Today in Digital Marketing - Google's Huge New Year Update... Didn't Actually Happen

Episode Date: January 2, 2020

GOOGLE makes it easier for your brand to collect reviews Did Google push out a HUGE algorithm update on New Year’s Eve? A reminder to get your SEO information from Google, not from SEO providers And Burger King punks McDonalds in glorious fashion. ----- Help spread the word! Please review this podcast at https://ratethispodcast.com/today — thank you! The Premium feed, with exclusive deep-dive interviews with social algorithm experts, is at http://patreon.com/todayindigital Today in Digital Marketing is brought to you by engageQ digital. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Let’s chat. http://www.engageQ.com or call 1-855-863-6233. Like this podcast? Click https://ctt.ac/o713H to preview a tweet you can send out to your followers. Links to Tod's social media at at the bottom of http://TodayInDigital.com Sources: https://wersm.com/how-to-deal-with-copyright-claims-with-youtube-studio/ https://www.seroundtable.com/google-new-years-search-algorithm-update-28774.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-get-more-reviews-button-28770.html https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/snapchats-coming-bitmoji-tv-will-feature-your-bitmoji-character-in-an-an/569640/ https://www.seroundtable.com/google-again-linking-out-to-high-authority-sites-seo-28754.html https://marketingland.com/spotify-latest-platform-to-halt-political-ads-273317 https://wersm.com/burger-king-hid-a-big-mac-behind-every-whopper-ad-this-year/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is January 2nd, 2020. Happy Birch Toll Day, Switzerland, and Happy New Year to everyone else. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, Google makes it easier for your brand to collect reviews. And did they just push out a huge algorithm update on New Year's Eve? A reminder to get your SEO information from Google, not from SEO providers.

And Burger King punks McDonald's in glorious fashion. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. If you're one of those digital marketing managers that likes to jump your brand onto the latest flashy thing, then you may want to check out Bitmoji TV, a new offering coming soon from Snapchat. It turns those Bitmoji avatars some people use into a full-motion cartoon show. Now, you won't be able to script these shows. The scenes will already be created by the Snapchat people. But you'll be able to have your brand's avatar, if you have one, star in one of those.

This is an extension of Bitmoji Stories, which Snapchat launched a little over a year ago. Let's not forget, Bitmoji Stories, which Snapchat launched a little over a year ago. Let's not forget, Bitmoji is popular. In 2017, at one point, it was the single most downloaded app in the US, UK, France, Canada, and Australia. Snapchat bought them in 2016 for $100 million. If industry rumors are accurate, Bitmoji TV should launch in February. Some really good news here. If your brand relies on getting Google reviews, or if you want to get more of them,

now Google will give you, the business manager, a special link, and when clicked by a customer, it will take them to Google Maps and pop up a little window that asks them to write a review. You may recognize this from YouTube, where you can add some text at the end of your brand's channel URL, and then instead of just landing on your channel's homepage, the user will land there, but there'll be a subscribe button overlaid on top of the channel in its own window. You don't have to be a social media manager long before you run afoul of YouTube's copyright

strike system. Some audio that was captured in your video contains some music and blammo, your video gets a big fat X. Now YouTube is making it easier for people like us to resolve those issues. Quoting WeRSM.com, creators can now see information about their channel's copyright strikes with their YouTube studio dashboard. There they'll be able to find out exactly which videos were removed, the party who submitted the copyright takedown notice, and what they can do to resolve the strike. Creators can also see the specific description of the copyright strike according to the claimant, providing a lot more transparency, unquote.

YouTube has also added a nice trim video function that will let you quickly snip out any copyrighted content that had been claimed by YouTube's content ID. The big question in SEO circles over the holidays was this. Did Google sneak out a huge algorithm change right on New Year's Eve? Some digital marketers are reporting position drops of 40%, and others position gains of 40%. And even others are seeing no change. As a reminder, Google's algorithm changes a lot, twice a day on average, and there's a lot that can affect your ranking that isn't the algorithm. The folks at SEO Roundtable believe that there was no big update for three reasons.

First, it's New Year's Eve. Why would Google engineers have been at their desks pushing out an update? Also, traffic is always quite a bit different around the holidays. And finally, none of the SEO tracking services are reporting any big changes to rankings. So if you are big changes to rankings. So if you are seeing changes to your brand's position in the Google index, it is probably an anomaly. While we're on the topic of Google's index,

just a reminder to not take things as gospel, even if they come from reliable sources. Moz.com, for instance, very well-respected SEO toolkit, perhaps the most well-respected. They put out an infographic that claims if you add links to large websites on your brand's website, that your ranking will improve. The graphic says, quote, multiple SEO experiments and studies show that linking out to high quality resources is correlated with higher rankings, unquote. And so a lot of people believe it. After all, it comes from Moz.

But let's not forget, all these services like Moz are only able to infer information. And sometimes, they just plain get it wrong. In this case, especially. Google's John Mueller told someone on Twitter that, no, linking out to high-authority websites does nothing to help you rank better in Google. And this isn't the first time Google has said this either. So remember, always get your information from the source. And finally, I know this isn't really digital specific, but I just loved this.

Over the holidays, Burger King revealed that it had been punking McDonald's all year long. In every ad they ran that featured a Whopper, they actually had hidden a Big Mac behind it. Every ad, every TV spot, every billboard, every banner ad behind that Whopper was secretly a Big Mac. The idea was to prove that the Whopper outsizes the McDonald's burger since it can, well, literally hide the burger. Of course, if you were to reverse those and put the Big Mac in front, it would be closer to the lens and so it would appear bigger as well. But, you know, let's just ignore that little factoid. Still, great idea. I'm back in gold now on Overwatch. High gold, even. As much as I don't want to admit that I'm a one-trick, I just do better on Mercy. If you value a daily digital marketing news show, please take a moment to review this podcast. It only takes a second, Thank you.