All Script And Tols For Free: 🔍 Automation vs. Autonomy

🔍 Automation vs. Autonomy

Mar 02, 2020

Good morning search marketers, and hello, March.

March means Google is supposed to now be treating nofollow links as "hints" for crawling and indexing.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've heard from and spoken with a number of readers and marketers at Google Partner agencies as well as with Google about the coming changes to Partner badge requirements — specifically around what the focus on optimization score and recommendations will mean for agencies (and their clients).

This change has put another spotlight on tensions around automation and agency/advertiser autonomy. Google says the aim is not to have agencies blindly accept (my words) recommendations to maintain the necessary 70%+ account optimization score. The acknowledgment that a number of the recommendations aren't going to be appropriate for clients is essentially baked into the 30% leeway.

What's clear is automation requires a healthy level of skepticism, an understanding of how the various optimizations are designed to work and savvy analytical skills to determine whether the automation is working as intended. And in the end, everything goes back to business fundamentals.

Keep reading for a Pro Tip on no-code ML for keyword research.

Ginny Marvin,
Editor-in-Chief

Pro Tip

How to use machine learning (if you can't code) for keyword research

"A few years ago I used to categorize keywords fairly manually, using some simple formulas where I could. It took ages," explains Andy Chadwick of Digital Quokka. "Since all the SEOs have been shouting about how great Python is, I am on the bandwagon. My goal is to streamline the keyword research process even further and I'm loving learning such an adaptable language. But then I came across a video about a new (free) tool. Imagine an online 'drag and drop' machine learning service; a system literally anyone can use. This is BigML."

"I am still pursuing my ultimate goal of mastering Python, but in the meantime, BigML has provided me with some very interesting insights that have already sped up my keyword categorization. So I share some ideas about leveraging (free) technologies already out there to work smarter."

Learn more »

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Search Shorts

Nofollow change and Google unconfirmed updates

Nofollow change unrelated to February updates. The unconfirmed updates we saw in February from Google are unrelated to any changes to the nofollow attribute change, said John Mueller of Google.

Scraped content. He also said you shouldn't lose sleep over people scraping content from your site.

Bing normalized URLs. Bing webmaster tools considers all variations and normalise the website url. Http, https, www., Non www, etc and all the reports are for that normalized URL, Bing said on Twitter.

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