Today in Digital Marketing - Google Sued Over “Fake” Reviews

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, social media comments on Black Friday posts are up, way up. How do you get negative reviews made by a fake person off your Google profile? One car salesman taking Google to court to try. Some nice updates to Snapchat's campaign offerings. Google Ads desktop app gets an upgrade. And Twitter is not having a good fleet week. It's Monday, November 23rd, 2020. Happy anniversary of the first airing of

Starting point is 00:00:27 Doctor Who. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. If you use Yoast or any of those SEO plugins for your website, you'll know that they let you change the page title that you send to search engines. That way you can control how your listing looks in Google and the likes. You probably also know that those plugins have a size limit for how many characters you can jam in there before the search engine just cuts off your title. And so, for the Monday quiz, does Google rank the words in a page title if those words have been cut off because the title is too long? In other words, are words after that cutoff even factored into that page's ranking? I'll have the answer at the end of today's episode.

Starting point is 00:01:19 If your brand has a Google listing with reviews, no doubt you have been on the receiving end of a bad review that just shouldn't be there. I don't mean you disagree with it, but rather the person who left the review has never been a customer. Or the review is for another business entirely. Our agency, EngageQ, primarily does social media engagement for medium to large brands. So we're secretly the ones answering questions, moderating comments, replying to DMs, and so on. A lot of our customers have been shopping malls, and I cannot count the number of times people post a negative review for a store in the mall on the mall's page and not the store's page.

Starting point is 00:01:56 While Google's official policy is to remove reviews that violate their policies, I'm sure you know that getting those pulled off isn't always easy. That's what happened to a British car salesman named Richard Boatwright. He says a number of fake reviews were left on his Google profile and Google isn't taking them off. So he's suing them and not for breach of contract, but for defamation. He told the BBC, quote, we have provided them with firm information that shows that these reviews are completely fabricated, that the people that are supposedly leaving them don't exist, unquote. While he may have a tough fight, American legislation generally favors the platform

Starting point is 00:02:36 when a user of the platform says something defamatory. But I'll keep tracking this, let you know if the case is successful. In the meantime, if you get a bad review that you think shouldn't be on the page, go to your Google My Business profile, find it in the review section and click the little flag icon and select this review is not relevant to this place or any of the options that apply. So you've worked very hard on your landing pages. You've made them a keystone, in fact, of your marketing outreach. But those pages are not showing up in Google. No matter what the title is, what your headings are,

Starting point is 00:03:13 how many times you've used the keywords you want to rank for, Google just is not surfacing that landing page. Why? Maybe it's your page structure. In most cases, we don't provide a link to that landing page from our main site. Or we deliberately exclude the regular menu bar from our site on those pages. You know what I mean? Like, if your regular website has the usual top-level menu, like About Us, Product Services, The Team, Contact Us, stuff like that, lots of times, we deliberately exclude those internal links from the landing page.

Starting point is 00:03:46 The rationale being we don't want any click other than the call to action on that page. And that, says Google search engineer John Mueller, is exactly why that page isn't ranking. If you have pages that don't have internal links pointing at them. This from a recent Google SEO office hours hangout. So pages that are hard to find from crawling, then usually Google Search will assume that these are not very critical for your website because you're essentially hiding away from people who are clicking around within your website.

Starting point is 00:04:19 And if we assume that you think they're not very critical for your website, then probably we won't give them as much weight in search. On the other hand, if you want those pages to be findable in search, then I would definitely make sure that you do have internal links pointing at them and that you do try to avoid duplicate and low quality content on those pages. Now, to be fair, sometimes you just don't care about that landing page being findable in Google.

Starting point is 00:04:47 And sometimes you actually don't want it to be in Google. But if you do want that landing page to show up in the search engines, put some internal links pointing to it from your main website and pointing out to the rest of your site on that page. Snapchat has some new ad options for people who market mobile apps. First, you can now select app installs as the campaign objective for AR lens campaigns that will optimize your campaign to hit people likely to install your app. You can even put a desired cost per install bid and Snapchat will try to keep it around that amount. There's a new objective too,

Starting point is 00:05:30 app conversions, which let you create custom audiences based on actions people take in-app, and some new goal-based bidding options like opens and purchases. Snapchat is also adding minimum return on ad spend bidding for those mobile app campaigns, and they say they are building out their audience network, similar to Facebook's. It's in beta right now, but should be out soon. Are you ready for Black Friday this week? Like, really, really ready? If you've got promotions running, Sprout Social says it has seen a huge increase in the number of people posting questions and commenting on Black Friday posts so far this month.

Starting point is 00:06:04 In fact, compared to last year, the amount of comments in the early part of this month has nearly doubled. In their 2020 index, they say 40% of consumers expect a response within one hour to their questions, comments, and messages on social media. Quoting from their blog post, comments and direct messages that fall through the cracks are missed opportunities and revenue, and even worse, lost loyalty. 49% of consumers will unfollow a brand on social

Starting point is 00:06:36 for poor customer service. People expect your brand to be active and engaged in conversation on social media, and Black Friday campaigns and posts are no exception. And hey, while we're talking about that, one company that can take this engagement and moderation off your hands is... So part of your job is to manage your brand's social media accounts. That can get busy, especially if you're running a paid campaign. You've got comments to moderate, reviews to reply to,

Starting point is 00:07:06 issues to escalate to management, and that engagement comes in around the clock. That's why you might need a social media engagement firm, a partner who's handling all that for you, either just evenings and weekends or offloading it entirely. And that is where my agency, EngageQ, can come in. We've handled the social engagement for dozens of brands. We start with a brand briefing to collect the info we need,

Starting point is 00:07:31 answers to the most common questions, and an escalation path. Then leave it to us. Our team can answer product questions, encourage purchases, thank your customers, hide or delete the bad stuff, reply to reviews, and more. And best of all, your customers won't know it's not you. We don't outsource this. Every single person is an in-house employee here in North America. If you're interested, check us out at engageq.com. That's engageq.com. Look for the link in this episode's notes in the About This Podcast

Starting point is 00:07:58 section. Fleets, that's Twitter's version of vertical stories, still experiencing some bugs. When they were first rolled out, users experienced lagginess in showing them, but now some reports coming in of worse bugs. Socialmediatoday.com says some users said that they could see fleets after the 24-hour expiration period. And Twitter said, yeah, sorry, that was a thing. Apparently they have some code that deletes the fleets. God.

Starting point is 00:08:30 When they hit the 24-hour mark. And a queue backlog prevented them from getting to them all on time. Apparently that queue is caught up now. And apparently that seen by list wasn't accurate. People who did view the fleet did not show up in that list, and Twitter says, that's by design. Quoting the company, our goal is to show a list of people who've seen your fleet, but we don't guarantee completeness for technical and experience reasons. For example, we cap the list when it gets long. The edge cases that can result in a mismatch

Starting point is 00:09:05 between the seen by list and the actual people who saw your fleet are uncommon. Two tools used by lots of digital marketers announced significant upgrades this morning. First, Screaming Frog's SEO Spider is now at version 14. This tool will crawl your website and find all the errors. This new version brings dark mode, Google Sheets export, HTTP headers and cookies, and aggregated site structure.

Starting point is 00:09:32 And there's a new Google Ads editor. This is the desktop version of their self-service ads manager. The app is a much better experience, by the way. If you do Google Ads, you really should be using the app. Anyway, version 1.5 is the new one, and it has improved filtering options, support for image extensions, and more detailed recommendations. It also adds 16 new data columns, which just basically brings it in line with their web-based interface. And you can now supply a merchant ID under shopping settings for app campaigns. And editors can attach dynamic ads feeds,

Starting point is 00:10:06 such as education and flights, to various campaign types, including app campaigns. And three small items to wrap up today. First, I thought this was interesting. One of Google's search liaisons explained on Twitter that if you move your website to a new hosting provider, Google's bot will actually detect that change and will schedule a new fresh crawl of your site. It does this to relearn how frequently it should crawl it. Secondly, both Gmail and Gmail for Business are getting a new side panel. So this will be a lot like the many, many plugins that have been around for a while that offer contact information. It does seem like Google is finally prioritizing its main tool set. When you have an email open, it will now show their contact information, like phone number and email address, their team and

Starting point is 00:10:54 manager, their office and desk location. Those last ones only for people within your own firm, of course. You'll also be able to add people to your contacts from this panel. It is rolling out today, but could take about two or three weeks to get around to everyone. And it will be there for pretty much everyone who uses a Google workspace of any plan or even a personal Gmail account. And finally, the answer to the Monday quiz, does Google consider for ranking words that have been cropped from your page title because they're too long?

Starting point is 00:11:22 According to SEO tooloolMoz, yes, those words will count for your ranking. Their methodology was kind of neat too. According to their blog post on this, as a test setup, we created a page with a title containing 128 characters. That title is too long for all of it to be displayed in the search engine results pages. A fake keyword was put at the end of the title.

Starting point is 00:11:45 That keyword, of course, would cut off. The fake keyword only exists in the title and nowhere else on the page. Here's what we discovered. The page became indexed by Google. I had a fun weekend doing the usual, you know, video games. Except for one stressful moment. Our Roomba ate my wedding ring. So backstory, I do most of the cooking for us and when I'm preparing raw meat

Starting point is 00:12:10 like chicken or pork, I take my rings off to prevent cross-contamination. I usually put the rings in my pocket and then I sit on the couch to play video games and the rings roll out of my pocket and either into the couch or eventually onto the floor. That is what happened. I had been missing them for days, and my wife happened to find my ring in there when she went to try to rescue her knitting needles from it. Roombas do work great, but honestly, they're like drunk toddlers. You really have to keep an eye on them. All right, that's it for today. I'll talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Google Sued Over “Fake” Reviews

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