Latest News from the World of Digital Marketing – July 2024 Part 2
Negative SEO: should you be worried?
Gary Illyes from Google answered a question about negative SEO and provides useful information on the technical details of how Google prevents low-quality spammy links from affecting normal websites.
The answer about negative SEO was given in an interview in May and has gone unnoticed until now.
Negative SEO
Negative SEO is the practice of sabotaging a competitor with a barrage of low-quality links. The idea is that Google assumes the competitor is spamming and removes it from the search engine results pages (SERPs).
The practice of negative SEO originated in the online gambling space, where the rewards for top rankings are high and competition is fierce. I first heard about it in the mid-2000s (probably before 2010) when someone involved in the gaming industry told me about it.
Virtually all websites that rank for meaningful search queries attract low quality links and there is nothing unusual about it, it has always been that way. The concept of negative SEO became more prominent after the Penguin link spam update made site owners more aware of the status of their inbound links.
Does negative SEO cause harm?
The person interviewing Gary Illyes was answering questions from the audience.
She asked:
“Does negative SEO through spammy link building, a competitor throwing tens of thousands of links at another competitor, does that sort of thing still hurt people or has Google dropped it?
Gary Illyes of Google answered the question by first asking the interviewer if she remembered the Penguin update, to which she replied yes.
She then explained her experience reviewing examples of negative SEO that had been sent to her by site owners and SEOs. She said that out of hundreds of cases she reviewed, there was only one case that might actually have been negative SEO, but that the web spam team was not 100% sure.
Gary explained:
“When we launched Penguin, there were tons and tons of complaints about negative SEO, specifically link-based negative SEO and then I very unwisely asked for examples like show me examples, show me how it works and show me. it worked.
And then I got hundreds, literally hundreds of examples of supposed negative SEO and all of them were not negative SEO. It was always something so far removed from negative SEO that I didn’t even bother to look any further, except for one that I sent to the web spam team for verification that we haven’t decided on yet, but it might have been negative SEO.
By this, I mean that the fear of negative SEO is far greater or much greater than necessary, we disable an incredible amount of links…”
The above is Gary’s experience with negative SEO. He goes on to explain the exact reason why “negative SEO links” have no effect.
Links from irrelevant topics are not counted.
About 30 minutes into the interview, Gary confirmed something interesting about how links were evaluated that is important to understand. Google, for a long time, has looked at the context of the linking site to match the site being linked to, and if they don’t match, then Google would not pass the PageRank signal.
Gary continued his response:
“If you see links from completely irrelevant sites, whether they’re p-n sites or pure spam sites or whatever, you can safely assume that we disable links from those sites because, one of the things is that we try to match links from those sites. topic of the landing page plus who’s linking, and if they don’t match, why the heck would we use those links?
For example, if someone has a link to their flower page from a Canadian casino that sells Viagra without a prescription, why would we trust that link?
I would say I wouldn’t worry about it. For example, find something else to worry about.”
Google matches topics from page to page
There was a time, in the early days of SEO, when thousands of links from mismatched topics could drive a site to the top of Google’s search results. Some link builders used to offer “free” traffic counter widgets to universities that, when placed in the footer, contained a link to their clients’ sites and used to work. But Google hardened those types of links.
What Gary said about links having to be relevant matches what link builders have known for at least twenty years. The concept that Google didn’t count off-topic links was understood back in the day when people were doing reciprocal links.
While I can’t remember everything that every Google employee has said about negative SEO, this seems to be one of the rare occasions when a Google employee offered a detailed reason why negative SEO doesn’t work.
Threads is celebrating its anniversary, and this is how it is doing
“Threads now has over 175 million active users per month – what a year!” said Mark Zuckerberg, head of Meta, on Wednesday, in an acknowledgment to Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram and Threads, and his teams.
In July 2023, as many users and advertisers were abandoning Twitter bought and transformed into X by mogul Elon Musk, Threads got off to a dazzling start.
The app was downloaded more than 100 million times in a few days, thanks in part to an ultra-simple Instagram sign-up. But user activity quickly dwindled.
“The 175 million is a high number. But that doesn’t necessarily reflect how many people use the service daily or how much time they spend on it,” acknowledges Jasmine Enberg, an analyst at consultancy Emarketer.
In an interview with digital newsletter Platformer, Adam Mosseri said he was “proud” that all meaningful audience metrics, such as time spent on the social network each day, were “steadily progressing.”
However, he reiterated his ambition to “build the best platform for sharing ideas online.”
“This means becoming bigger than X (formerly Twitter). It will take time, but I will consider myself a failure if we don’t succeed,” he said.
The end of Google Podcasts
Google Podcasts is shutting down in 2024. Users can easily transfer their podcast subscriptions to YouTube Music or export them for use in another podcast app.
Note:
- Only users with subscriptions in Google Podcasts can transfer or export them.
- Child accounts cannot transfer to YouTube Music.
- Transfer is only supported in countries where YouTube Music is available. In South Korea, YouTube Music is only available to Premium subscribers.
Your Google Podcasts data will be available in Takeout for a year, after which it will be deleted. You can permanently delete your data earlier in MyActivity. Ensure YouTube Music is installed and updated before transferring your subscriptions.
All users can transfer their subscriptions to YouTube Music or export them before Google Podcasts ends on August 30, 2024.
To transfer:
- In the Google Podcasts app, click Export subscriptions.
- Tap Export to YouTube Music.
- In YouTube Music, tap Transfer and follow the prompts.
To export:
- Download your subscriptions as an OPML file.
- Use Google Takeout to download your data.
Migrating or exporting ensures you don’t miss episodes, though additional info like listening progress won’t transfer. Listening to migrated podcasts in YouTube Music will make your IP address visible to the podcast host.
Artificial intelligence
Europe does not want to be left behind, and Moshi IA is born
The world of generative artificial intelligence is getting more and more interesting. Two weeks ago, Runway unveiled a video generation model called Gen-3 Alpha that was positioned as a direct competitor to OpenAI’s Sora. The company did not specify a release date, but said Gen-3 Alpha would be available “in the next few days.” Time has passed and this promising tool is finally available globally. It should be noted, however, that a paid subscription will be required to use it.
Runway says Gen-3 Alpha is the first in a new series of models trained on a multi-modal infrastructure. It boasts many improvements over its predecessors (Gen-1 and Gen-2) launched in 2023. A leap has been made in image quality, consistency and motion.
To help create professional content, Runway allows this model to be used with advanced Motion Brush, Advanced Camera Controls and Director Mode tools. “Gen-3 allows characters to be more consistent and stylistically controlled,” says the company on its official website. In addition, it has partnered with several entertainment and media companies to create customized versions of the video generation model.
Runway’s platform allows its previous model, Gen-2, to be used for free. For some users this may be a good start, although they will also encounter limitations, such as short clips and low quality. Runway definitely wants to gain subscribers with its products.
Romuald Fons, CEO & Founder of BIGSEO, is the protagonist of this great APD (Asociación para el Progreso de la Dirección) cover story.
For this reason, Romu has given a pretty cool interview where he has left a few tips and ideas about marketing strategies, how to get more customers in RRSS, the importance of SEO for SMEs and the future of SEO and search engine marketing in the era of AI.
If you want to read the interview, click on the image or on the button below.
BIGSEO
Romuald Fons, CEO & Founder of BIGSEO, bets on organic traffic
Romuald Fons, CEO & Founder of BIGSEO, is the protagonist of this great Association for the Advancement of Management.
For this reason, Romu has given a pretty cool interview where he has left a few tips and ideas about marketing strategies, how to get more customers in RRSS, the importance of SEO for SMEs and the future of SEO and search engine marketing in the era of AI.
If you want to read the interview, click on the image or on the button below.
In short
Latest Tech and Digital Marketing Updates
📌Google wants to win over iPhone users. Currently, Google is the search engine for Safari, but threatened by an antitrust lawsuit, Google is trying to get users to download its app so as not to rely on Safari and decrease payments to Apple.
📌Pay for your Amazon.es orders with Bizum. Amazon Spain customers can now use the Bizum payment option both on the web and on the mobile app, so you can choose the option you like the most (and thus reduce the cart abandonment rate).
📌X continues to reinvent itself. In the year that most changes are taking place in the previous Twitter, they are now working on improving Grok, the AI chatbot of the app for Premium subscribers: profile analysis, context on trends, new menu…
📌AI will edit and analyze photos in WhatsApp. You will be able to ask anything about the image, analyze elements of it, edit and improve them… Although you can’t use it yet, but there is little left. We warn you.
📌Dia strategic alliance 🤝 Just Eat. 66% of Just Eat users order regularly in supermarkets. So what has Dia done? Strengthen its service to almost 800 stores. Make it easier for customers to use more shopping channels to generate more.
📌And we continue with alliances…. In this case, Burger King and Dabiz Muñoz (named best chef in the world for the 3rd time) join forces to create the King Dabiz, a new burger available until September. Innovation and creativity.
📌Google adds 8 new languages to search results. An opportunity to increase traffic globally thanks to the “Translated Results” feature, where website titles and descriptions are automatically translated.
📌 AI novelties on Samsung devices to facilitate tasks: dialog transcription, language detection and translation in PDF files, and Circle to Search function to translate texts and Sketch to Image function to expand drawings to full images.
📌About Estrella Galicia and the Jenner sisters. There has been a new episode. Well, and last. Estrella Galicia has had to delete the video of the sisters drinking their beers for breaching road safety regulations and for surreptitious publicity…
📌The innovative strategy of El Corte Inglés. It launched a campaign that only showed ads when it wasn’t raining, using weather data to target advertising. This strategy achieved more than 10 million impressions and increased the click-through rate by 20%. Just in case you thought it was all made up….
📌 This new WhatsApp feature is top. For when you can’t listen to audios or you’re simply too lazy to listen to your “annoying” friend, they’re going to add automatic transcription of voice messages, so you can read them at your own pace.
