SEO
Google has started rolling out a link spam update
Gray hair. Something you get as you age, or if you work as an SEO in the summer of 2021. After shaking the SEO world with their June and July core updates, Google is gearing up to cause another earthquake in your rankings, this time with their newly announced “link spam” update.
Nullify, not penalize: According to Google’s official announcement, this update “is even more effective at identifying and nullifying link spam more broadly, across multiple languages.”
Instead of penalizing, nullifying simply ignores the offending links. As a result, your search rankings drop because links that previously helped you rank are now worthless.
Help us or face the consequences: According to the announcement, if you have affiliate links, sponsored posts, or guest posts on your website, you should properly qualify them by:
- Adding rel=”sponsored” to affiliate and sponsored post links
- There weren’t any specific “rel” recommendations for guest post links, but Google did link to a page where the majority of the suggestions are about adding qualifiers like rel=”nofollow.”
Failing to do so may result in a manual or algorithmic action being taken, according to Google. That’s a polite way of saying: “Don’t say we didn’t warn you.”
CONTENT MARKETING
Good news if you make audio content: Spotify is adding a Facebook-like news feed
Notifications. Admit it, you’ve clicked on at least one of them today. Whether on Facebook, Twitter, or your favorite email app.
Spotify knows this, and has announced the addition of a bell icon to their homepage. After you click on the icon, you’ll see a “What’s new” feed, displaying the most recent releases from artists, podcasts and other creators you follow.
And, if there is a new release, a blue dot will appear next to the bell icon, similar to how a red dot appears next to the notification icons on Facebook and Instagram. We all know how addicting these things can be.
Why you should care: Organic discovery. If you create audio content, you want more listeners. With this update, Spotify hopes it will hook listeners to constantly check “what’s new” from their favorite audio creator.
Availability: According to the announcement, this feed will be “rolling out to all users globally on iOS and Android over the coming weeks.”
SPONSORED BY MAXIMUS
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What do you get with Maximus Managed Services?
- A powerhouse team to create, build, and launch winning native campaigns, including in-house designers, copywriters, and, of course, expert media buyers who will treat your budget like it’s their own.
- Proven track record with over $2.55mm in ad spend completely focused on reaching desired CPA goals and ROAS.
- Premium site targeting including: MSN, NBC, and CNN (to name just a few). Plus, key integrations and instant access to all the top native networks.
- Competitive advantage with Maximus software for campaign management, real-time data, site-level bidding, and other sophisticated optimization features focused completely on performance.
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FACEBOOK ADS
Cold ad accounts, ice-cold showers
Ice-cold water flowing over your skin.
That’s how it feels when you open the Facebook Ads Manager to check your stats and you see that red label message telling you that your advertising access was restricted.
If you are about to launch campaigns with a new account, the first thing you can do to avoid that is warming up that account.
Essentially, sending signals to Facebook that you’re a good boy. Or a good girl. And that you’re not going to use Facebook Ads the wrong way.
You must start building your account reputation.
Advanced media buyers are well aware of this. But if you have been dealing with Facebook Ads for a short time, here’s a simple ad account warm-up checklist shared by Ads Alchemist.
It’s quite simple:
- Launch a Page Likes campaign with a $10 per day budget. Make sure that the copy and image of the ad are 100% compliant with Facebook policy. Once it gets approved and spends a few bucks, move to the next step.
- Launch a Conversions campaign with copy and creative you know it will get approved. But use the landing page you’re going to use in real campaigns. The goal here is to understand if your landing page is compliant.
If the campaign doesn’t get approved, you need to change something on the landing page.
If it gets approved, make it spend a few bucks, and go on by launching your campaigns.
You can go through the second step every time you need to test the compliance of a landing page before launching the complete campaign.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
GOOGLE: The EU is hammering Google with anti-monopoly requests. This time, they’ve given the company two months to reform flight and hotel search results.
CLUBHOUSE: Club followers are gone, and so are admins. These are some of the changes announced by Clubhouse yesterday.
PINTEREST: We marketers are addicted to metrics. Pinterest continues to fuel our addiction by introducing two new metrics for Idea Pins.
BUSINESS: We bet you’d like to know the answer to this: What is one outlier consumer behavior right now that will become normal in the next 3-5 years? Here are some interesting Twitter users’ opinions.
SEO: Doing FAQ content? Google has provided some clarification on how to structure it.
BRAIN TEASER
I do not have any special powers, but I can predict the score of any football game before it begins. How can I do this?
You can find the solution here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Instagram wants you to spend more time on … Facebook
Because, why not?
Instagram’s latest test is telling their users there’s another app they might wanna check out: Facebook. The reason? Because there are features “only available” on the platform and not on Instagram.
Like your parents being there if you’re a millennial or Gen Z, that is.
For now, only a very small group of users on Instagram see the message. Time will tell whether this will be a successful experiment or be abandoned like hundreds of experiments Instagram is doing weekly.