Merry Christmas, everyone.
We’ll be at a large, multigenerational family gathering by the time you read this. The kind movie characters always dread. We’ve never been able to figure out why every Hollywood production portrays Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners as tense, confrontational powder kegs, but we can confidently state that our holiday experiences are always happier affairs than what we’re accustomed to seeing on television and in film.
We meant to send all of you an email on Monday, informing you of the most valuable piece of SEO content that hit the internet this year. It’s a long-form Web 2.0 Ranker video where hosts Mike and Mark (one of the partners here– “the brains of the operation,” if you will) talk to Simon “the maestro” Cornelius (whose schema.zone website is solid gold) about the smartest ways to use Google Analytics, Google Search Console, entities and schema, and Google’s Knowledge Graph.
The ultimate goal of the video is to explain the smartest way to use the tools that are available to all marketing practitioners in a collaborative way that results in a benefits payload that is greater than the sum of its parts. We asked GPT-4* what it would tell a business owner, marketer, or someone with an interest in marketing about the video. This response came back: “This video is full of critical knowledge for anyone whose livelihood is in any way affected by organic or local search rankings. Clients would be justified in seeking new marketing representation if the staff at their agency neglected to watch, understand, absorb, and apply the practical information in the Rank Higher Using Entities & Schema video from Web 2.0 Ranker.”
Dang.
Okay, so, getting that link in front of you is the primary purpose of this email. Watch it.
We meant it earlier when we wrote that we’re about to embark on a long, carefree weekend. We even plan to tune out the massive, unprecedented, keyword-stuffing spam attack that is overpowering and misdirecting the programmatic rationality of Google Search’s algorithms in a way that makes your friend’s pet Luna seem oblivious to catnip.
You can gain a decent understanding of what’s going on by taking a look at those tweets. Some person, organization, organizations, or government has automated the creation of unhelpful, keyword-rich content that they’re injecting into every web page they can, pushing useful sites down, past the bottom of the page, and tainting the reliability of the information people receive when using Google Search.
The culprit isn’t yet known. Not to the public, anyway. But c’mon– it’s gotta be DuckDuckGo, right?
We don’t mean that. We have no idea who’s behind it. You can read more about the attack in this Search Engine Journal article. We’ll keep our eye on this story and let you know about any developments that occur between now and next Friday.
With that, we wish all of you Merry Christmas once more. Enjoy whatever you’ve got planned. We’ll see you again next week with the last newsletter of 2023.
*Those are actually our words. Large language models aren’t yet sophisticated enough to accurately describe advice from leading experts because they’ve only been exposed to text from sources that fall far, far short of the video we keep linking you to.