Today in Digital Marketing - Why Google Sometimes Ranks Plagiarized Content Higher

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. Today, why Google sometimes ranks plagiarized content higher, Be protected. Be Zen. ads for clients and colleagues should get a lot simpler soon. It's Monday, June 21st, 2021. Happy Orthodox Pentecost Monday. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Google today announced they will be closing the following tools that advertisers have relied on. Director Mix, Dynamic Display, Audio Mixer, and even the recently announced Dynamic Audio tool that let you build tailored audio ads. But fret not, digital marketers. They're closing them because they plan to integrate them into one big single platform called the Ads Creative Studio.

Starting point is 00:01:16 Quoting the company, Ads Creative Studio aims to streamline many of the processes creative teams are accustomed to when building out different ad types. We're introducing a new project library that centralizes creative asset construction and management. From the project library, you can create and manage video, display, and soon, audio creatives. You can collaboratively organize and use assets of all types from the asset library, allowing one team to maintain the creatives while another utilizes them in display and video campaigns. We've also redesigned the process to build creatives across ad types so you can easily generate variations that are customized to your audience. In this new unified workflow, you'll specify which creative elements within your ad should be customized,

Starting point is 00:02:02 then adapt the message of each element to be relevant for each audience. This means you can use a common workflow across video, display, and audio ads to easily create tailored messages, unquote. So this is sort of like, I guess, Facebook's Creative Hub, or maybe what Creative Hub aspires to be, in that you can export your creations to the various Google ad platforms.

Starting point is 00:02:26 Ads Creative Studio will be available in beta to display and video 360 customers at the end of next month. And then to select YouTube ads customers in September, they'll roll it out more widely after that. TikTok this morning announced they're launching a new feature called Jumps. Jumps will let video creators and brands link to mini apps that can provide more information or start someone on using a mobile app. So things like movie reviews, beauty tutorials and likes. And if this sounds familiar, it's because that's basically what Snapchat did last week. Indeed, as socialmediatoday.com noted, quote, feature replication is nothing new with the latest features and tools and social apps, but the speed of replication does seem to be ramping up.

Starting point is 00:03:17 With many times just days between one platform announcing a new edition, then a competitor app launching almost the exact same thing, unquote. And to be fair, Snapchat did copy TikTok to make it spotlight format. So, you know, I guess all fear and love and war. If you've used TikTok before, you may have actually already seen these as they've been using them for a very small group of mini apps like recipes and so on. But this is basically throwing the door wide open to applications. I say applications because TikTok is still manually approving them.

Starting point is 00:03:48 They're also not letting just anybody use those approved links. That too will roll out slowly. So you've slaved over that blog post. You've done it the way Google wants. Lots of solid information, organized well, trustworthy sources, author credibility. But some jackass has just straight up copied your article and put it up on their site. And worse, their plagiarized version is ranking higher than your original. What the hell, Google? It's something we can determine to a large extent. Google search engineer John Mueller.

Starting point is 00:04:26 But even if we know which one is the original and which one is a copy, sometimes it makes sense to show a copy in the search results. And one of the situations where I have seen this happen consistently is if a website is of lower quality overall, where when our systems look at it, they're like, well, we can't really trust this website. But if a higher quality website were to take some of this content and publish it,

Starting point is 00:04:50 we would say, well, we know more about this website. And actually, maybe we should show this content in the search results. So that's also one of the situations that you might be running into where maybe it's worthwhile to also invest in improving the quality of your website overall. So not just that one article that apparently people like, but also the rest of your website overall. There are some things you can do if you're not able to change up your site much.

Starting point is 00:05:17 Reach out to influential websites and try to get a link back. Disavow any links that might be messing up your domain quality, that sort of thing. By the way, these John Mueller things that you hear from time to time on the podcast come from his fantastic office hours that he does every week. Go to YouTube, look for Google Search Central, and then office hours. 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.

Starting point is 00:05:48 Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. If you've ever wanted to use influencers in your campaigns but weren't sure how to go about it, here's some inspiration from the beauty brand L'Oreal. They've hired more than 20 Pinterest influencers that will create branded content for the company. And guess what format they're using? TikTok! Kind of. Pinterest has sort of a TikTok format. They call them Idea Pins.

Starting point is 00:06:23 The content will be mostly beauty tutorials and speculations on trends. Content marketing is kind of a new bag for L'Oreal. Last month, they launched their first real content marketing program, an online video series aimed at hairdressers who buy the professional product lines, quoting marketingdive.com. The new campaign arrives as Pinterest is reporting an uptick in beauty searches on its platform, with queries like soft makeup and white eyeliner reaching record highs. L'Oreal is also experiencing a surge in interest in its products, particularly from countries in which vaccination programs have made substantial progress. This growth comes after L'Oreal's yearly sales fell 4.1% in 2020 due to the economic fallout from the pandemic, unquote.

Starting point is 00:07:06 While they might not be new to influencer marketing, they're not exactly digital newbies. Last year, the company created some AR lenses for Snapchat and even released its first line of virtual makeup, which are products you apply to your videos and photos to post on social media. On every web server, almost every anyway, there lives a file in the root directory called robots.txt. The intention of this file is to tell search engines which parts of your site you want them to crawl and which you want them to stay away from. This way, if, for instance, you're working on a beta version of your site

Starting point is 00:07:43 and it's publicly available on your server, if people know the URL, you can block the crawlers from crawling it. Well, sort of. You can suggest to the crawlers that they ignore it, but it's kind of on the honor system. Most legitimate engines will honor what you put in there. A side note, because robots.txt is a publicly available file, you can just look it up yourself on any web server

Starting point is 00:08:03 to see what they want you to stay away from. It's kind of entertaining sometimes. But the problem is some web servers that your brand may use don't give you direct access to that file. If you have a Shopify store, for instance, you've never been able to create or edit that file specifically for your store. Until now. Shopify today announcing stores can now edit that file. This should be up now and you can access it this way. First, go to online stores, then themes, then actions, then click edit code, add a new template, then select robots, click create template, make all the changes you want, and then save the robots.txt.liquid file in your published theme. But, fair warning, Shopify says, remember, if you monkey with it too much, you could

Starting point is 00:08:48 accidentally block all engines from accessing any part of your store, so only do this if you know what you're doing, because they say they will not provide support for whatever you do in there. And finally, YouTube announced this afternoon they will be doing a live stream for businesses on Thursday.

Starting point is 00:09:09 They call it the Small Biz Day event and will have interviews, workshops, insider tips, and so on. Their kickoff workshop, for instance, is called How to Create YouTube Videos that Attract New Customers. I got to shout out this new tool that we're using here to put the show together. Since we started, we have relied on the RSS reader tool Feedly to pull as many news feeds as it can. And then we kind of patched the rest together with bookmarks that we check every day and a web change notification service and that kind of thing. We discovered InnoReader, I-N-O, I-N-O Reader last week. And it's amazing. It's an RSS reader too, but it lets you filter feeds. So, for instance, one of the new sites that we rely on has really great posts,

Starting point is 00:09:50 but every day they post this big, long, here's everything that happened today article, which we never use. So now we can just filter those out. And if a site doesn't have an RSS feed, it will actually try to create one just for you by looking at the HTML code and trying to pull out the headlines of common elements. And if it can't do that, it'll let you get a notification in the reader when something on the website's changed.

Starting point is 00:10:12 And you can track Facebook pages, view your YouTube subscriptions. It'll automatically highlight words that are important to you. This is not a paid ad, by the way. It's just really, really cool. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Why Google Sometimes Ranks Plagiarized Content Higher

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