Today in Digital Marketing - Was This Popular SEO Tool a Scam All Along?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today,

Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, the Facebook audiences you must create now Be protected. Be Zen. test drive their cars without their cars? And will Facebook's new cropping tool be racist? It's Monday, June 14th, 2021. Happy National Veterans Day, Bolivia. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. You might not know this, but Google factors spelling and grammar into its search algorithm. If your webpage is full of bad English, Google considers that a poor user experience and will penalize you for it.

Starting point is 00:01:07 Likewise, if you have broken HTML code on your web page, same thing. Google may knock you back in the rankings because of that. But if you have both broken English and broken HTML code on your web page, which do you fix first? Today's quiz, what does Google recommend you focus on first when it comes to fixing your web problems?

Starting point is 00:01:31 Your spelling and grammar? Or your bad HTML code? There is an answer, and I'll tell you it later in today's episode. The SEO industry is still reeling from word last week that the top-ranking HTML editor on Google may have been a scam all along. Hacker News published an article by a developer who said they found this tool claiming to be cleaning code, but was secretly injecting links into the output in order to boost their rankings and sites that they were affiliated with. The tool would generate HTML code from a visual WYSIWYG editor. Quoting joeyoungblood.com,

Starting point is 00:02:10 what this developer uncovered was that each time someone used the free version of the editor, it would inject a link into a website or article affiliated with their website or core business. Oftentimes, this had nothing to do with the editor. In this developer's case, the links were sometimes to his top competitor. The links were scattered across websites likely to be of high quality, including NBC Sports, Intuit QuickBooks, Rice University, and Macworld, unquote. But is it a scam if the tool discloses that they're doing this? Indeed, the tool in question has a disclaimer on their site saying,

Starting point is 00:02:44 yeah, they'll inject links into your content, unless you cough up money for their pro version. Even so, it appears Google wasn't happy about it and has now apparently hit the site with a manual penalty, meaning a human being at Google plans to remove them from their position in the index. The lesson here? Nothing really is free. First, it was Europe's GDPR, then California's CCPA. Now get ready for the CPA, yet another jurisdictionally-based privacy law, this one from the American state of Colorado. Quoting Streetfightmag.com,

Starting point is 00:03:29 Under the CPA, consumers have the right to receive a copy of their personal data from businesses, and they have the right to know what data is being collected and shared. They also have the right to correct any inaccurate information and the right to delete. Requests must be honored within 45 days and they must be done free of charge. the CPA goes into effect in 2023, it will become the first state privacy regulation that can be enforced by the Attorney General's office and the District Attorney's office. That's just one of a number of enforcement mechanisms that have been baked into the legislation. Violations to the CPA will constitute a deceptive trade practice and penalties could be up to $2,000 per violation, unquote. These laws are stacking up. Virginia has one. Washington has tried three times now to pass one.

Starting point is 00:04:11 Colorado's legislation, just waiting for the governor's signature. And yes, it affects your business, even if you're not based in Colorado. Like all the other laws, it applies if you conduct business in the jurisdiction or produce products or services aimed at Colorado residents. When Facebook shuts down its Facebook analytics tool in two weeks, it won't just be pretty charts and path funneling that we'll lose. It'll also be the ability to create very niche audiences. The tool lets you create audiences with much more precision than anywhere else on the platform. For instance, you can create an audience of people who commented on your Facebook page, or shared a post, or even only those who reacted with the angry emoji, and so on.

Starting point is 00:04:58 Everywhere else on Facebook's ad platform, that's all dumped into one big bucket called Everyone Who Engaged With Your Page. John Loomer has an excellent post on his blog today that walks you through how to extract those audiences now while you can. That's at johnloomer.com, J-O-N-L-O-O-M-E-R.com. There are 15 audiences he recommends you create. Post reactions at the one day, seven day, 28 day, 90 day, and 180day periods. Those are actually the only periods that their interface lets you select. And then do the same five for post comments, and the same five for post shares. You might not ever use them, but creating them only takes a

Starting point is 00:05:35 minute or two, and you'll have them in audiences if you decide a month or two from now that you might want to. What do you do when you market a car brand and people are nervous about test driving your vehicles? Maybe they're scared past test drivers haven't been vaccinated. Or maybe the lockdowns have just changed all of our behavior and nobody likes leaving the house anymore. If you're Volvo, you turn to augmented reality. The car brand today launching a virtual test drive

Starting point is 00:06:05 embedded into a Pinterest pin. It's for their new electric SUV, and when you tap the pin, you're taken to a 360-degree view of the car while it's being driven. You can even tap and drag to look around. I should note, this is not an image of the car. This is a video, a 360-degree video of the car being driven, which you can move the camera around. I should note, this is not an image of the car. This is a video, a 360 degree video of the

Starting point is 00:06:25 car being driven, which you can move the camera around. Quoting socialmediatoday.com, it's a first of a kind integration for Pinterest, which leans into immersive AR like experiences, which will eventually become commonplace in all forms of e-commerce and online product discovery. In addition to this, Pinterest will further the promotion by partnering with selected Pinterest creators who will walk consumers through their personal favorite features of the car, boosting exposure and connection in the app, unquote. According to Pinterest, 8 million people engage with content about cars every month,

Starting point is 00:07:00 and a third of their users report being inspired to shop for cars they weren't even looking for. Google has upgraded its PageSpeed Insights tool to show partial field data. Field data are the numbers that Google collects from browsers around the world. Ever wondered why they pushed Chrome so heavily? Now you know. Until now, field data was only serviced if all metrics for a page met a threshold of data. Now though, any metric that meets the data threshold will be available to view. A senior Google engineer said on Twitter that this is a big deal and should add back in about 30% of the data that had been missing. Facebook is rolling out smart cropping for videos,

Starting point is 00:07:52 and I know sometimes it seems Facebook uses the word smart ironically, but in this case it's reasonably intelligent and might even help you create some new versions for multivariate testing. Smart cropping will automatically generate a 1x1 or 4x5 version of any video clip with the Facebook code identifying what it thinks are the main objects in the video. Here's how they describe it, quote, SmartCrop will optimize for the main subject in the content, keeping the main subjects centered and in frame.

Starting point is 00:08:16 You'll be able to publish this video directly within Creator Studio and can review the reframed video prior to publishing. You can also compare the reframed version with the original prior to publishing to decide Well, let's just hope their auto-cropping algorithm is better than Twitter's was. You can find the backstory there by googling the phrase, Why does Twitter crop out black people? Three small items in the lightning round today. First, J.P. Morgan says Amazon will overtake Walmart next

Starting point is 00:08:52 year to become the largest retailer in the U.S. Axios reports that YouTube will stop accepting ads for its masthead ad unit from certain verticals, including alcohol sales, gambling, prescription drugs, and election and political ads. And judging from some unreleased code, it looks like Instagram will be changing the way their close friends list feature works.

Starting point is 00:09:12 Seems like they are planning to rename it Selected Followers and let you select a different audience for each story you share. Oh, and as for the quiz, if you have both broken English and broken HTML code on your web page, which do you fix first? The answer from Google search engineer John Mueller. We try to find really high quality content on the web. And sometimes it can appear that a page is lower quality content because it has a lot of kind of grammatical and technical mistakes in the text. So that's something where, from my point of view, if you're aware of these kind of issues, I would just fix them. So I would almost say, like, spelling and grammar is probably, for most websites, a higher priority than broken HTML.

Starting point is 00:10:03 I'm going to leave you with this. Those of you who listen to this podcast a lot know that I am a video game enthusiast. E3 happened this past weekend. That's the big annual conference with all the video game announcements. And you know how these things go usually. The developers of a video game get enough of their game

Starting point is 00:10:17 together to preview that they announce it. A next version or something like that. And they show all sorts of details and gameplay footage and get people hyped about its release. What happens if you don't have any of that stuff? You don't have any character designs. You don't have the story. You really don't have anything at all,

Starting point is 00:10:34 but you still want to announce that a game is coming out. That's what Obsidian Entertainment did spectacularly this past weekend, and I'm going to leave you with their trailer for the announcement of the sequel to Outer Worlds, which they call Outer Worlds 2. Enjoy. Talk to you tomorrow. We begin by hearing an old, wise-sounding voice. And we see a quiet, peaceful setting.

Starting point is 00:11:00 This will make our game seem big and important. Now, something must break the serenity. Will this creature be in the game? No. Say goodbye to it forever. Suddenly, and for no reason, people running. These pointless slow motion shots make everything seem cool and should bolster pre-sale numbers. That wah sound can mean only one thing. We must gaze over an epic shot of a world.

Starting point is 00:11:42 And there should be lens flares. Now we see our hero. But only their silhouette. Because the developers haven't finished the design. Or finished the story. Or finished any gameplay that's actually

Starting point is 00:12:00 ready to show. In fact, the only thing they have finished is the title.

Today in Digital Marketing - Was This Popular SEO Tool a Scam All Along?

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.