Today in Digital Marketing - The One File That Can De-List Your Site from Google

Episode Date: September 8, 2020

Microsoft’s new tool could help keep you from making the one change that can completely screw up your brand’s web site… a big security warning for those of you who use Wordpress… and here’s what happens when you fire your SEO company — and they don’t like it. Spoiler: It’s not good. JOIN OUR SLACK COMMUNITY! • Click: http://TodayInDigital.com/slack SPREAD THE WORD: • Tweet It: http://bit.ly/tweet-tidm to preview a tweet you can publish • Review Us: http://RateThisPodcast.com/today ABOUT THE PODCAST: • Produced by: http://engageQ.com • Advertising: http://TodayInDigital.com/ads • Transcripts: See each episode at http://TodayInDigital.com • Theme music: Mark Blevis (all other music licensed by Source Audio) TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA: • Twitter: http://twitter.com/todmaffin • LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/todmaffin • Tod’s agency: http://engageQ.com • TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@todmaffin • Twitch: http://twitch.tv/todmaffin • Tod’s Twitter list of digmktg sources: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1182697350948503553 Source links are in the transcript (visit http://todayindigital.com and click today’s episode). --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, Microsoft's new tool could help you from keeping the one change that could completely screw up your brand's website. A big security warning for those of you who use WordPress. And here's what happens when you fire your SEO company and they don't like it. Spoiler, it's not good. It's Monday, September 8th, 2020. Happy International Literacy Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. Well, the big news in our world, of course, is Google's decision last week to remove a whole

bunch of important data from their ad reports. Specifically, those keywords which didn't draw what Google calls a, quote, substantial amount of traffic. In other words, the long tail. Thousands of blog posts have been written about how important the long tail is, and some digital marketers on Twitter last week were reporting upwards of 15% of their keywords were gone. One guy said more than 50% had disappeared, which means if you can't see the keywords, you can't negate any bad performing keywords.

But you still pay for them. Well now, even Google competitor Microsoft has weighed in. Their head of search and advertising evangelism, Christy Olson, calling the move ludicrous, quoting her tweet. This is crazy. I get that it takes lots of resources to store and maintain data, but with more than 15% of queries being affected, removing advertisers' ability to access those queries and terms until it's deemed necessary that they have, quote, enough volume without defining enough is ludicrous. Meanwhile, Olson's company, Microsoft,

continues to plug away at building up its ad platform, today announcing a new series of virtual boot camps for those digital marketers who want to kick the tires at Microsoft's platform. This is actually their European series, so I'm guessing the time zones won't work for people in the Americas, but I registered for it. It handled it just fine, and I'm in Canada, so I'm hoping they'll have recordings of the sessions, which include how to expand your reach and performance

with the Microsoft Audience Network. They'll be covering targeting and best practices, plus a course on their search partners and a deep dive into their automated bidding for campaigns. There is a link in the transcript of today's show, which you can get to at todayindigital.com and click on today's episode. And one more Microsoft item. Did you know there's a file on your server, the one that hosts your brand's website, a file that if you edit it the wrong way,

even just a bit, you could accidentally straight up remove your brand from all search engines. It's called the robots.txt file. It's a file that tells all search engines what parts of your site you'd like them to index and what parts you'd like them to stay away from. They don't always obey that file, mind you, but most of the time they do.

Oh, and fun side note, if you go to the robots.txt file of any major site, or your competitor for that matter, you too can see what parts of their website they'd rather keep away from public eyes. I frequently see beta versions of sites in there. I even once caught a major product launch that a company hadn't yet announced. Anyway, that file, robots.txt, has a fairly simple structure,

but it's still pretty easy to screw up. And so, Microsoft has launched a new and enhanced tester tool. Quoting Microsoft, the tester helps webmasters to not only analyze the robots.txt file and highlight the issues that would prevent them from getting optimally crawled by Bing and other robots, but also guides them step by step from fetching the latest file to uploading the same file at the appropriate address, unquote. It's in Bing's new webmaster tool site. Look for the robots.txt tester tool under tools and enhancements. You can

now put in any URL from your site to check to see if your robots file is blocking search engines from indexing it. Heads up if you manage your brand's website and you use WordPress. I know you know the conventional wisdom that you shouldn't use the same password twice on websites. There's another piece of wisdom you should consider if you use WordPress, and that's to change the username you use to log in with, especially if that username is admin, which it is by default. And every hacker, every script kiddies bought, every brute force tool in the world pummels WordPress sites day and night trying to log in as admin.

Over the weekend, I installed a security plug-in on my own personal website, and now I am about to read to you just one afternoon, yesterday afternoon in fact, of all the failed login attempts on my server. 1108 AM, 1136, 1148, 1235, all those tried using admin. 151 PM, they tried my first name there. 156, they tried my email address. Then back to admin at 157, 259, 347, 441. In other words, several times an hour, these bots are trying the word admin or your email address or first name if they have it. And to be clear, nobody is trying to hack me personally, right? These are bots.

They do this to thousands of WordPress sites day and night. They're doing it to your WordPress site right now, hoping to get in, install some malware, or even just post some crappy spam page about term life insurance or something. So, word to the wise, if you log in with the username admin, consider changing that username. Now, it's a little tricky to do since WordPress won't actually let you change the root admin username,

so what you're going to do is create a new user account, give it administrator access, then log out of that admin account and log in with this new account. And finally, go to users and turn off access to the old account called admin. Facebook says it will now start sending emails to people who manage Facebook ad accounts when their ad campaigns have been denied for policy reasons, and those emails, they claim, will let you know which advertising policies your ad didn't follow.

Frankly, I don't believe them. This is something they promised a couple of years ago, and it still doesn't happen. The Facebook page for this very podcast was suddenly banned from advertising without warning for multiple violations of policy. That was in January. I've been trying off and on since then to get it reinstated. The appeal was auto-denied by a bot.

The appeal form now just says they've made their final decision. I've spoken with about eight different Facebook reps. And not only is this page still banned, they won't even tell me what policy they think it violated. They also won't tell me if a human being has ever reviewed what they believe to be the violation. And I've seen countless stories across the web, on Twitter, and even in this podcast's Slack community of people whose personal Facebook accounts were arbitrarily locked out for no real reason, and they can't get back in, meaning they can't access the ads they were running for

clients or do anything on their brand page. Everything is just locked out with no way to appeal it, no way to speak to a human. This is part of the reason we're moving much of our agency's media buys for clients away from Facebook. We just can't trust that an AI bot's wrong decision won't hold our client's brands hostage, with no apparent way to get a human to even take a look at it. Hell, I've more or less stopped using Facebook and Instagram personally because I live in fear of rubbing the AI the wrong way and then not being able to get into Business Manager, which of course would be a huge issue for us at the agency.

Anyway, Facebook's little update in the Ads Manager says they'll at least tell people the reason they violated policy, which I guess is an improvement. Sort of. If they actually will, which I kind of doubt. Speaking of brands getting held hostage, a warning today from Barry Schwartz. Barry runs the seroundtable.com blog covering all the changes in the search engines. We rely on it daily here at EngageQ to keep up to speed on all the developments. And today, he reminded his readers that sometimes shady companies do shady things. The one I just wrote about recently was somebody saying that they hired an SEO company.

I spoke with them early this afternoon. They wanted to leave that SEO company. They were allowed to according to their contract, but the SEO company said, no allowed to according to their contract, but the SEO company said, no, you have to pay us another two months at least. And they didn't want to do that. And then all of a sudden, an hour later, their Google My Business listing was turned into permanently closed

and their site was removed via Google Search Console from the Google Search Index. Obviously, SEOs who have access to your Google My Business, Google Search Console, and so on could do great damage to your website. As for how to avoid getting into a relationship with a bad actor, as always, do your research. You have to really vet them and make sure, call their customers. If the customers like them, they can give you references, but still, you should call some of their customers because a lot of these SEO companies post about their successes and stuff like that.

And if you do enough Googling, you can find them. So make sure you just trust them because a lot of your business is in their hands. That's Barry Schwartz. He runs the industry leading se roundtable.com blog, definitely worth adding to your feed reader or Twitter list. Has LinkedIn given up on the vertical stories format? They had been testing it to a small handful of countries earlier in the spring, but since then it's kind of stopped. They haven't added any new testing countries in more than two months. Even their help page hasn't been touched in two months.

A writer at Social Media Today emailed a PR rep there and got the old, we have nothing to share this time. But all that said, don't count them out. It does seem like work continues behind the scenes. One person on Twitter said he saw them testing letting users add website links to their stories. That's the standard swipe up that you see on Instagram. So more than likely, they're still planning to launch it. And soon, my friend, the entire world will be vertical. My thanks to the American user named Mustache Staff who left a review of this podcast

saying it's brief and I learn something new every day. Also, I sound smarter when talking to my marketing coworkers. That's excellent. Thank you for the kind words. If you would like a shout out too, just rate and review this podcast.

There's a simple link in this episode's notes that makes that an easy one click process. And if you're not in our Slack community, you are missing out potentially on actual business. Just this morning, one of our Slack members posted, quote, My company is interested in speaking with an agency to help us manage our brand's social media in 2021. Bonus points for experience with franchise and multi-location brands. Thought I'd start here for recommendations, unquote. in 2021. Bonus points for experience with franchise and multi-location brands. Thought I'd start here for recommendations, unquote. See, if you were in our Slack group, you could

have replied to that and maybe gained a new client. It's free to join. There are more than a hundred digital marketing professionals in there for you to pick their brains and so on. Just go to todayindigital.com slash Slack or tap the link in this episode's notes. Oh, by the way, some of you have asked where the source links to stories have gone. They are still available, but for various workflow reasons, I've moved them out of each episode's podcast description. You will find them now on the website, todayindigital.com. Just click the episode you want, you'll find the source links and the complete verbatim transcript of each show. I'm Todd Maffin. More news from the ever-changing world of digital marketing tomorrow. Talk to you then.