Google Biggest News of 2020 & how to get Pandemic Backlinks
I’m proud to introduce you to my first Weekly Alternative News SEO & Digital Marketing, and this week we got the most important Google news I’ve heard in maybe the past eight years.
But first, here’s the summary:
- What is Bing bringing in its webmaster console?
- Google discovery, the ads part of Google discover, should you invest?
- The biggest Google News
- What’s up with Matt Cutts?
- Rand Fishkin is giving us a couple of tips about what we should buy as far as ads
- Google and guest blogging, paid links, where’s the deal?
- Future Page Experience Layout update
- New age cloaking, what is that?
- Google is fighting counterfeit goods, how is it doing it?
- Pandemic backlinks
Bing webmaster console – new feature
Bing is helping the webmasters to check if everything is right on the site. It’s not a very in-depth audit; it scans the site and checks out if the basics are okay.
You should use it; Bing is a search engine so you should register your website into the Bing Webmaster console.
I also use the Yandex as well, and you probably know the Google Search Console. Use all three and thanks to Bing for bringing in this new feature into the mix. Always useful and it’s free
Discovery Ads
You may have seen Google Discover popping up on the homepage of the app on your mobile, on Google.com home page, YouTube and sometimes also Gmail.
Every time there is a new way to buy ads, anywhere, I advise you to go for it right away. They are the best-undervalued attention right now.
It might not work for everyone but throw a coin in there and see if it works for you since it’s cheap right now. Soon it’s going to be blown up by all the brands, and you never know.
I’m going to try it, and you should try it too.
Let me know if you try it.
Amit Singhal leaves, Prabhakar Raghavan steps in
That’s probably the biggest Google News I have heard in the past eight years.
Amit Singhal left. It’s the guy who made Google: Search, Anti-spam, Relevancy, basically the Google as we knew it when I started in 2004.
Then machine learning, deep learning, AI whatever you want to call it.
It’s the boss at Google it’s all automated, and it lost the battle of sorting out information with nuance, with granularity.
Right now, Google is worse than it was three or four years ago.
Ben Gomez and Jeff Dean are competent; they proved that they’d done their part, but I think their vision was limited and two guys at the head of a company like Google the search engine (Alphabet is the mothership).
So two guys at the head of Google search engine, I don’t think it was working well, and they were politely asked to go somewhere else. I believe they are still staying at Google, but it’s not a promotion.
And the man, Prabhakar Raghavan, the best guy they could have picked for the job. I followed him for years, I’ve read tons of his scientific documents, I’ve seen tons of his lectures, if you are interested in how a search engine works, if you’re interested in how algorithms are helping out humans, you came across that guy.
He’s the best, he knows everything, and he’s not at a small level at Google, he’s like vice president level for the Cloud, for Gsuite, for Ads, for Speeding Search. For 30 years he was at Yahoo, IBM.
If there is one guy today who can make a better Google, overall, that’s him, and he’s going to head Search, Voice and Google Assistant + Google Ads.
He’s the king of integration. My bio reads search engine hacker, and I do read the scientific papers, I do read and understand the patterns, but I also want to know who are the men behind those algorithms. Check him out; his lectures are fascinating.
In this video, on Youtube: Day 1 Keynote: Prabhakar Raghavan (Cloud Next ’18), he’s explaining how he’s integrating G suite.
Some features are so smart like the smart reply, which saves up about 10% of our time in the inbox.
Another video that I could recommend is: How to be there for every twist and turn of the customer journey.
Consumer behaviour and algorithm design. This one is a few years old, but it will tell you everything about his vision on how a search engine works.
The most crucial video is: Five things I learned from a great man
He’s talking about Dick Karp, his teacher from Berkeley and I also love the vision that Prabhakar is bringing in because it’s productivity, it’s elegance in simplicity, everything is connected.
Those elementary principles that try to make technology coming to our lives to be useful; to make our lives more comfortable, and to integrate in a way that it might not take over.
If you want to know where Google is heading, know everything about this guy, he’s the man.
If he doesn’t end up CEO, I don’t know, but this is the right choice for Google right now to level up.
What’s up with Matt Cutts?
If you are new to SEO, you might not know who Matt Cutts is, but I learned so much from Prabhakar and also from Matt Cutts or more from what Matt Cutts was not saying. It was almost as important as what he was saying.
First, he was Google guy on webmaster world then he became Matt Cutts. He was employee number 68 at Google, so been there for a while, but I think SEOs and webmasters just killed him. He couldn’t take it anymore.
He’s a cool guy very knowledgeable, and I think he’s doing some proper working at the government level for the US digital service.
His TED talk is also fascinating, he explains what technology he’s bringing into the US government. Not an easy task but certainly very fulfilling.
Rand Fishkin & his new tool, SparkToro
SparkToro is a useful tool. The free version not so much.
It’s geared towards trying to figure out what your audience is listening to what your audience wants. A potent tool, not cheap, but I see a lot of potential in what Rand is doing with this new tool.
He is throwing out a couple of tips on Twitter about what is the undervalued attention right now.
Podcast, podcast ads, especially if you do them embedded
I agree with Rand; podcasts ads are low cost, high relevancy and the hosts are trusted sources.
Content marketing, of course; I love content marketing
It requires more creativity, has the best ROI ever, and it does take time and/or money. But, I agree with Rand, there’s nothing better right now, as far as undervalued attention: podcast ads, direct ads, influence marketing and content marketing.
Google and guest blogging , paid links, where’s the deal?
Google, John Muller, again & again, all guest blog posts are about “links should be no-followed paid or not”.
That’s a big debate that’s I wanted to throw in the news because there was a little thing on Twitter the other day about this.
It’s not illegal. From the beginning of the press and public relations, the journalists have been paid, bought out gifts, manipulated, etc.
It’s a big point; I got to do a particular corner on that because it’s out of the scope of just the news, it’s just bothering me that Google is using psychological warfare techniques to try to stop everyone from getting links.
So yeah, content marketing.
Producing great content is the way to go
But that’s also the most challenging part. Only the top 1% of the content creators pyramid can produce fantastic content that will draw attention organically.
What about the rest? Well, I don’t know, figure it out or call me but if you just follow Google guidelines I can guarantee you’re not going to go very far so please, Google, stop this nonsense, it’s not working what you’re trying to do.
Page experience
All you need to know about Google next ranking factors.
Supposedly in 2021, there’s going to be the new page experience ranking factors. Well, guess what? It’s been done before. I think it was 2010, 2012, 2013 or something like that. They already had a layout update algorithm so what you need to do is dive into SXO: SEO + UX
This is the game and remember, having a fast website, a website that’s accessible for search engine with a pleasant user experience you don’t get any extra point, you don’t get brownie points for that, this is just doing your job then you’re going to win the game with content and
links but you got an empty shell if you only have a fantastic website and crap content and no links so little by little we have to make better sites not easy but indeed necessary.
New age cloaking by SEO book
Sometimes you come into websites like Facebook, Pinterest or some any site with a massive pop up, especially on mobile where the real content is hidden. It’s cloaked, it might be hidden with a not spammy blackhat technique or technique that is used by black hats to put out different content for robots and users, but I think the trend is going overboard with all those paywalls.
Cloaking is not a crime
Check out incloakingveritas.com by my former student Patrick. If you want to apply cloaking in a white hat manner, it’s about changing the internal linking, that’s my speciality.
The Topical Mesh, Semantic SEO and how you need to reorganize the content.
Most of the time I use cloaking because for the humans you need the mega menu, you need links everywhere. And for Googlebot I want a perfectly pure, Less Is More, internal linking, so we use cloaking.
It’s totally fine with Google guidelines as long as you don’t touch one comma of the content.
Google to allow removal of counterfeit goods from search results
That’s funny. So they pulled out a form in which you can report if you the fake stuff you find online. You can tell Google to remove it because they have not been able to find it from an algorithmic point of view and I think it’s way too big for them to try to solve it on an algorithmic level.
For example, if you search for cheap Louboutin shoes on Google.com, English results, you will find some shady websites.
So you can fill in a form and help Google fight fake goods.
Pandemic backlinks
Something fun in the area of public or private blog networks is the art of putting a backlink in what’s called a spot. And for sure the art of putting a backlink in anything charity oriented, surveys or whatever it has always been something that a good link builder was looking after.
On Black Hat World the famous black hat SEO forum not so black hat anymore, there is this “Get this pandemic
backlinks guide” where the guy is showing how you can get backlinks from Canvas, Litchi, ArtisteCard, Mifare, Newsbreak, GoFundMe, etc. and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
It works of course, but now afterwards the spot is gone and you can’t have the backlink because the platform changed, or the no-follow appeared, or they did something technical that just blew up the backlink or the site closed down.
That’s the way it goes with this kind of link building, but it’s free. It just requires a little bit of creativity and like everything else, sometimes look right next to what someone is showing you in public, and you might find a way better spot.
Whenever someone is giving you a spot for a backlink, it’s already burnt, it’s not going to last.
So look just on the side or reverse or top or bottom just elsewhere.
This is just a mindset.
Thanks for your time, until next week.
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