✅ Weekend Wrap-up: Dodging The 5 Biggest Traffic-Killing Pitfalls

GM nerds,

Welcome back to the digital marketing newsletter that’s pouring one out for Skype:

AKA another microsoft bag fumble.

Here’s what’s good this week:

→ Multilingual SEO Growth Hack 📈

→ Dodging The 5 Biggest Traffic-Killing Pitfalls ✅

→ Does Instagram’s Algo Really Punish Longer Vids?🤔

→ more, obviously 💬

But first…

​This Week's Video 🗣️🎙️​

In this week's video, I explore the evolution of online communities in SEO and digital marketing, reflecting on my journey from Black Hat World and revisiting posts from over a decade ago. I share insights into how my strategies have evolved, the challenges I faced, and the innovative solutions I developed. So, tune in!

​YouTube​​

What’s Going Down @ Google 📊

→ If the Google “Diversity Update” has been doing a number on your rankings, here’s some advice on how to fix it. TLDR; Change the GBP link, monitor results, and balance traffic sources.

→ Here’s some good info on how Google determines relevancy & helpfulness. I mean, some of it relies on really by-the-book stuff (I swore I'd never mention E**T on this newsletter again lol), but this level of analysis is still worth a look.

→ 5 SEO content pitfalls that could be hurting your traffic, according to Adiran Riemer. TLDR; writing blog posts based on keyword search volume, publishing content in bulk instead of prioritizing quality, focusing on word count instead of value, turning every header into a question, and publishing every single day or week.

→ ICYMI: last week’s SERP Organic and AI Overview Volatility Research report is worth a look for anyone trying to game AIOs. This analysis unpacks how the data shows Google AI Overviews are changing faster than organic Search. AIOs are very volatile, we all know this. What we maybe didn't know was that their volatility doesn’t correlate with organic search volatility and that generative text seems to change for every query. Basically, it's more of a Featured Snippets replacement rather than a part of Search, so it should be considered something totally different from organic Search.

→ Also re: AIOs, they’re trending heavily toward “authoritative sites” and have become an AIO “increasingly significant source of traffic to YouTube channels.”​

AI Insight 🤖

→ Speaking of Google & AI, Sergey Brin just told AI staff to stop ‘building nanny products’ because Google’s AI products “are overrun with filters and punts of various kinds.”

→ Also, Google Sheets just got a Gemini-powered upgrade that uses AI to turn spreadsheets into charts.

→ OpenAI is unveiling GPT-4.5, Orion, its largest, most “giant” and “expensive,” and most advanced AI model yet— and it “hallucinates a lot less than GPT-4o”. Pro subscribers now have access, as do developers on paid tiers of OpenAI's API. Expectations seem to be "deeper world knowledge" and "higher emotional intelligence" but also that some of "the gains from scaling up data and computing are beginning to level off." Access for now is limited to paid subscribers because, according to Altman, OpenAI is all out of GPUs.

→ Meta plans to release a standalone chatbot app as Meta aims to “be the leader in artificial intelligence by the end of the year.” You do that, bro. Arrival date looks like Q2 2025.

Social Media Round-up 📲

→ This Adobe study on Music's impact on social engagement, specifically on TikTok, comes in with some interesting takeaways. For example, 29% said they're “more likely to buy a product if it's featured alongside a song they like” and Indie music gives you the best chance of getting a high number of likes and comments.

→ Speaking of TikTok, “TikTok One” will replace the TikTok Creative Center in early April.

→ An important note on whether the Instagram algorithm actually punishes longer videos (it doesn’t): it weighs watch time not just as a percentage of a full video viewed, but also the number of seconds viewed. So, “10 seconds viewed on a 1-minute video are just as important to IG's ranking algorithm as all 10 seconds viewed on a 10-second video.”

→ LinkedIn now has comment analytics. If anyone cares. And, if you don’t care, it’s probably because LinkedIn sort of kind of resembles a hellscape at times— but maybe this “For You”-style tab called “My Network”, which will allow users to only see content from people they are connected to and from pages and people they follow, will help with that.

→ YouTube’s Replace Song function just saw some improvements, including selecting a range of options for replacement tracks that you can use without copyright issues.

Also

→ The B2B Influencer Marketing landscape keeps growing and this post will set your expectations re: what to expect. Everything from Interactive Content to Long-term Partnerships taking the market share from to Sponsored Posts to Influencer marketing and the impact of LinkedIn and the role of AI is covered.

→ It’s worth checking out Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR’s case study that answers the questions of “Can you use near-duplicate content across different regions, but for nearly the same language?” and “If yes, based on what criteria?” by achieving 300% Growth with Multilingual SEO for Topical Authority. How’d he do it?

TLDR; by effectively utilizing the same content across multiple regions.

How’d he do that? Watch the video.

​

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

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