[Ep108] - Hey Google, Can I Have Multiple Variation Of The Same Content?

In 17 minutes, get up to speed on the must-know Digital Marketing updates from the week of 9th May 2022.
1. TikTok Introduces A New Interactive Market Insights Tool - TikTok has released a new insights tool that allows you to discover critical data points on your target market/s using a variety of filters. The new site, which you can find here, has a number of filters to help you narrow down your target demographic and learn more about specific topics. 

For example, if you wanted to know what the major trends were among TikTok users in the United States around the holidays, you'd get a data highlight that listed the top three categories in which TikTok was used, as well as other information. 

It's comparable to Facebook's interactive insights tool, which is intended to provide you with a more personalized perspective on crucial data points rather than more generalized studies and whitepapers that may not be relevant to your requirements.

The data may be useful in guiding your strategic approach and influencing your decisions. The one disadvantage right now is that TikTok's insights database doesn't appear to be particularly large, so many of the same data points appear in multiple categories, which means they may not be as specific as you'd like.

You can check out TikTok’s new insights platform here, Facebook’s Insight Tools here, and Facebook’s Monthly Trending Tool here.

 
2. The First 'For You' Summit in Canada by TikTok - Next month, TikTok will host its first-ever 'For You' Summit in Canada, with Canadian creators and marketers invited to attend and learn about the newest trends and insights in person in a real-life meet-up event.

Keynote addresses, new study findings, guest appearances, live music, and more will be included at the Canadian ‘For You’ Summit.

TikTok has held several For You Summit events in other countries, the most recent of which focused on the Southeast Asian market.

The Canadian Summit will be held over two days, with the first day focusing on keynote speakers and the second on major trends and recommendations, including eCommerce prospects within the app.

You can register for the Canadian ‘For You’ Summit here.


3. Speakers & Agenda For Meta's 'Conversations' Business Messaging Conference Are Now Available - Next week (5/19), Meta will have its first-ever 'Conversations' corporate messaging conference, where it will show off its latest innovations and upcoming enhancements for its messaging systems, which currently have over 2 billion users combined.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg, COO Sheryl Sandberg, and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi will also speak at the event.

Following the keynote presentations, there’ll be a range of breakout sessions and deep-dives, covering topics like ‘How to get started with messaging to support your customers’, ‘Building conversational commerce experiences’ and ‘Working with Meta’s partner ecosystem’. 

It could be worth tuning in to glean some more insight into how messaging can complement your business process. You can check out the full Conversations agenda here where you can also register to attend the single day event. 


4. No More Anonymous Sitemap Submissions On Microsoft Bing - Microsoft Bing will no longer accept anonymously submitted XML sitemaps via HTTP queries because of abuse by search spammers.

You can still use robots.txt on your domain name and/or Bing Webmaster Tools to submit your sitemaps.

To tell all search engines, include a reference to your sitemap in the robots.txt file located at the root of the host. Example: http://www.example.org/sitemap.xml Sitemap

Webmaster tools from Bing: Alternatively, you can use Bing Webmaster Tools to upload your sitemaps: https://www.bing.com/webmasters/sitemaps

Finally, don't overlook the IndexNow plugin.


5. Live Captions For Audio Events And Custom URL Listings On LinkedIn - Here is what LinkedIn announced this week:

“Up until now, when members joined an audio event on LinkedIn, they could only listen to it. By adding real-time captions, we are making audio events more accessible and inclusive for members with hearing impairments.”

Finally, LinkedIn has confirmed that all users will soon be able to put a link to the top of their profile that would redirect visitors to their company's website.

The function, which was originally noticed in testing late last month and already covered on our show, will first be available exclusively to those who use LinkedIn's Creator Mode option, before being handed out to all users in the near future (though no timeline as yet).


6. YouTube Makes 'Clips' Video Highlights More Accessible - YouTube has announced that all creators will soon have access to the 'Clips' feature, which allows viewers to select and share a tiny segment of a video clip (up to 60 seconds in length) that will play on a loop straight on the original video's watch page.

According to YouTube, more channels have been granted Clips access in recent weeks, and by next week, all channels will have the choice.

If a channel has Clips enabled, the 'CLIP' button will appear below the video playback screen. Here is a demo of the Clips feature.


7. Video Page Indexing Report Is Coming to Google Search Console - Google will be introducing new kinds of data to Search Console to make video indexing easier to track and fix. You can use Search Console to check if your structured data markup is correct and how many impressions a video obtained if you upload videos on your site. You'll be able to do the following with the new report:
  1. Check out how many video landing sites Google found and how many of them have a video. 
  2. Examine the reasons for videos not being indexed in video landing sites.
  3. To debug and fix issues, use the list of URLs for the video pages that are affected.
  4. Validate the fix before re-crawling the impacted URLs.
  5. The URL Inspection tool can be used to check the video indexing status of a certain video page.
To learn more about the new report, visit here.


8. Google Shares How To Manage Titles In Search Results - The title link is usually derived from the title tag used by the publisher.

Google, however, has the ability to modify the title link to something else. Google is now offering advice on how to manage the site title that appears in search results. The new part is about debugging title tags to figure out why Google's title links are changing.

1. Check that each page includes a title tag.
2. Create succinct title tags that summarize the web page's content. Avoid using ambiguous terms like Home Page or Profile.
3. Stay away from keyword stuffing.
4. Avoid boilerplate that is repeated across the site.
5. Branding terms are OK until they become prevalent.
6. Google uses the header elements in the title links on occasionally.
7. Use the Robots.txt correctly.

You can read more about the new TitleTag Documentation here.


9. Google's 6 Image Optimization Tips - Google’s Developer Advocate Alan Kent provided six ideas for optimizing images on websites. They are:

1. Remove the cumulative image layout shift (CLS)
2. Size Your Images Properly
3. Select the most appropriate image file format
4. Use Appropriate Image Compression
6. Sequence Your Image Downloads Correctly 5. Cache Images In The Browser

The complete Google video is here.


10. Hey Google, What Do I Do About Spammy Links from Malicious Domains? - According to Google’s John Mueller, the best way to deal with Spammy links from malicious domains is to disavow the whole domain that they’re coming from and then move on. Per Mueller, “If they’re being disavowed then we tell our systems that these should not be taken into account, neither in a positive nor a negative way.”
 

11. Hey Google, Can I Have Multiple Variation Of The Same Content? - Per Mueller, “From Google’s point of view, if you’re taking content from your own website and publishing that again with some elements of the page changed, that’s essentially up to you.”

A lot of times we can think of content in terms of how Google might respond. But Google’s response is generally based on how much value that page is providing to the site visitors.

“And it’s something where my assumption is in many cases you’re not providing a lot of value by just copying the existing article and changing some of the words on it. 

So my feeling is, from a strategic point of view, probably you would be better suited writing something unique and compelling for those topics or to create one article that covers kind of these different variations. 

But my recommendation is really kind of make fewer articles that are actually really good.”