All Script And Tols For Free: 🔍 Beware of GMB hijackings

🔍 Beware of GMB hijackings

Nov 16, 2020

Good morning Search Marketer, not to add another thing to your worry list but,

It appears hijacking of Google My Business listings is on the rise. Unethical local marketers are effectively phishing, using the "claim this business" link in the local Knowledge Panel/Profile, Greg Sterling explains.

Google is aware and advised, "If a merchant ever receives a request to manage or to transfer ownership from an unknown person, they should decline the request. The rights to own or manage a Business Profile can only be granted if the verified merchant accepts the request or the requester proves their affiliation with the business."

Still, as Greg reports, there are all kinds of odd examples of hijackings happening, including unintentionally. Businesses, especially SMBs, should be vigilant about protecting their GMB listings. Learn more about how to claim and optimize your local Knowledge Panel.

Ginny Marvin,
Editor-In-Chief

Social Short

LinkedIn ad measurement errors affect more than 418,000 advertisers

LinkedIn has acknowledged it discovered two measurement errors that led to overreporting of video views and ad impressions on sponsored content campaigns. The issues persisted for more than two years and affected more than 418,000 advertisers, the company said. LinkedIn is issuing ad credits to advertisers who were overcharged. Most were overcharged by less than $25.

Why we care. This disclosure will remind advertisers of Facebook's problems with inflating video ad views and numerous other measurement errors. LinkedIn said it is in talks with the Media Ratings Council to audit its ad measurement metrics and with Moat for viewability measurement.

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Search Shorts

SEO for government, Q&A for STEM education and Googlebot over HTTP/2

SEO for governments. Google published a new video aimed at helping governments and authority agencies to understand and do better SEO on their web sites.

STEM education-related Q&A pages. Google updated its guidelines for the Q&A page structured data to now allow for STEM education-related Q&A pages. You can read the updated guidelines over here.

Googlebot HTTP/2. As you know, we covered that Googlebot will crawl some sites over HTTP/2 this month, well, Google has now added this information to their Googlebot help documents.

AdSense Search. Google AdSense updated its workflow to allow AdSense publishers to add a Google-powered search engine to their sites.

Finish 2020 strong. Start 2021 off right.

Invest in your company and yourself: Attend Search Marketing Expo online, December 8-9, for actionable tactics and strategies that drive more traffic, conversions, and ROI.

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How Fingerhut's parent planned a successful CDP onboarding process

Sponsored by Tealium

We hear a lot about how to choose a solution for your martech stack, but less about what you do once you've made a decision. At the recent MarTech virtual event, one session took on that topic: "So, you have a new CDP… Now what?"

"We chose a vendor, everything's going to be awesome," said Ben Thompson, director of e-commerce analytics and tag management for Bluestem Brands, the parent of Fingerhut. "But it doesn't always go that smoothly, does it?"

Even after Bluestem committed to adopting Tealium's Audience Stream CDP, Thompson described a situation in which key stakeholders were anything but enthusiastic about getting the technology into place.

Read More>>