Marketing Letter - 📉 Google Ls Keep Stacking

GM nerds,

Welcome back to the newsletter that speaks Google fluently enough to translate:

(h/t @MintedEmpire)

So it goes.

Here’s what’s good this week:

→ TikTok’s Q5 Tips📈
→ How SearchGPT Stacks Up 👀
→ YouTube’s New Creator Tools 🛠️
→ Google Ls Keep Stacking: Featured Snippet Fails, HCU Claims Another Victim, & More 📉
→ more, obviously 💬

But first…

​This Week's Video 🗣️🎙️​

In this week's video, I’m excited to share insights on building a rank and rent business that can generate $10,000 a month without the necessity of achieving high organic rankings. I get to guide you through a straightforward process of reaching out to local service businesses, securing leads, and optimizing your strategies for conversion. Tune in for more!

​YouTube​​

What’s Going Down @ Google 📊

→ This BBC piece - The 'bias machine': How Google tells you what you want to hear - looks at how Google’s Featured Snippets are prioritizing intent over accuracy, aka “pulled bits out of the text based on what people are searching for and fed them what they want to read.” Sounds bad!

→ Speaking of Google Ls, here’s a piece on The Stupidity of Google’s Site Reputation Abuse Policy: “One person’s genuine content is another person’s search manipulation. The line between the two is blurry as all f***.” … (FYI, not sure I’ve ever linked to anything with this many F-bombs). The first-party/third-party distinction is completely pointless because "First-Party Content is Just As Problematic." This leads to a situation where "Topical Authority No Longer Matters," and "when topical authority doesn’t matter, you will have a flourishing ecosystem of parasite SEO." Not wrong.

→ Biggest L of them all? Remember the guy from Giant Freakin Robot who attended the Google Creator event and said it turned into a funeral? Well, he’s shutting down his site due to HCU-inflicted damage. He dropped from 20 million monthly readers to “a few thousand” unique visitors.

→ Google Ad Manager dropped a bunch of new features, including a Curation tool, streamlined payments, unified reporting, and simplified deal negotiations.

→ For anyone curious about AI Overviews:

-here’s a “mini AIO case study” that paints a picture of how much traffic AI Overviews is driving
-here’s a resource that tracks AIOs and their presence in the SERPs over time
- and here’s Rich Sanger’s “AI Overview Library: The Ultimate Resource on Google’s AI Overviews”

→ Believe it or not, Forbes Advisor is finally suffering in the SERP, “down -10M monthly organic sessions since Google's manual penalty against them”:

AI Insight 🤖

→ I’ve shared a ton of generative AI platform comparisons, but this marks the first one with OpenAI’s newest: SearchGPT vs. Google vs. Bing. Here’s the TLDR on what the deal is w/ SearchGPT:

- “had a better understanding around time-sensitive queries and used more recent sources”
- falls short of Google and Bing re: local search
- “offers certain advantages over Google and traditional search models, it is still a work in progress”

There’s a lot to go through here, tho. Worth a read.

→ Oh yeah, and with ChatGPT Search tapping into Bing’s index, word on the street is that Bing is finally "an SEO priority." TLDR; it’s simply time to do a quick Bing audit— “Pull up Bing Webmaster Tools, glance at what’s indexed, and address any gaps.”

→ At the risk of “getting political,” here’s a piece on what Trump’s victory could mean for AI regulation.

Social Media Round-up📲

→ YouTube just dropped some new creator tools including Data Stories that “show creators their video's first 24-hour performance in a visual format.” a Most Relevant Filter designed to “help creators find important comments and questions from viewers,” and a Video Linking function that will let creators with 4K+ subscribers “initiate video linking requests with advertisers.”

→ Two new pieces from The Information- Why Reddit’s Explosive Growth Could Last and Reddit Passes Snap- explain a) how Reddit has become more valuable than Snap despite having fewer users and less revenue, and b) why it matters that the gap between logged in Reddit users and logged out Reddit users might matter.

→ Threads fumbled on election night. Still an irrelevant platform? Seems like it.

→ Too bad if you’re still getting your Xmas strategy together, TikTok is already dropping its “Why Q5 is TikTok's golden opportunity for marketers” post-holiday guide. Why Q5? Well, reduced competition for ad space leads to cost efficiency. And, according to TikTok's internal data, shopping-related content surges in January, as “self-care takes center stage” w/ “69% of users planning to buy products for themselves.”

The more you know.

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

​​

1238 Seymour Street, Vancouver, BC V6B 6J3
​Unsubscribe · Preferences​