Marketing Letter - 💀 Google is Coming for Parasite SEO

GM nerds,

Welcome back to the newsletter that understands the secrets of what’s “helpful”:

(h/t @googlehonesty)

Here’s what’s good this week:

→ OpenAI’s Search Engine Drop Date ✅

→ Instagram’s “Emerging Creators” Boost 📈

→ Forbes’ Reputation Abuse Update Strategy 👀

→ more, obviously 💬

But first…

​​This Week's Pod 🗣️🎙️​

In this episode of TWIDM, James and I cover our recent activities, Instagram Reels, YouTube strategies, Twitter growth, and community management challenges. We discuss the value of attending conferences and the lack of value in conference talks. We also address Reddit marketing challenges, local business partnerships, review impact on rankings, SEO course quality, and how content and user experience affect Google rankings. Come through.

​YouTube​

​Apple Podcast​

​Google Podcast​

​Spotify​

What’s Going Down @ Google 📊

→ Speaking of AI, Google has decided it’s in its “Gemini Era” while announcing 15% Q1 revenue growth. Real ones, however, know Google is in fact in its “Flop Era.”

→ New month, same sh*t.

- Here’s a May 1 reflection on the 45-day March core update that specifically looks at “how the transition of Google’s helpful content system to its core ranking system is supposed to work.”

- And here’s a reminder that on May 5, the Site Reputation Abuse Policy will begin rolling out, which specifically targets “parasite SEO.” While not all third-party content will be considered spam, “third-party content produced primarily for ranking purposes,” “without close oversight of a website owner,” and “intended to manipulate Search rankings” will be considered spam.

Buckle up, SEOs.

→ This is f*ing brutal— after using its platform to “sound the alarm about independent publishers being demoted on Google to give way to big media sites” (in this article here), they’ve posted an update: HouseFresh has been virtually fully wiped from the SERPs, losing 91% of its search traffic. The article takes a look at:

- how Dotdash Meridith developed a “keyword swarming” strategy to push out independent competitors
- how and why Forbes flooded the web with affiliate-focused SEO content on topics far outside its scope
- how major corporate publishers are firing journalists and gaming AI to churn out content

And more. Worth a look.

→ Just a couple weeks after blocking its coupons directory from being crawled by Google, Forbes served a 410 status code to get rid of the coupons link from its navigation, aka completely wiping all coupons. We all know this is because of the Google site reputation abuse policy which drops on May 5th and will feature both algorithmic and manual penalties.

Not like Forbes has any reason to be afraid:

Besties 4 Lyfe.

AI Insight 🤖

→ Word on the street- aka from Jimmy Apples- is that OpenAI’s long-awaited search engine might be dropping next week— the speculated date is May 9, 5 days before Google I/O. Back in February, it was reported that OpenAI was working on a “web search product that will intensify its competition with Google” and it’s finally here. To quote Sam Altman:

“Google shows you like 10 blue links, like 13 ads, and then 10 blue links, and that’s like one way to find information. But the thing that’s exciting to me is not that we can go build a better copy of Google Search, but that maybe there’s just a much better way to help people find, act on, and synthesise information.”

SEOs: Assemble. LFG.

→ Local SEO homies, don’t sleep on Ryan Darani’s thread re: how to use ChatGPT to get PR links.

→ Some big publisher deals dropped this week: The Financial Times and OpenAI are uniting to train AI models on archived content and “to let ChatGPT respond with short summaries of FT articles.” Meanwhile, Google and News Corp, which owns the Wall Street Journal, agreed on “$5M to $6M annually to develop new AI-related content and products, as part of the Google News Initiative.”

→ One positive consequence of the OpenAI deal? It should help ChatGPT in showing content and links in response to queries.

Social Media Round-up📲

→ Instagram is updating its algo to help out “emerging creators” w/ Reels. The TLDR is that “they’re changing how they rank content recommendations to give smaller creators a better chance of breaking through” and will “reward original content and discourage unoriginal content”

→ Insta is also testing a “clear-mode,” letting users hide the description and UI buttons and get a cleaner view of Reels.

→ How is Meta’s integration of AI on Insta and Facebook coming along? Folks are calling it “unusable.” Is that good?

→ This isn’t a particularly Zoomer-aimed newsletter, so this might be the first time I’ve mentioned Twitch (lol), but it’s worth noting that the platform just rolled out a “TikTok-like discovery feed.”

→ Looks like X might be hiding its action buttons as part of its new AI. For some reason? IDK anymore, man. Sure.

→ TikTok Shop onboarded 6M Sellers in the back half of 2023. What are you waiting for?

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

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