Marketing Letter - ✅ The Forbes Parasite SEO Playbook

GM nerds,

Welcome back to the newsletter that makes it make sense:

TLDR; favoritism, corruption, incompetence, etc.

More on this later, but here’s what’s good this week:

→ Meta’s New AI-Powered Ad Tools👀
→ The Fundamentals of Shopify SEO ✅
→ The Forbes Parasite SEO Playbook 🧠
→ Optimizing Google Ads Ad Copy in 2024📈
→ more, obviously 💬

But first…

​This Week's Video 🗣️🎙️​

In this week's video, I discuss some of the methods for recovering from the Google HCU update. I share personal experiences and strategies, including buying auction domains and redirecting old content. I also caution against audit recovery agencies and emphasize on the importance of community resources like Advise.so. Come through.

​YouTube​​

What’s Going Down @ Google 📊

→ This piece documenting “The Rise of Forbes in Google – Parasite SEO Perfected” is a fascinating deep-dive into Forbes Marketplace, the “Forbes affiliate frankenstein” that has grown so large that it has made serious attempts to buy Forbes. By some metrics, it could be argued that the Forbes Parasite SEO program is the “site reputation” GOAT.

I mean any piece that can drop a line like this: “Forbes Marketplace is a Google heist of the highest order. It’s generic, thin content with a single goal: rank to generate affiliate revenue. And Google has lapped their shit up.”

… is worth a read, IMO.

→ This Shopify SEO article drops 9 ways to improve your Shopify SEO and it’s decent advice re: optimizing your Shopify store for Google. The top 3? Optimizing your Website Architecture and Shopify Collections Pages, and making sure you’ve integrated w/ Merchant Center. How to do that? Well, the article actually gives really detailed step-by-step advice for these 3 and the other 6.

→ This Optmyzr data analysis study on what’s working re: Google Ads ad copy in 2024 asks and answers some big questions, like:

Is there a correlation between Ad Strength and performance? (TLDR; No)

Do ads written in title case or sentence case perform better? (TLDR; Yes!)

How does the length of the creative (character count) affect performance? (TLDR; Not as much as it used to— focus on quality > quantity)

Pretty fascinating piece with data to back up these answers as well as some other relevant questions, too.

→ There have been some “crazy swings in rankings AFTER the August core update” and this thread performs some in-depth volatility tracking and analysis.

→ As of 29 October 2024, Google Trends notifications will be gone. In their place, Google wants you to subscribe to a daily newsletter or RSS Feed.

→ BTW, for those interested in the United States vs. Google trial, internal documents have revealed that monopoly-retaining decisions were made because Google knew that “many publishers would terminate their AdX relationship in favor of their preferred vendors” if AdX lost exclusivity.

→ Also… figured it’s worth passing this reminder along:

AI Insight 🤖

→ Speaking of Google, its AI search campaign-building tool has been expanded to other languages— for now, it’s just German, French, and Spanish. Also, Google’s expanding AI-powered ad image editing to search, Display, App, and Demand Gen campaigns.

→ If you’re curious re: how AI content is being detected, here’s one way… Google’s “SynthID toolkit watermarks and identifies AI-generated content. These tools embed digital watermarks directly into AI-generated images, audio, text or video. In each modality, SynthID’s watermarking technique is imperceptible to humans but detectable for identification."

On that note, here’s a piece on how “Google will begin flagging AI-generated images in Search later this year.”

→ This OpenAI o1 use cases and tests thread is cool. Click through if you wanna see OpenAI’s newest solving puzzles, building games, creating web crawlers, writing poems, and churning out weather apps.

Social Media Round-up 📲

→ And speaking of AI, Meta is rolling out a suite of new AI-powered advertising tools in time for the holidays. Highlighted promo codes, enhanced reminder ads, and the ability to use " site links to add multiple landing pages to a single image or video ad on Facebook Feed."

→ Also, YouTube Studio is finally releasing the long-awaited AI tool that helps content creators brainstorm video ideas. Beta-tested back in the spring, the feature is part of the freshly juiced up Inspiration Tab, which offers ideas to get creators started as well as title and thumbnail suggestions, and more.

→ + also re: YouTube, “YouTube Communities” is a new initiative that hopes to keep the community-building that creators bring to Discord, WhatsApp, and Reddit on YouTube— “sort of a mix of old-school forum, subreddit, and Facebook group.”

→ TikTok truthers validated. New survey results reveal that about 40% of young adults regularly get news from TikTok" and about 17% of total US adults say they “regularly get news on TikTok.”

→ If you’re looking for ways to monetize your Instagram presence, here’s an article full of ideas. The piece gives some good examples on how to get moving w/ some basic revenue-generators, including selling branded merch, selling branded content, and promoting other products with affiliate marketing.

→ BTW— LinkedIn has started training its GenAI on its users' personal data by default, without notifying you. You can turn it off by opening up your settings and opting out.

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

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