👀 A Look at Google’s Unwritten Guidelines

GM nerds,

Welcome back to the newsletter that’ll trace Google’s downfall better than anyone else on the web:

So it goes.

Here’s what’s good this week:

→ Will SGE Be Devastating for E-Commerce? 📉

→ To Delete or Not to Delete: YouTube Strategy Essentials ✅

→ Making AI Do Your Scraping 🤖

→ Google’s Unwritten Guidelines 👀

→ more, obviously 💬

But first…

​​This Week's Pod 🗣️🎙️​

Dive into EP66 of TWIDM as Craig Campbell shares insights on SEO updates, AI content, e-commerce strategies, and much more. He also reveals the secrets behind scaling and content mastery. Tune in.

​​YouTube​

​Apple Podcast​

​Google Podcast​

​Spotify​

What’s Going Down @ Google 📊

→ March update still be updating.

→ If you’re noticing Google’s usual “Shopping” tab has gone away, rest easy. Instead, a "product sites" tab has been implemented in search results. The current testing series will see "Shopping" replaced with "Products" in Search.

→ The Fat Stacks blog took a deep dive into Google’s recent updates and did some good work translating Googlespeak into the practical truth (aka “unwritten guidelines”). Rules include: "Only publish content your visitors want," "Meet all the informational wants of every reader who visits your site, but nothing more, "Every piece of content you publish must be original," "Do not publish so much content in an attempt to scale content, no matter how good it is," and more. There are 12 total, and the last packs the best punch: “above all else, publish content that is helpful. This is self-explanatory.” lol.

→ Lily Ray is a divisive personality in the SEO community, but you gotta hand it to her on one thing: she’s got a good grasp on WTF is going on w/ Google. In this piece, she gives her take on the HCU and analyzes it about as deeply and clearly as anyone has— though maybe not as critically. lol.

→ If you want the actually useful insights from Neil Patel’s data w/o actually following the guy, this is the newsletter for you. Check out this list of “3 content marketing stats that will change how you create content”:

“1. 94.29% of the web pages indexed in Google got 0 traffic from SEO in the last 30 days.

2. Within 5 months of human-written and AI-generated content being published on the web the human-written content generated 5.44X more traffic.

3. 59.41% of the content we analyzed over the last 30 days had no engagement on social media. No likes, no shares, no comments. “

→ Malte Landwehr argues that “SGE will be devastating for e-commerce” because “Google will try to own 100% of the e-commerce market. The whole research is done via SGE. And the final conversion will happen via Google Shopping” and he provides some data to support his point. Take a look, doomers.

Social Media Round-up 📲

→ LinkedIn just dropped “Dynamic UTMs,” designed to make LinkedIn ads optimize your web traffic. With the option to automatically add UTM options to your campaigns, rather than manually building them, you can streamline your campaign and/or creative names being looked at by analytics tools.

→ This just in: don’t delete your old YouTube videos. As per YouTube Product Lead Todd Beaupre: “YouTubers: Don’t delete videos unless you have a very, very good reason. When you delete a video, you delete your channel’s connection to the audience that watched that video… If you want to maximize your growth, keep your videos public or unlist them if you must.”

→ Remember when it looked like Ron DeSantis might be president? Wild times. Anyway, he’s banned social media for anyone under 14 in Florida. Is it a sign of things to come on a larger scale? IDK, we’ll see.

→ If you’re still counting Elon’s stack of Ls, here’s a big one: “Musk's X Corp loses lawsuit against hate speech watchdog.”

AI Insight 🤖

→ This new piece on SEJ- “How To Use Google Sheets For Web Scraping With AI”- explains how AI and Google Sheets can work together to make scraping data easier than ever, making auditing, competitor analysis, and other site and data structure tasks smooth AF. The article compares ChatGPT to ChatGPT + Google Sheets IMPORTXML, finding that ChatGPT isn't quite up to the task on its own.

→ An AI Chat feature dubbed Side Panel Chat is being tested by Google. It will be integrated into the developers' pages subdomain. As of now, it’s still in Beta. Keep an eye out.

Jacky Chou​
Founder of Indexsy
hello@indexsy.com
Let's Connect on Twitter👇

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