All Script And Tols For Free: 🔍 Google's annual spam takedown report

Jun 11, 2020

Good morning Search Marketer, the spam battle continues.

Google discovers more than 25 billion spammy pages a day, according to its annual webspam report released Tuesday. The company also says it generated over 90 million messages to site owners about issues that may affect their site's appearance in search results as well as potential improvements. The reports highlight Googles' challenge of having to constantly try to stay ahead of spammers. Left unchecked, spam hurts the entire search ecosystem, including searchers and legitimate sites that appear in the results.

While some brands have remained silent about the Black Lives Matter movement, that's an exception among the highest profile B2C brands. One of the challenges for brands in taking social or political stances is convincing audiences that their positions are authentic or sincere. A plurality of consumers in a Morning Consult survey (42%) said companies "try too hard to make it seem like they care about things besides their own bottom line."

Another 22% said they "didn't know" and 36% were supportive of brand activism. Greg Sterling says, "While pressure on brands to take political positions has been growing for some time, this seems like a turning point or watershed moment of sorts." Marketers need to be prepared to respond. Consumers, particularly Millennials, are looking for brands to take a stand and do so authentically.

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Keep reading for a Pro Tip from Fred Vallaeys on learnings from COVID-19 and more.

Ginny Marvin,
Editor-in-Chief

Pro Tip

Don't pause campaigns, reduce budgets to keep learning

"We know that the machine learning models for automated bidding are constantly learning, even before campaigns are set on automated bidding," explains Fred Vallaeys of Optmyzr. "All the system needs to learn is for conversion tracking to be enabled. From that point forward, every query's data becomes part of the model that calculates the probability of a future query to convert. Because many advertisers temporarily halted online ads, we now have some new insights into what happens to automated bidding algorithms when you starve them of recent data. Campaigns that were paused during the pandemic seemed to stop learning and when re-enabled were confused about the new state of the world and needed significant time (~2 weeks) to again understand how to help set the right bids to help advertisers reach their goals."

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Search Shorts

Brand queries, indexing issues and garage door local spam

Google update brewing? There are some signs of an unconfirmed Google search algorithm update. It is early and if anything pans out, we will keep you posted.

Document-Policy: force-load-at-top. If you do not want to let Google scroll down your page for the highlight featured snippet, then you can use this document policy to prevent it.

Garage door map spam. Danny Sullivan of Google said it is investigating reports of an increase in garage door Google My Business local spam.

No indexing issues. John Mueller of Google said Google is not currently having indexing issues.

Brand queries. Here is how Gary Illyes of Google responded to a question around if brand queries have influence in search. He said, "this is an insanely hard question for Twitter. If you search for [tinfoil hat Amazon], the intent is clear for you, but if it's a new site, for algorithms ain't. Rankbrain, for example, uses historical data to build that confidence, but we have tons of signals that can help."

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