Happy Friday, everybody.
An absentminded click during last night’s blog post research clued us in to the fact that English drill rappers exist. We stumbled upon GBP, a new, not safe for work song by 21 Savage and Central Cee (someone whose fame in Britain was assured to us by both ChatGPT and Claude). Spoiler alert: it’s not about Google Business Profiles. A currency-stuffed duffle bag in the music video (and, like, the chorus) makes it clear that we’re dealing with the other GBP: the Great Britain Pound.
Despite that detour, we still have plenty of stuff to write about today. We’ll start with the ranking bug(s) that messed up Google’s local searches over the past two weeks.
Tons of businesses saw their rankings plummet on Monday, January 6 and the weekend leading up to it. We’re citing Monday’s date in particular since many Local Viking and Local Brand Manager users run their scheduled GeoGrid configurations on Mondays. If you were wondering why your results were screwy on that day (or on the 4th or 5th if your GeoGrids run during weekends), you’ve now got an answer. Google resolved the issue by January 7.
No official statements in the meantime admit to further problems, but, anecdotally, we can tell you that we saw enough suspicious data over the past two days to declare that something fishy’s going on. We don’t know if it’s a reincarnation of the bug we just described, a related defect, or something new altogether. We can confidently say that we came across unreliable data for six metro areas–Atlanta, New York, Chicago, DFW, Los Angeles, and Houston–on Thursday and Wednesday.
Neither the declared nor undeclared problem affected all businesses in all niches. We advise you to run your searches again in a few days if you feel like you can’t trust your recent data
The other important information to disseminate today is the fact that Click to Cancel, a new FTC regulation, is now in effect. This means that your customers must be able to cancel subscriptions in a manner that’s as simple and straightforward as possible. On top of that, you must get consent to show them retention offers during the cancellation process. Failing to comply with the new regulation will result in $50,000 fines on top of forced refunds and a few other penalties that can be doled out at a court’s discretion.
We’ll get into our closing links now. The first one is a paywall-bypassed article from The Economist about the impending TikTok ban. That’s a matter with too much last-minute reprieve speculation to summarize, but the Biden and Trump administrations are both seeking ways to delay TikTok’s ban. That being said, the Supreme Court upheld the ban’s legal standing earlier today. The New York Times is actively posting TikTok updates as they happen. Next, Digiwatch explains why Facebook’s relaxed moderation guidelines are not scaring away advertisers. Finally, for all of you running YouTube channels for your agencies and/or clients, this Buffer listicle goes over the 15 best video editing tools.
Author’s note: all of the images we used this week were the result of vague ChatGPT prompts, e.g. “create an illustration that depicts the looming TikTok ban.” Not bad, right? It’s becoming more useful as its popularity grows.
Enjoy your weekends.