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🔍 Google Ads suspends ticket reseller | Why Bing Discover got dropped

Good morning search marketers, are you a rule-follower?

Yesterday, we had two reminders of what can happen if you cross Google and its guidelines. 

Bing found that out when its Discover pages were dropped out of the Google Search index earlier this month. Google won't comment, but Microsoft told us it didn't make any changes to Bing Discover "that would lead to this change." Google's webmaster guidelines specifically mention that sites should use the robots.txt file to keep search results pages from being crawled and indexed. Bing didn't comply with that, but Google apparently spotted the violation and took action anyway.. 

On the ads front, policy violations caught up with secondary event ticket seller Viagogo, which has faced legal trouble for misleading consumers with false claims about ticket scarcity and crazy-high fees. Industry groups have been calling on Google to stop profiting from Viagogo ads, and on Wednesday, the search giant confirmed it was suspending Viagogo's Google Ads account. 

Event ticket resellers are among the sectors Google is focused on policing for policy violations — along with industries such as third-party tech services, for-profit bail bonds services and others. In 2018, Google instituted a certification process for ticket resellers to be able to advertise with Google. Resellers must provide proper disclosure of pricing and fee structures on their websites to be eligible to advertise.

Read on for a Pro Tip on using observation audiences in your PPC campaigns and much more. 

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

 
 
 
Pro Tip
 

Here's why observation audiences are so useful

"Pay attention to what YouTube videos and targeting types are driving the highest numbers of view through, click through and earned likes and page visits," encourages Joe Martinez of Clix Marketing during SMX Advanced. 

Michelle Morgan of Clix continues with a recap of his session. "These earned actions mean that after someone interacts with your video ad, they can like other videos, watch other videos, share other videos, add your videos to a playlist or subscribe to your channel. All these additional actions are always free, and you can create audiences in Google Ads Audience Manager to use as next-step remarketing campaigns to lead users to eventual conversions."

"Advertisers should also create audiences from their video ads and add them to all of the search campaigns as observation audiences. We can then see a portion of the impact our TrueView for Shopping campaigns have had on search. People may not be ready to buy products from your YouTube campaigns immediately. But if the ads are engaging and targeting the right audience, we can get some information on if any of the users came back to search for your products on Google.com after seeing your video ads."

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B2B Site Search Best Practices: Giving Customers What They Need, When They Want It

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Are visitors looking for a needle in a haystack when they come to your website? If prospects and customers can't find what they are looking for quickly and easily, they will stop looking and leave. Join us to learn how how to plan and execute a large search-enabled site and why machine learning, AI and a server-less environment are key to delivering quality content for every search use case, every time.

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Search Shorts
 

More Google ranking tremors...

Google algorithm tremors. The unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm tremors are still shaking up and, no, Google has not confirmed or denied anything on this update for us yet.

Google Discover not a quality judgement. Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that you shouldn't read too much into whether the discover report shows or doesn't show in your Search Console. It's not a quality judgement — it's just that Google won't show the report unless it has sufficient data for your site in the Discover feed

SEO Meta Dash Game. Have you seen this fun SEO meta dash game?  It even has characters from the SEO industry.

Out of context. John Mueller from Google said about two-thirds of what he says is taken out of context, maybe including this search short?

 
What we're reading
 

We've curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader

Google Archive of Political Ads Is Fraught With Missing Content, Delays – Wall Street Journal

Google 'Backing Out' of China Partnerships, Senator Warner Says – Bloomberg

Google Fixes Recipe Rich Results Bug – Search Engine Roundtable

Google Glass May Have an Afterlife as a Device to Teach Autistic Children – New York Times

I help MarketWatch understand why unethical reputation management is toxic – Andy Beal

Local SEOs Say Try Again, Google My Business Suspension Issues Not Fixed – Search Engine Roundtable

PPC & KPI Monitoring: How to Diagnose Changes to Your Impression and Search Volume – Adalysis

Real-time bikeshare information in Google Maps rolls out to 24 cities – Google Blog

 
 
 
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SMX East: Bigger & Better Than Ever!

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