Here are some items of note from the digital marketing world we spotted during the week of October 11, 2021 …
The FTC sent messages to more than 700 businesses warning them about not disclosing paid reviews and endorsements. The FTC has long considered paid reviews and endorsements as advertising that must be disclosed. While the public notice made clear that there was no wrongdoing alleged, this does appear to be a signal that the US Government may step up enforcement of nondisclosure. Brands paying influencers and others to rate and review their sites should be careful to make such content obvious – even if it’s not on their own websites.
In case you’re wondering how machine learning affects your paid search campaigns, you will certainly be interested in what Navah Hopkins has to say on the subject. Navah shares some excellent information in a recent “Ask the PPC” article in Search Engine Journal.
Google’s John Mueller addressed a question regarding ranking recovery after a core update. The questioner mentioned technical SEO items had already been addressed. John’s advice, in a nutshell, was to concentrate on website content. Google has been very clear that the last several core updates have been related to website content being relevant to the intent of searchers’ queries, so this advice makes a lot of sense. It’s also important to remember that technical SEO must be as closely aligned to best practices as possible. Otherwise, your content may not do as well as it otherwise could.
There have long been discussions in SEO circles around an observed bias towards big companies and big websites in search results. The reality is that even a smaller site can rank well for specific queries if the content is of high quality and is considered more relevant to the query than content on other sites – even bigger ones. John Mueller also addressed this question during the past week.
