🔍 Disinformation and Brand Safety in the SERPs

Dec 20, 2019

Good morning search marketers, should we be concerned about brand safety in search?

Brands often have extensive brand safety protocols for display and video campaigns, but (depending on the vertical) search is often overlooked. In the age of fake news, deceptive content and disinformation, brands may want to pay closer attention to their search surroundings.

On Thursday, Google touted its fact-checking initiative in Search saying fact-checks appear in results more than 11 times per day globally. The company also said it's working with organizations to provide more context via fact-checking markup. The example it showed featured a result labeled as "false" that, while relatively far down the page, still appeared on page one. Bing has not drawn the criticism of Google and Facebook, but a recent paper from the Stanford Cyber Policy Center found Bing returns a troubling number of results with disinformation and misinformation "at a significantly higher rate than Google does." Trust in search could become a bigger topic of conversation in 2020.

As the holidays approach, we want to thank you for reading and being a part of the Search Engine Land community. Starting with Monday's newsletter, each day, we'll be highlighting noteworthy content from 2019 around a key topic area through the holiday season. We hope you enjoy these special editions and wish you a joyous holiday and happy New Year!

Read on for Jamie Pitman's thoughts on Google's Local Guides program and more.

Cheers,
Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

Pro Tip

What went wrong with the Local Guides program?

"When Google launched Local Guides some years ago, few of us could have realized what level of impact this program would have on the local search ecosystem," explains Jamie Pitman of BrightLocal. "Getting real-life humans to contribute their opinions and time to make Google Maps more useful and accurate is a lofty and admirable goal, right?"

"Sadly, having spoken to several high-profile members of the local search community, including some Google My Business Product Experts, the current picture is far from optimistic. It seems that the professional perception of Google Local Guides is one of bad actors, gamification, abuse and misuse."

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Niche and unpopular. Here is a fun line from Google's John Mueller: "The awesome thing about the web is that there's room for all kinds of unpopular & niche things."

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