- Apple and Google are under scrutiny from the NY Times
- Here is a very cool list of SEO add ons for Google Sheets
- Automatic video creation from a webpage
- A Reddit user is creating post automatically with Open AI GPT3
- Google came out with a video, explaining how the search engine works
- Citizen Browser is an interesting initiative to monitor fake news and social media
- Another initiative is the study about the impact of fake news and bots in the upcoming US Presidential Elections
- Microsoft Clarity is a new web analytics free tool
- Alphabet Inc.; quarterly report shows a 14% increase year to year.
- Google Passage Indexing might be leveraging BERT, a Machine Learning algorithm.
- DataVocabulary vs Schema.org
- Google Quality Raters Guidelines gets an update.
Apple and Google are under scrutiny from the NY Times
On the New York Times: Apple, Google, and a Deal That Controls the Internet.
In this post, they are trying to make a case about a photo of Tim Cook (Apple CEO) and Sundar Pichai (CEO of Alphabet) having dinner together. They also show a picture of Steve Jobs with Larry Page.
It’s a small circle. These people hang out together; they know each other; they discuss things and exchange ideas. They are part of a small club of masters of the world who make deals. That’s how it works. Thank you, The New York Times, for telling the world something that seems very obvious to me. It is a small world at this top of the pyramid of Tech. They do have a lot in common even if they are competitors within the antitrust complaint; it’s easy to bring back all those tiny elements and assume that something is going on.
If there is a conspiracy theory for you here, it is.
Here is a very cool list of SEO add ons for Google Sheets
On Search Engine Journal: 10 Google Sheets Add-Ons That Make SEO Work Easier.
Google Sheets is a pretty good tool. I’m not a big fan of Excel and spreadsheets in general, but it is a must for SEO. I’m not a big fan because I had to use it so much back in the days when we didn’t have any other options, but now we do. However, still very good, so thank you who wrote this, Mindy Weinstein, for all these add-ons like search analytics, Supermetrics, RankTank, Moz API, Majestic, SEO monitor, Remove duplicates, Power tools, Advanced find and replace.
There you go. It’s a very cool list. Of course, you have “SEO tools for excel” that still exist. That was the first SEO plugin we had for spreadsheets.
Automatic video creation from a webpage
On research.google: Automatic Video Creation From a Web Page
The tool is called URL2video. It is free, and now we have no excuses not to create multimedia content as I advise in my Topical Mesh strategy. You have to create text, video, audio, and images; this is the way to go. Multimedia is the new SEO. Search is multimedia, multi-platform, multi-devices. If you still do only text and focus on Google the computer version, you are doing SEO like it’s 2010.
A Reddit user is creating post automatically with Open AI GPT3
On Reddit: This user is posting with GPT-3: /u/thegentlemetre
A very interesting Reddit user called The Gentlemeter is actually a bot. It’s based on Open AI GPT-3.
I spoke about Open AI GPT-2 and GPT-3. I still don’t know what you think about GPT-3. It’s very impressive for a text generated by a script. The text looks decent for humans to read. GPT-2 was already doing a good job, but GPT-3 is groundbreaking. I’m not sure about GPT-3, I don’t know how much is just buzzing around and how impressive it is compared to the previous version, but this is most definitely pretty awesome. Let me copy you a paragraph: “According to the third-law of third-mode dynamics for an isolated system entropy tends to increase over time if this is true empirically and it seems so then we may deduce that as time progresses and more information available on search engines like Google or Bing, knowledge must come increasingly dispersed and less concentrated among individual humans.” Wow this boat writes better text than humans actually.
How does Google, the search engine works?
Here is an official video by Google: Trillions of Questions, No Easy Answers: A (home) movie about how Google Search works.
This video is most definitely general-public oriented. If you’re an advanced user, you will not learn anything, but it’s interesting to see how they frame the story around it.
If you know everything about search, look at how they tell the story to convince the world that they are not the evil company that some people are attempting to portray right now.
Citizen Browser to monitor fake news and social media
On themarkup.org: The Citizen Browser Project—Auditing the Algorithms of Disinformation
This is what’s happening. Right now, 1200 people are validating (or not) what’s going on around social media, what content on the platforms they choose to amplify.
This is good; I like this. People used to take control in their own hands over what the algorithms are doing but always remember that social media is just a tool; it’s exposing us; it’s accelerating the pace and amplifying the effects of human behaviors. Check out algorithms, but if you want to change humans and how humans behave and how humans hurt each other, good luck.
The impact of fake news and bots in the upcoming US Presidential Elections
On firstmonday.org: Characterizing social media manipulation in the 2020 US Presidential Election. Here’s a study that claims to use a scientific method to analyze what’s going on, especially right now, with the US’s election for the new president. The conclusions are interesting, saying that the bot plays a big part in fake news workflow. We need more than one report or study. There was a problem in 2016. Did they solve it for 2020?
We can’t answer that question. It’s too early. We need a little bit of stepping back and most definitely a better understanding of those platforms from the officials, the people who regulate the congress. They need to dig deeper, they need to educate themselves more because they are staying on a surface level, which is okay, but if you’ve been doing this job for as long as I’ve been and you realize that what people are saying in front of congress and what congressmen and women are doing to expose those platforms might be more efficient if taken a little bit differently in my opinion.
Microsoft Clarity – the new web analytics free tool
See what your users want – with Clarity.
Well, in 2020, Microsoft is coming out with an analytics tool. Can you believe it they didn’t have one before? Personally, for my websites, I don’t use Google Analytics; I prefer Yandex Metrica. I’d rather give my data to the Russians than Google, and I would go Microsoft if I had to choose between Microsoft and Google.
Alphabet Inc.; quarterly report shows a 14% increase year to year.
Alphabet Announces Third Quarter 2020 Results.
I always look at those quality results. Google is up 14% year on year, so despite the situation, they are still growing. Growth might be slowing down a little bit, but still. The total revenues of 46.2 billion in the third quarter reflect broad-based growth led by an increase in advertisers spent in search and Youtube and continued strength in Google Cloud and Play.
Here you go. We’ve remained focused on making the right investments to support long-term sustainable value. This last quote is questionable because if your company needs to report quarterly, you make decisions based on this. This is the problem; this is why I always say that once a company goes public, they can’t claim to have a long-term vision. Google does because they have so much cash to play with and founders are nerds who want to play Nerdy God, but they also took many decisions that prove that they cut off the long-term vision. For example, when they got rid of the 20% of the time that employees could spend on a personal project, this is a short-term decision, not a long term.
Google Passage Indexing might be leveraging BERT, a Machine Learning algorithm
On Search Engine Land: Could Google passage indexing be leveraging BERT?
A friend of mine, Dawn Anderson, wrote an in-depth piece about this passage indexing that I reported a couple of weeks ago and about BERT, one of those machine learning algorithms from Google. If you apply the Topical Mesh, my strategy is made for this if you apply Semantic SEO. I anticipated, and it’s comforting my point of view.
DataVocabulary vs Schema.org
On the official Google blog, Webmaster Central Blog: Sunsetting support for data-vocabulary
You have to use schema.org. Datavocabulary.org is an old attempt at this whole structured data thing. It is another trend; it’s basically helping you do a better job at having your content understood by a bot that doesn’t know what it reads. Google is not smart, and you have to enable it to know what you want to say.
Google Quality Raters Guidelines gets an update.
Finally on thesempost.com: New Google Quality Rater Guidelines, Update Adds Emphasis on Needs Met
Here you go, another concept after E-A-T. This one is the new upcoming SEO trend you need to focus on. I don’t want to preach for my own church but this is just a step forward for quality raters to evaluate if content matches user intent. My strategy is right on point with this. I focus on putting the right content at the right time at the right place in front of the right person. SEO doesn’t have to be challenging; you just have to be smart about it.
That’s all for this week! Thanks for your time, have a great day.
Listen to the podcast
Watch the video
Latest posts
