👀 Weekend Update: The Latest in Google’s War vs. Affiliate Sites

GM nerds,

Welcome back to the newsletter that lets you cancel your New Yorker subscription bc here we give you the answers for free:

A) the phrase “Google S.E.O.” makes zero sense
B) we’ve been answering the question of “Is Google Gaslighting the Internet” since before Day 1

Here’s what’s good this week:

→ The Latest in Google’s War vs. Affiliate Sites 👀

→ AI Analyzes Major Trends in Winning YouTube Ads 🤖

→ SEO Strategies That Work Better Than Google’s “Best Practices”? 🤔

→ more, obviously 💬

But first…

​This Week's Video 🗣️🎙️​

Many people tend to be quite aggressive when setting up the CTR software, but in this video, I get to share my personal way of doing it, which has been working well for me. So, if you want to learn more about setting up the CTR software, tune in.

​YouTube​​

What’s Going Down @ Google 📊

→ Pretty good whiteboard vid by Moz this week, highlighting 4 Surprising SEO Test Results.

- +12% when taking hidden content out of the tab/accordion
- +8.5% in organic traffic when title tags were capitalized
- +16% uplift when brand name removed from title tags
- no + or - impact when article schema was added

As we should expect by now, a lot of this runs counter to Google’s prescribed best practices. Stay alert, always A/B test.

→ Google is streamlining product listings, simplifying the process of surfacing product listings for sellers with automated 'website crawl' feeds that use structured data markup on your sites to pull out relevant product info. Love anything that simplifies this sort of grunt work, TBH.

→ Google’s war against affiliate sites continues. Or,, as some prefer to frame it: “targeting the quality level of sites that followed certain tactics like keyword stuffing, organized link rings, scaled automated content and so on.”

The official word is that you should be "targeting people, not keywords," and refrain from "copying competitors." So, one could hypothetically translate that as something like… find a way to specifically do those things w/o being caught. lol.

Not me tho.

Never.

→ This week’s Google AF Headline of the Week: “Google cut Uncle Sam a $2 million check so it could avoid a jury trial. A judge just agreed.”

→ This article is full of all sorts of rookie mistakes and basic errors, but the New Yorker dunking on Google Search for “gaslighting the internet” is still worth a look.

AI Insight 🤖

→ Interesting to learn that Apple won’t be paying OpenAI for its use of ChatGPT. Or that OpenAI won’t be paying Apple. Instead, Apple is basically offering to pay with “exposure” as currency (aka “distribution”). Major partnership, either way.

→ The OpenAI circus continues to entertain as Sam Altman is considering going for-profit so that its board loses control.

→ Perplexity’s early spike in the SERPs seems to have already come to an end. Pour one out.

→ If you haven’t fully tuned out Neil Patel, it’s worth checking out his report on whether ChatGPT actually drives sales. The TLDR; ChatGPT generates 2.5 billion visits a month— what can be tracked right now suggests that direct conversions may or may not be impacted, but the platform absolutely causes tons of people to learn about businesses.

→ Meta’s AI launch in Europe has been paused “after the Irish privacy regulator told it to delay its plan to harness data from Facebook and Instagram use.” Advocacy groups are taking issue w/ “Meta's plan to use personal data to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models without seeking consent” and, as usual, the EU be taking any opportunity to f** w/ big tech.

Social Media Round-up 📲

→ A Gemini AI analysis of 8K top YouTube Ads and comes to some conclusions re: key trends for brands, effectively using data to give some crucial insights.

The trends:

- spotlighting underrepresented voices
- celebrating individuality
- reinforcing community
- sparking wonder
- building trust
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Here’s a link to the source report @ thinkwithgoogle.com.

→ Speaking of YouTube, the new “server-side ad injection” means that ads will now be embedded in videos. Ad-blockers take the L, and so does the average YouTube user.

→ On a more promising note, YouTube is also testing Image-Based Search w/ Google Lens.

→ Reddit’s partnership with Integral Ad Services will give marketers enhanced analytics, including frame-by-frame options on video ads, as well as more campaign delivery transparency on Reddit.

→ SEJ is reporting on some new LinkedIn Newsletter​

LinkedIn newsletter action is kinda surging ATM, as publishing has increased 59% and engagement has bumped up on the platform 47% YOY. Changes include:

- reading experience improvements like displaying comments alongside the article
- publishers create custom cover images w/ Microsoft’s AI-powered Designer tool
- subscribers receive alerts (both email and in-app) when an issue is published

There’s more, too.

→ X’s improved Advanced Analytics = officially dropped.

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

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