💀 Judgment Day Dropping Soon: The May 5 Google Update

GM nerds,

Welcome back to the newsletter that goes out to everyone whose already-clapped cheeks are about to get clapped once again:

Here’s what’s good this week:

→ Meta’s New AI Ad Tools 🤖

→ Making Influencer Marketing Make Sense ✅

→ Which OnPage SEO Signals Matter in 2024🤔

→ Sunday Bloody Sunday: The May 5 Google Update 💀

→ more, obviously 💬

But first…

​​This Week's Video 🗣️🎙️​

In this episode, I talked about a tactic for obtaining a Google My Business location for Rank and Rent businesses. This tactic does not involve buying someone else's service, as that is illegal and has several implications. Instead, it only works once you have a successful Rank and Rent business. Tune in.

​YouTube​

What’s Going Down @ Google 📊

→ ICYMI: with another update dropping like, now, here’s a reminder on the basics of what to expect. Sunday, Bloody Sunday. For some high-level analysis (AKA a video by me), check out my “MAY 5 JUDGEMENT DAY (Site Reputation Abuse Update)” video from my Building in Public series. Godspeed.

→ We’re at the dawn of the Site Reputation Abuse update, still struggling through the recent Core update, but some are still tracking the horrors of the HCU. Man, it’s been tough. Of the 380 sites being tracked since September, exactly zero have recovered, and 70 of the 380 sites I'm tracking have dropped 90%+.

→ In preparation for the May 5 Site Reputation Abuse Update, another major player- SI- has taken down a significant portion of its site.

→ ICYMI: Google has expanded Performance Max to online marketplaces. Using this new Performance Max for Marketplaces feature, you’ll no longer need a website or Merchant Center account to make Google ad campaigns with the ability to send traffic to product listings on third-party ecommerce platforms. If you’re a small business that’s in big on Google Ads, you could hypothetically save space in your budget by re-designing your strategy away from a site or merchant center.

→ FYI: when the calendar flips to June, Google will be automatically pausing low-activity keywords.

Social Media Round-up: TikTok Edition📲

→ TikTok just dropped big “Pulse” news,” including a premium ad placement feature aimed at allowing paying brands to strategically place their ads in the app— aka, you can buy ad space next to popular content by the publishers and creators of you’re choosing. Click thru for the DL on Pulse Custom Lineups, Pulse Premiere Tentpole Moments, Pulse Premiere IP Lineups, and more.

→ New developments in the whole TikTok becoming a Search Engine thing: Aleyda Solis reports “organic search visibility growth has skyrocketed (along with other UGC platforms) since the March Core Update” including massive query developments in "restaurants near me.” Google is shaking and crying RN.

AI Insight 🤖

→ Meta has announced some new ad tools (mostly AI-powered), including AI-powered recommendations for brands in Instagram’s Creator Marketplace, extensions to the AI “Image Expansion” option for Advantage+ creative, and an update to its Reminder Ads that allows to “include external links to a new product or sale in their Reminder promotions.”

→ This week’s edition of Insane AI Headlines is a doozy: “Ukraine unveils AI-generated foreign ministry spokesperson”

→ X’s Grok AI is now powering a “Stories” feature that “summarizes the personalized trending stories in the app’s Explore section.” Twitter’s take on Stories has failed before— maybe Grok, possibly the most irrelevant chatbot, was the missing ingredient?

Influencer Marketing: Making it Make Sense

There’s been a lot of buzz about Influencer Marketing the last few years, and many marketers have:

- wondered if they should be getting in on it, and how to
- got into it and wondered if they’re doing it wrong
- got in and cashed in

Not to mention— pretty much everything in between.

This new report from Sprout Social on “2024 Influencer Marketing Benchmarks” provides some valuable data that helps us make sense of the scene. Here’s the MarketingCharts breakdown, if you don’t wanna download the whole thing.

Analyzing 10M+ posts across multiple platforms, we can see that Travel, Beauty, and Sports & Fitness top out the engagement rate list, while Music, Gaming, and Finance scrape the bottom.

Also worth noting: Travel, the highest-rated topic, only hits an engagement rate of 2.40%.

Hot Tip

Worth checking out Charles Floate’s “Most Important OnPage SEO Signals 2024” post. TLDR; Internal Linking, Content Composition, and Meta Title & Tags are the top 3, while Keyword Stuffing Images, Keyword Density, and Exact Word Counts take massive Ls.

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

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