Hello, everybody. Did you see the news story about the Just Stop Oil dumbasses who vandalized Stonehenge with orange paint? It’s true that Britain is the birthplace of the industrial revolution (which many of that island’s natives do not require much prompting to mention), but we very much doubt that Celtic crowds used to gather at that rural rock circle to hear druids preaching predictive sermons about the eventual invention of the internal combustion engine. Whatever Stonehenge’s purpose was, June 21, otherwise known as the summer solstice (when the amount of time between sunrise and sunset maxes out in the northern hemisphere), would’ve been one of the four days per year when it got to truly shine.
Something we need to grudgingly concede is that Just Stop Oil has a talent for publicity, an important form of marketing. They tried to force Stonehenge’s fate on Taylor Swift’s jet. They failed, settling for two jets that are not connected to the singer, but that failure still turned into headlines. Liam Gallagher (the rowdier Oasis brother who was married to Mel Gibson’s Lethal Weapon 2 love interest) is tweeting about them. So is J.K. Rowling. Just Stop Oil also got some press for forcefully decorating the face of a King Charles wax statue with a vegan cake (desecrating mankind’s shared cultural heritage is fair game, but binding cake batter ingredients to each other with eggs is a bridge too far). We’re even rewarding JSO’s infuriating tactics by shining yet another light on them. Enough of this nonsense.
The Google Search Central YouTube channel released a June 2024 English language SEO office hours video eight days ago. As of May’s ranking factors leak, the correct reaction to new videos from Google Search Liaisons should always be “who cares?”
We spent some time wondering if the folks who interact with the SEO industry on Google’s behalf were aware of the fact that they were disseminating false information. After watching many hours of old SEO Office Hours videos, we’ve concluded that they were absolutely aware. Here’s a good example from 2016 (from 42:48, where this timestamped video link begins playing, until 43:33) that was recorded in the wake of numerous announcements about Google eliminating website authority scores. Listening to John Mueller say there is no quality score, then add “but if we did have a quality score…” makes it pretty clear that he knew what was going on. That’s our take, anyway.
Before we start wrapping this up, those of you who haven’t migrated to GA4 from Universal Analytics should probably get moving on that. We’re not judging you. We procrastinate too. You’re down to 10 days now though.
We’ve got four links for you before we go. Do you know about Aurus limos? It’s a Russian carmaker that got a big time publicity injection this week. Next, a confluence of factors like inflation, unexpected fees, and not-quite-good-enough chatbots have come together to result the lowest ever customer satisfaction scores in the United States. We’ve linked to something similar in the past, but The Wall Street Journal reported a newer all-time low earlier this week. Third, we have a Vox article that comments on the fact that no one seems to watch the same TV shows anymore (as an aside, if you’re looking for something to watch, we recommend Dark Matter– it’s great). Finally, TikTok is allowing companies to create virtual spokesmen. This article on socialmediatoday.com explains what that means and speculates about how it’ll play out.
Have a wonderful weekend. Enjoy the long-lasting sunshine (unless you’re one of our Australian readers– you guys should play flashlight tag or something).