites like The Onion or shitposts found on Reddit. For marketers, though, it's almost worse. The next evolution of Google's zero-click strategy, giving users answers while downplaying links to webpages and stores, links that marketers rely on to drive traffic and build business. One thing is clear, this leak, and now Google's response to it, have not helped the company during one of its most pivotal times. Facebook has released its quarterly report on what content got traction on its platform. Facebook started doing these reports to counter a widely held belief that its algorithm pushes people

Starting point is 00:03:46 toward controversial, emotionally charged, divisive content. This report looked at this past Q4, or at least it almost did. The report somewhat hilariously redacts four of the top six videos that went viral. The content doesn't appear to have been redacted for the report.

Starting point is 00:04:03 Rather, that line item reads, This video is temporarily unavailable, which implies it was pulled because of policy violations. This means we don't know what the number one, number three, number four, and number six videos were. We do know that they each had more than 43 million views before being pulled. Whatever the top video for the quarter was hit more than 50 million views before being pulled. Whatever the top video for the quarter was, hit more than 50 million before being smacked. In terms of the websites most often linked to, the top five are YouTube, a GIF search engine, TikTok, people.com, and GoFundMe.

Starting point is 00:04:37 If people being in there surprised you, it surprised me too. It turns out the content that people are sharing and Facebook's algorithm is pushing has turned mostly to Hollywood gossip. The top three posts were Matthew Perry's death, Jeff Bezos moving to Miami, and Martha Stewart's fashion.

Starting point is 00:04:56 Almost all of the rest of the top 10 were similarly tabloidy. Quoting social media today, quote, in this sense, the report does succeed in showing that Facebook users may not be seeing as much political content as you'd expect. But again, this is a question of scale. And while these top links are being seen by millions of viewers,

Starting point is 00:05:15 that doesn't mean that other URLs aren't also reaching millions too, especially when you consider that news stories tend to have a shorter shelf life and are thus less likely to get the same levels as these gossipy posts, unquote. As for the marketing industry, one important takeaway is that the shift away from links continues. We've known for some time that Facebook's algo doesn't like to reward posts which take people off its site. And as the years go on, this only seems to be more pronounced. Fewer than 5% of posts shown to users in their news feed included a link in last year's Q4. Looking back to Q3 of 2021, that number was 13.5%, still low, but much more than these days. You can probably see this trend in your own website traffic reports with visitors from Facebook in steady decline.

Starting point is 00:06:06 There is one big caveat to these reports, though. Facebook only reports what is shown on feeds. It doesn't include those shared between individuals via DM and, notably, doesn't include those shown in groups. I would argue that some of the more divisive content is being shared via those methods, so it's not quite as transparent a report as Meta would have us believe. We have a link to the full report in today's email newsletter, which is free to sign up to. Just tap the link at the top of the show notes or go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. A year-long Google experiment that tested placing ads amongst organic results has ended.

Starting point is 00:06:47 And the results must have been good because that experiment has now become canon. Two months ago, the company changed its documentation about top ads to read, top ads are generally above the top organic results, although top ads may show below the top organic results on certain queries. This isn't, of course, where consumers expect ads to be. We're all trained that we can safely ignore the top few results, and we can assume that's precisely why Google wants to shake things up. We first saw this in light testing last June. Then mid-October, that test group got much wider and people started noticing.

Starting point is 00:07:28 Two months ago, Google's ad liaison confirmed that they had made the change permanent. So with two months under our belt now, Brody Clark, writing for Search Engine Journal, has run the numbers and given us a better sense of it all. He says, most commonly, it's a unit of one or two ads that are placed within the top organic results, ads that normally would have been placed at the top. He says the most common layout is to place these ads directly below a featured snippet rather than above, as had been in the past. Quoting from his piece, quote, the first situation, mixed with organic results, is pretty clear about Google's intentions to encourage more clicks on ads and desensitize users to ads appearing at the top

Starting point is 00:08:05 with users mistaking ads for organic listings. In contrast, the second situation with featured snippets could be perceived differently. While ads continue to appear in the viewport on desktop, the answer to the user's query is prominently displayed at the top of search results without ads getting in the way. I can't see this as being a bad thing for users or SEO, as Google is making the organic listing more visible across these instances, unquote. There isn't anything to freak

Starting point is 00:08:31 out about, though, even though ads can now appear intermingled. Clark says it still actually doesn't happen very often, and it's almost as if Google is still treating it as a test. Again, quoting his piece, quote, based on my research, I believe the change should be perceived as neutral for Google users and SEO. If you see ads being mixed with organic listings in the wild, keep your wits about you, unquote. Google is shutting down its business messaging service, an instant messaging client built into Google Maps. This feature allowed users to chat with businesses directly from their Google Maps or Google search results.

Starting point is 00:09:11 A chat button on the business's place card in Google Maps will be disabled on July 15th. By July 31st, the service will be completely shut down. It was first launched in 2017 with the awkward name Google My Business Chat. It was originally integrated with SMS. In 2018, the company made it a standalone service within the Maps app, eliminating the need for third-party apps. Businesses used this feature for customer service, and Google even created an API for large businesses to manage customer messages.

Starting point is 00:09:41 So what now? Well, if you need chat data out of it for compliance or regulatory reasons, you will be able to download past chat conversations using Google Takeout. The company says it does not plan to replace the service and advises businesses to use alternative communications channels. It is a strange decision to be sure, especially given that two of its biggest competitors, Apple and Meta, both offer business messaging solutions. Instagram will now let you mute incoming messages from everyone except users on your close friends list. This is, of course, a consumer feature in the app. It's nothing I expect businesses would want to do.

Starting point is 00:10:21 When you enable limits for everyone but close friends, you'll only see DMs, tags, and mentions from those on your close friends list. Others can still interact with your posts, but you won't see these updates. Sadly, for the antisocial among us, that setting will automatically turn off after four weeks, and you'll need to manually extend it. Also, the app has expanded its restrict feature

Starting point is 00:10:42 and now lets you prevent a specific user from tagging or mentioning you in addition to hiding all their comments. And finally, you think you're having a bad month? At least you're not the Google employee who accidentally deleted all of the data of one of its biggest customers. That customer is a $135 billion Australian pension

Starting point is 00:11:07 fund. They used Google to store their data and woke up one day to discover everything they'd put there was gone. But no problem, at least there were backups too, right? Nope, Google had deleted those as well. Luckily, they did have the whole thing mirrored in a completely separate geographical regions. Unluckily, Google deleted that mirror too. This caused two weeks of downtime and deep concerns from the hundreds of thousands of members wondering what happened with their retirement savings. A very apologetic joint statement from the Google Cloud CEO and the pension funds CEO followed, then some soul searching. This week, Google posted a report on what happened, and it turns out someone just forgot to fill in a field.

Starting point is 00:11:52 Quoting the statement, quote, during the initial deployment of a private cloud for the customer using an internal tool, there was an inadvertent misconfiguration by Google operators due to leaving a parameter blank. This had the unintended and then unknown consequence of defaulting the customer to a fixed term with automatic deletion at the end of that period, unquote. And if you're thinking, well, surely there must be some kind of notification or confirmation screen or, hey, you sure you want to do that kind of pop-up box before big things like that happen?

Starting point is 00:12:28 Google says, yes, there are, but those only appear for customer-facing controls. Google employees don't get any confirmations. Depension Fund says they've reconstructed most of their data now thanks to a third-party fail-safe backup provider they'd been using, though they didn't say how up-to-date that backup to the backup was. Google says the issue only happened with one customer, and they've made some changes and totally checked everything, so it shouldn't ever happen again. Really? Pinky swear. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm proud to announce that our pet dashing cross mini schnauzer, maybe we're not entirely sure, successfully pooped outside. I know, I know.

Starting point is 00:13:15 Laugh if you want. Hey, it's a big deal if you've ever trained a puppy before. Much celebration was had inside the house. I think actually the puppy was a little confused as to why my wife and I were so happy and giving her all sorts of treats and playing, but she took it. She was happy to enjoy the benefit of that. So hopefully we can continue the run. I'll see you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Damage Done

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