Full Transcription
[Introduction] – 00:00
Hey everyone, welcome back to This Week In Marketing. This is your host, Sajid Islam. And today, I’ll be going over the notable news and updates in the digital marketing space from the week of December 27, 2021. But first, I want to say that this is the last episode of 2021, as well as the first one that actually kind of spills over a little bit in 2022. So happy new year and you know, thank you so much for listening to the podcast. I look forward to serving you all in 2022 and beyond. With that let’s start off.
[Update 1 – Put Your Product At The Top Using Google Business Profile] – 00:37
First, there is an update from Google that says there is a way for you to basically mark your products, basically the way there is a new feature where you can market a product section that allows you to market a product as special. And when you mark it as special, your product shows up at the top of your Google Maps and Google listings. Right? Why would you want to do that? So if you have a particular product, that is probably the cash cow, you can go ahead and mark it, and voila everyone who comes and looks up your business. That’s the first thing they see. So go ahead, try it out. And you’ll be glad you did with that.
[Update 2 – Like Bing, Does Google Have A Limit On Crawling Long pages?] – 01:22
Let’s move on to the next one. So someone on the Internet asked Google’s John Mueller again if you do not know who John Mueller is Google. John Mueller is basically their point guy to answer any SEO questions on behalf of Google and ask him, hey, I have this very large HTML file again. Html file is what gets rendered on your browser page. So if you have go to my website, there is a page that’s coded in HTML, and then obviously you the end user, do not have to actually know about HTML because the browser takes the HTML, the Hypertext markup language, which is what it means. It takes it up, transfers it, and then puts it in a very nice, user-friendly way to display the information to you. So someone has said, hey, I have this large HTML file. I’m trying to upload it to Bing and Bing is giving me an error message. That page is too long. Pages too large. Does Google have a page limit? So John Mueller said, you know what? Yes, there is a limit. However, you should not have to worry about it because I’ve tested it up to hundreds of megabytes large sizes
of HTML pages in Google for SEO-wise crawling. And it works just fine. So chances are most of you would not have run into that limit. So don’t worry about it. But of course, be worried about other things. Like if you have a large HTML file, say 100 MMB, someone is trying to render it. Obviously, it’s going to take a long time to render because their browser has to download all these files and then kind of be able to show it to you, and obviously, you are going to get dinged in other areas like page speed and web vital metrics and things like that. So Google’s John Mueller suggestion, as well as my suggestion is that obviously, you don’t have to decide. Oh, it’s 25 KB versus 100 KB or 25 kw versus 50 KB. You don’t have to limit the page, but obviously, try to keep it to what it needs to be. And don’t worry about it. Go ahead and code whatever you need to code. If you want to embed your CSS file or JavaScript into an HTML file and make it like 500 KB, that’s fine. I think that should be fine. Again, these are hypothetical numbers I’m just using to explain you the point here. The point here is that now if you’re going to combine, let’s just say 10,000 kb file into one. Maybe that’s when you probably start to get dinged on SEO.
[Update 3 – Google: No Difference In SEO Value Between Nofollow, UGC, Or Sponsored Link Attributes] – 03:55
Okay with that, let’s move on to the next update, which is again on SEO topic, where someone again asks Google John Miller. Hey, I see there are three different types of link attributes. One is no follow UGC, which is user generated content or sponsored link attributes, and Google supports all the three attributes. What is better is one better than the other. And John Mueller says, you know what? There is no SEO value. It doesn’t matter whether you do like
a user link that says no follow or user generated content response link attributes. So go ahead and use it. We don’t lose your sleep over it. But by the way, what does not follow me? Sometimes a web page, for example, our website is market and grow. It’s going to say we are going to add a link to a website. Let’s just say, hey, go check this out. This cool coworking space XYZ place. Right. And I could just put the link in. And when Google Scroller or Spider comes to index our page and it sees a link, it will follow that link and go to that coworking space. Now, oftentimes people will just put the word no follow or no follow, as in the Instructing, the crawler Google Spider, Google crawler. Whichever way you look at it is going to say, hey, when you see a link, don’t follow it, right? Just stay on my side. Index my site and that’s about it. Don’t follow the other side. Or if you have user-generated content, someone
else provides a comment on your site, right? And you want to put a link in there, you’re marking it as tagging it as users generated content. You’re telling the robot again, hey, this is not my content. Someone else put it in. I do not know. Don’t follow it. Similarly, sponsor hey, I’m sponsoring this. This is someone paid me to put this link on our website. I do not know what it is, but this is a pay for play. So basically what it boils down to is that there is no difference. Go ahead and use it. Obviously, I would say for your own occounting purposes, inventory purposes, you may want to link it the right way as input the right tag. So that way later on, when you need to change
something, you know which one is what okay with that?
[Update 4 – Re-activate Previously Disapproved Google Ads] – 06:08
This brings us to the last update of this week, as well as the last update of this
year, is that previously, if your ad was disapproved because of a policy violation, say you are trying to let’s just promote smoking products, right? Vaping products. And up until yesterday, the product was no longer allowed. And then starting today, it’s allowed. Right? Obviously, you tried up until yesterday, it was not allowed. And you tried to run an ad in December 2021. And obviously your ad was disapproved. And now it was sitting there. Come January, today is January 1, and you go in and you say, oh, this is approved.
Google will actually automatically go and update that ad that was previously disapproved. As with limited eligibility and policy past violation. What the signals is that now the ad now because there’s a change in policy, you are eligible to reactivate this ad. Google will not reactivate this ad for you by automatically. The only reason being is that Google doesn’t want you to be like, shocked like this. It’s a double edged sword. They automatically enable you. You’re not accounting for it. And suddenly all your dollar ad spend has been used up on this new ad group or ad that you didn’t account for. So Google basically updates that in the Google dashboard, it’s eligible. Limited policy passed violation. And what that’s basically signal is that now you’re eligible to run this ad again, the policy has changed and Google will allow you to run it if you submit it for approval.
[Closing] – 07:44
With that folks, that’s it for This Week In Marketing. Now you know everything to be in the know. This was a small/short week. Not many things happening in the world of marketing but these were the only few updates I thought I should bring it over to you and obviously, connect with you all for one last time. And see you all in 2022. Take care bye-bye.
Thank you for tuning in this week, it was a pleasure to serve you all. Hit the subscribe button so that you remember to sign on next week. Same place, same time for another round of This Week In Marketing.
1. Put Your Product At The Top Using Google Business Profile (00:37) – Google Business Profile, formerly Google My Business, has a new feature in the products section that lets you mark a product as “special.” After you mark a product as special, that product will be moved to the top of the products you listed in your Google Business Profile listing.
2. Like Bing, Does Google Have A Limit On Crawling Long pages? (01:22) – Google does have a limit but most pages won’t come to that limit. Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter when it comes to really large HTML file sizes, Google can handle it – and you should not worry about it.
John responded, “we don’t have a documented limit, last I saw someone check it was 10’s-100’s of MB, so I wouldn’t worry about that.” John did add that it might impact your page speed and core web vitals metrics. He said, “giant HTML pages do slow things down, so it’s probably still something to keep on your to-do list.”
3. Google: No Difference In SEO Value Between Nofollow, UGC, Or Sponsored Link Attributes (03:55) – Google supports no-follow, UGC, and sponsored link attributes. Someone asked John Muller if one is better than the other.
John responded on Twitter “there’s no practical difference in terms of “SEO-value” for the site you’re linking to.” They all do the same thing – which is not pass any link value from the source page.
4. Re-activate Previously Disapproved Google Ads (06:08) – Google now allows you to reactivate an ad that was once disapproved because of a past violation but now that ad is no longer disapproved because Google changed its Ad policy.
But Google doesn’t just automatically flip the ad on fully because you might not expect a past ad that was disapproved before would activate on its own and thus use your budget. So Google notifies you in the console about this as “Eligible (Limited) Policy (Past Violation)”
Here is how Google defines past violations “Google continuously re-reviews ads to ensure they conform with our policies. During the standard re-review process, our system may identify disapproved ads that no longer violate our policies. If your ad was disapproved for an extended period of time and our enforcement system later decides that the policy no longer applies, we may keep the ad disapproved and classify the ad as “Past Violation”. We do this to prevent you from unintentionally exhausting spending on old ads. In order to re-activate your ads, please follow the steps below.”