Search Engine Roundtable Podcast

What a week, we had another big unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update. Google Ads had a pretty massive bug with campaign disapprovals and suspensions. Google published a new SEO link best practices. Google has implied its guidelines on policy circumvention for web spam. Google organized its sitemaps documentation. Bug publishers are super concerned with the new AI-powered search features from Bing and Google. Did you know Microsoft Bing's codename is Sydney? Microsoft Bing’s terms of service for this new AI are concerning some as well. An SEO poll says that most people don’t think Microsoft will gain too much market share. Microsoft posted that 71% thumbs upped its new AI results, but there is work to be done, Microsoft said. Google Ads released version 13 of its API. Google Ads added a quick campaign setting button, which the PPC industry love. Google My Business insights API is going away fully this coming Monday. Google said 301 redirects 1 to 1 close matches even if they are in different languages. Google said using a CDN as a bot interstitial is not a great idea. Google also wants CDNs to stop using 404s and 403s to reduce Googlebot crawl rates. Google is testing a new user interface to show the search menu bar in mobile search. And this SEO on Reddit has his company fly him around to post photos locally to social media; he is a legend, according to some. And if you want to help sponsor those vlogs, go to patreon.com/barryschwartz. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

SPONSOR: Wix - did you know you know Wix is now integrated with Google Search Console? You can monitor organic performance with GSC data in Wix Analytics and learn more at the Wix's SEO dashboard makes GSC data available at a glance post.

In part one, we go through Jeff Ferguson's long history in search marketing. In part two, we pick up with him starting his own agency. Then in part three, we talk about the state of SEO studies, and we end in part four with the zero-click study and how the future of SEO looks.

We spent some time pointing out the issues with the study, but at the same time, the intentions of the study were excellent. A lot of this I have written before, but he goes deeper into the issues he had with that study. Most of it was that people just took the headline as the default when it really is more nuanced than just that.

My issue was that Google didn’t refute the data in a strong way; it was just not enough.

To end, we spoke about the need for SEO in the long term. He said SEO would keep adapting, and the evolution would change a lot, like how TV changed. He said there wouldn’t be digital marketing in the future; instead, there would be marketing with digital aspects of it, but not digital marketing alone. He described how current job types would adapt and do SEO in the future, including PR departments.

In short, be ready to adapt to SEO - which is what the best SEOs have been doing since day one.

You can learn more about Jeff Ferguson at Amplitude Digital and follow him on Twitter @CountXero.

What an insane week between the AI announcements, algorithm updates, content, and so much more. I start off talking about Google's Bard announcement and a bit about the Paris announcement two days later. But Microsoft Bing stole the show with their demo of how Bing incorporates ChatGPT into Bing Search - it’s impressive. In fact, Yusuf Mehdi from Microsoft said Bing saw the largest relevancy boost in two decades, and that aligned with a Bing algorithm update story we wrote on January 18th. Bing even updated its webmaster guidelines to fit the new version of Bing Search. We also saw how the search ads get integrated. It is shocking, maybe, how searchers don’t get how important this new AI-powered search will be. Google also had not just one but two unconfirmed Google search ranking updates, one on the 4th and one on the 8th/9th. Google’s Danny Sullivan reiterated more about how AI content is fine for search if it is helpful and then gave us a lot more advice. Google said JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa are all fine for structured data. Google confirmed the GoogleProducer and GoogleProber user agents. Google is reprocessing a bunch of local reviews that were legit but were removed by accident. Google Business Profiles is removing emojis and characters from business names. Google Merchant Center has a snapshot view in search. Google is testing gray snippet boxes in search. Google Podcasts carousel is going away in search. Microsoft Bing is tucking away its logo on the mobile search results page. And there was a poll asking SEOs how important the Yandex leak is for SEO. And if you want to help sponsor those vlogs, go to patreon.com/barryschwartz. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Sponsored by Rank Ranger, the all-in-one- professional SEO software. Rank Ranger is a comprehensive SEO platform that allows you to grow your business with data and analytics. It offers valuable insights through advanced rank tracking, including above-the-fold tracking, Organic Share of Voice reporting, actionable SERP feature data, and SERP analysis tools.

Show Notes:

In part one, we go through Jeff Ferguson's long history in search marketing. In part two, we pick up with him starting his own agency. Then in part three we talk about the state of SEO studies.

In short, he goes off on his rant on SEO studies done on ranking factors and other areas. In short, he was not a fan of those studies and he wrote a lot about how they were done wrong. He wasn’t saying the intent was wrong, the companies that made these studies really wanted to help. But doing ranking factor studies are just too hard and really hard to prove.

Of course, it ruffled a lot of feathers in the SEO community. But he goes through more on why he did what he did and what he wanted to get out of it.

You can learn more about Jeff Ferguson at Amplitude Digital and follow him on Twitter @CountXero.

In this week's recap, I covered the unconfirmed Google update that seemed to impact product review sites but maybe more on January 26th. Yandex had a huge leak, and SEOs and marketers dug through the search engine’s source code. Google’s answer to ChatGPT might be Apprentice Bard using LAMDA Sundar Pichai of Google basically confirmed this. Google’s John Mueller blasted some links sellers. Google Search Console updated the video indexing report. Google said to try to nofollow site credit links in your footer. Google said spammy links from porn sites should not be a priority. Google said if you redesign your site, the rankings make go “nuts.” Google Search Console verification does not impact your rankings. Google said firewalls and CDNs are the biggest reason for why your site is blocking crawling. Google updated its canonicalization docs in a big way. Google said don’t use relative paths in your canonicals. I posted the big Google webmaster report for Friday. Microsoft Bing said the lastmod field in your sitemap file is critical. The new BingBot might go 100% today. Google Ads announcements and news seemed to have slowed since late last year. Google reported earnings that showed their ad revenue was down 3.6% year over year. Yahoo Search is really going to be making a comeback, I have more evidence. And if you want to help sponsor those vlogs, go to patreon.com/barryschwartz. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

In part one, we go through Jeff Ferguson's long history in search marketing. Here, in part two, we pick up with him starting his own agency. Jeff explained how he was working at this arbitrage company, and they were not profitable for a decade, and then overnight, he helped them become profitable, and they were making a ton of money. But they didn’t do it right, and eventually, they took a major hit. So he was offered a package to leave but picked up doing consulting during that time. He ran his agency for ten years before merging with Amplitude Digital.

He loves agency life and doing his own thing. He is at a point in life where doing his own thing and owning his agency is where he wants to be. He does write a lot of content; he shares a lot of advice on Twitter and Facebook.

You can learn more about Jeff Ferguson at Amplitude Digital and follow him on Twitter @CountXero.

As I mentioned briefly last week, Google announced mass layoffs last week, and I discuss what I know so far about it. There are also reports that Google is pushing advertisers to use third-party resellers and not their internal staff. The DOJ sued Google again to break up its ad business. Microsoft announced its earnings, showing how Bing’s search ad growth continues to slow. Bing also may have had a search ranking algorithm update. Google Search Console content ideas beta feature may go away in March. Google Search Console Insights has an achievements section. Google confirmed a bug with some preferred languages in Google Search, and they blame mobile-first indexing. Google Ads had an outage on Monday morning that caused huge headaches. Google has no preferences between connected structured data and not connected structured data. Google will parse the image elements even when those elements are enclosed within other elements. Google published a new case study after 18 months, this one from Vimeo on video SEO. Google said generating tons of fake URLs on a site won’t cause SEO issues. Google Business Profiles now supports cars for sale inventory for US dealerships. Bing is testing infinite scroll. Google is testing two justifications in the local results. Google is also testing a new trusted store badge. Bing has a new menu for image search that uses a drop-down and adds explore and collect. Account-level negative keywords are now available on Google Ads. Google will sunset Google Optimize on September 30th. And it seems like Yahoo Search may be making a comeback to Search - that would be exciting. And if you want to help sponsor those vlogs, go to patreon.com/barryschwartz. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

SPONSOR: This week's video recap is sponsored by Duda, the Professional Website Builder You Can Call Your Own.

Jeff Ferguson is the CEO of Amplitude Digital, and he has been in the search space for a really long time. He is also an Adjunct Professor at UCLA. In part one, we went through his long career in this space. He spoke about how he worked at a start-up that basically scrapped content on the web, and the company exploded during that dot com explosion. It was talking about the old SEO days, of course.

He actually even worked at Napster - now that is a classic internet story. He explained that he had to make the private catalog public for search engines to crawl, index and rank, and it worked like a charm, he said. He was Hilton’s first digital advertising person and his first time working at a massive company. He was there during the Paris Hilton tape was out on the internet, and people did not understand that once it was on the internet, it was forever out there. And he had to turn off some ads because Hilton was spiking and driving terrible clicks.

We then spoke a bit more about his work history in part one of this vlog.

You can learn more about Jeff Ferguson at Amplitude Digital and follow him on Twitter @CountXero.

This week we had two unconfirmed updates from Google rollout after the helpful content, and link spam update finished. Google said quality updates could impact crawling and indexing. Google Search Console updated the performance report for product tracking. Google also updated the video indexing report for better error reporting. Google will ignore robots.txt rules if they are served with a 4xx status code. Google said publishing frequency doesn’t make something spam. Google’s John Mueller spoke more about the head section. Google will not make changes to the quote for request indexing in Search Console. Google Ads is rolling out Performance Max experiments. Google Business Profiles is testing adding more details to attributes in local. Google Business Profiles has an image server bug. Google Search is testing moving the order online button to the top. Google has a check local wait times button. Google discontinued Google Posts insights. Google Maps has new posting restrictions for user-generated content. Microsoft Bing is testing topics in the search bar. Google Search dropped podcast snippets in list view. Google Search is testing perspectives and opinions. Plus, Google announced massive layoffs as I was recording - 6% of their workforce. And if you want to help sponsor those vlogs, go to patreon.com/barryschwartz. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

SPONSOR: Wix - I just love what they are doing with SEO, from the Wix SEO Content Hub to the SERPsUp podcast, let alone all the new SEO features they added to the Wix platform.

Search Topics of Discussion:

Mark Saltarelli and I spoke about his history and about B2B digital marketing in part one; it was super interesting, so make sure to listen to that. In part two, we talk about customer misses, structuring campaigns, and data.

We dove into some examples of what a typical B2B customer misses with this, and he said many companies forget to exclude their own customers in these efforts. Why was the ad spent on existing customers when they are already customers? They also don’t do a great job of segmenting their lead databases, and they don’t target to speak to segments of those leads with special messaging. He also spoke about close-lost opportunities; if you make advances to your product, reconnect with those closed opportunities because they may be happy with your product today.

We then spoke about structuring your campaigns around B2B. Make sure to categorize your campaigns not just by topic but also think about segmenting the campaign by the level of intent. He talks through some technical actions you can take to actually accomplish this. Also, look at verticals that you can segment to and separate out broad match from your other match types so you can control spending better.

Mark explained he doesn’t have the data he wants and needs; about 40% of that data is gone, and it will probably worsen. But he said if you can capture it in your CRM, then you can pick up patterns on keywords that map better than others. So that is one other reason to capture it all in your CRM software so that you can see the trends. It is pretty insane what you can do to dive in within each lead to see what the conversation was with the sales representative.

Finally, he said he is just as much or a bit more in the weeds when it comes to the campaigns he worked with. But now he has more access to the data, in real-time, now that he works in-house. He can speak to the right people in almost real-time to surface concerns he has about the health of the funnel and to really drive better marketing outcomes. When he was in an agency, he had less control over all of this. It is less about providing recommendations as an agency would do and more about acting on the data now that he is insane.

Follow Mark on Twitter @marketingbymark or on LinkedIn by finding Mark T Saltarelli.