SEO NEWS #23

SUMMARY OF THE WEEK

  1. L’Oreal made a big redirect mess
  2. Biden’s victory was what tech wanted
  3. Christmas trees are not ranking on Google
  4. Google allows you to add street view imagery from your phone
  5. Antitrust: Commission sends Statement of Objections to Amazon
  6. Online security with a Google VPN
  7. Goodbye Google Webmasters, Welcome Search Central
  8. Is Google biased towards particular news sites?
  9. How Google may use Machine Learning during crawling?
  10. SEO Poly for SEO Geeks
  11. A Chrome extension to check out Core Serp Vitals
  12. Alphabet CEO: Plan to target EU commissioner was not “sanctioned” by me
  13. SEO Tools on Github
  14. Tricking fake news detector with malicious user comments
  15. Ask A Google Employee on Youtube
  16. A proof that Google must be broken up: Google Photos becomes a paid service.

L’Oreal made a big redirect mess

The French do everything to look funny.
And Jean Guillon noted that the French cosmetics company L’OrealL’Oreal made a big redirect mess redirecting loreal-paris.fr and loreal.paris to loreal.com/fr/ and lorealparisusa.com points to the US version of loreal.us
which points to an error page. Wow, you need SEO here, guys.
I know you do have SEOs. I know people who pretended they work for you. So what’s going on?

Biden’s victory was what tech wanted

On Protocol.com

I never talk about politics or religion.
But this is not political news. I’m a tech guy, and like anybody in tech is wondering what’s next.
Joe Biden apparently won the US presidential election in 2020.
It seems like everything should be better for Silicon Valley and all the
so-called liberal social media and so on.
Well, it’s not 2016 anymore. It’s not 2014 anymore. It’s 2020.
And the climate has changed, and tech companies got a bit down; they got taken with their pants down.
it’s too late, it’s too late, at least for the big four, but it will
trickle-down onto the rest of the industry.
It’s not just about Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook.
One proof that the Biden administration is welcoming tech companies is the fact that they hire: People from Amazon or Airbnb and Uber and Facebook and Dropbox, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Lyft, Stripe.
I’m just saying it like it is, no comment.

Christmas trees are not ranking on Google

Mark Rofe, @iamrofe on Twitter, tweeted:

John Mueller replies, “Sometimes it takes a month or two. I’ll give it until January and check back then.”

And then what happened?

Of course, Barry Schwartz makes a post about it: Google responds to exact match domain not ranking for Christmas trees.

And just a regular Barry Schwartz article here.

The problem is if everybody is trolling, were making jokes.

Well, please signal it, give a hint, because the way it is right here, I don’t see a smiley in John Mueller’s tweet. I don’t see anything in Barry Schwartz’s post that gives me a hint that it says a bit more context. This seems to be a joke. I’m sorry, but this was a terrible joke.

Well, no. It’s not, OK. Barry and John, you got taken for a ride by what today calls themselves growth hacker. They’re just marketers, and I do the same stuff that Mark does. I only take a look, 30 seconds at his Twitter account, and you will understand that this guy is he’s not trolling; he’s making an operation, a marketing move, a growth hacking move to get people to talk about his Christmas trees.

Is he going to sell more trees, Christmas trees?

I don’t know. But, all the people who made fun of him for the tweet, well, you helped them. And good job, Mark.

And Barry and John, if you did, no, I don’t think you picked up on it.

You just thought that was a silly joke.

And you did see that you were played. Nice one.

Google allows you to add street view imagery from your phone

On Androidpolice.com: Google tests, letting anyone at street view imagery with just their phone.

And we know 360 cameras are required to contribute. The first time I saw Google Earth, it was a breakthrough. It was one of my big Internet moments; I was like, OMG, this is available to us. You can visit the entire planet with a click of a mouse. And then Google Street View was even crazier. I mean, this is like, you got to be like, I don’t know if they were smoking when they decided to photograph the entire world, but they did it, and now they would like to bring more content created by the user. Actually, it’s already the case; they already photos and videos on Google Street View, but they are more like attach files. They are not the actual Street View feature. So I don’t know what’s going on here, but most definitely something to follow up on bc it’s Google outside of the device. It’s Google all around us. And that’s the future of Google and the world.

Antitrust: Commission sends Statement of Objections to Amazon

On ec.europa.eu: Antitrust: Commission sends Statement of Objections to Amazon for the use of non-public independent seller data and opens second investigation into its e-commerce business practices

I told you last time when there was a lawsuit against Google, well now it’s the European Commission going after Amazon for their use of non-public, independent seller data. They open a second investigation into its e-commerce business practices. So it’s all going back to what was disclosed during the big tech hearing. You can look at the video here with Kristine Schachinger. And I will do more.

They will be taken apart to what extent they will be broken up; I don’t know, and I think that Google prepared everything with the way Alphabet Inc is set up. I just realized it’s a genius move.

They knew it. They prepared it. It’s all set up already from Google’s point of view if they are going to be broken up.

I don’t know about the other ones but count on me to follow up on this.

Online security with a Google VPN

One.google.com: Increase your online security with the VPN by Google One

Thank you, Google 9,99$ a month in the US only. If I use a VPN, it’s to hide from Google, so no Google One for me, and I do not recommend you

Google One VPN, I recommend Proton VPN. I’m not affiliated with them.

They don’t even know who I am. I know who they are and they are the best. They are in Switzerland. That’s what I use. Not affiliated again, this is just from the heart use Proton VPN and trustedproxies.com for proxy.

Goodbye Google Webmasters, Welcome Search Central

On the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Definitely, nobody uses the word webmaster to define the person in charge of building a website and managing a website.

And it’s hilarious how they give fancy titles to Googlers.

Like they call Webmaster Trends or search trends analyst. I think it was a Webmaster trends analyst. So maybe they probably have a new title now. Those Googlers are on what we call from an industry-standard, community managers. OK, so this is the community management support portal or central or palace or blog or forum or whatever you want to call it. But, yeah, you might fool people into thinking that the googlers are something else than simple community managers, but they are. What defines that job?

Is Google biased towards particular news sites?

On ahrefs.com: is Google biased towards particular news sites?

It’s a complicated study and most definitely biased. It feels like it would require a lot more scientific process and data.

In this blog, we see that the liberal news gets a huge portion of traffic, like a lot more. Like eight times more, it seems like you have eight times more liberal pages. 

Ahrefs is trying to make the case that there is no proof. That Google is biased, and they can’t conclude anything definite. The conservatives use Google less; the Liberals publish more, maybe.

All I see is a pie with shares of pages for the top 25 liberal and conservative news sites.

It must be like 80 percent of liberal organic traffic for the top 25 liberal and conservative news sites.

I was pretty amazed by the disproportion of this chart.

Maybe some more serious study will enlighten us and prove us some better results.

How may Google use Machine Learning during crawling?

On Barry Schwartz’s Searchengineroundtable.com:  Here is how Google may use machine learning during crawling.

Martin Splitt is asked if they use machine learning to identify or predict what they will crawl in quality. Of course, there are no stupid questions.

The right question is why would you not use machine learning to extract? Remember, Google identifies 90 billion spammy links per day and 25 billion spammy pages per day; that’s what they recognize.

So they discover, and they decide to put it into the trash.

And they are still millions or billions that don’t get caught.

So, of course, they want to use machine learning because you only see the first phase.

You see when Google discovers your page, and you know when the page returns in an interface like the search engine results page, you don’t see all the operations in between.

There are tons of operations between the discovery of the page and when it returns into the SERP. I feel like the same questions repeatedly, is it worth doing a blog post about it? 

SEO Poly for SEO Geeks

SEOPoly by our friend Jef Van Gool.
Yes, it’s a monopoly but SEO version.
Cool game. Buy it for a Christmas present, if you know any SEO, he or she will definitely appreciate it. Guaranteed.

A Chrome extension to check out Core Serp Vitals

On Reddit.com, a cool guy shared a Chrome extension to check out the core serp vital.
So to see if the search engine results page is Core web vital compliant.
Just a word of warning, this kind of chrome extension is most definitely sucking up a lot of data from your browsing and stuff, so beware.
I didn’t install it, so I can’t vouch for it but I know this kind of extensions, so if you know it’s sucking up your data, then turn it off, use it when you need it, and that’s it.

Alphabet CEO: Plan to target EU commissioner was not “sanctioned” by me

That’s amusing news from ArsTechnica, even though I think the Financial Times was the first to report it.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai had to apologize to Mr. Breton, Thierry Breton, a European Union commissioner, because they had a plan and a document leaked. It was a plan to pressure him and to, well, try to push him in a corner and swing his mindset towards what Google wanted to know, and Alphabet CEO is just sorry. And he was not aware.

Well, brother, you are responsible. You are the CEO of the company.

You are the last line of defense. No one after you can be responsible.

So you have to take responsibility, and you want to admit it.

But the only thing you are sorry about is that the email leaked.

OK, that’s the only thing you’re sorry about because of course, you guys don’t do evil.

That’s, that was a long time ago, and I’ll probably do in a couple of seconds in upcoming news. 

SEO Tools on Github

On GitHub, they share some SEO tools.

Well, it’s more like an emailing tool. what you can do is collect email addresses within a specific niche, so you target keywords, and it’s pulling out of the Moz free API, the free hunter.io API, and the Google Library

to get you a list of emails concerning a certain topic

Love it; emailing is still today in 2020, in my opinion, one of the most undervalued visibility assets at your disposal.

Tricking fake news detector with malicious user comments

Eurekalert.org says that Penn State was able to trick fake news detectors very easily by just writing a comment.

You manipulate comments, and regardless of the content, the article will get flagged because of the content of the comments.

Easy trick. So easy. But, I’m glad that some university is doing this kind of stuff and not just search engine hackers like me.

Ask A Google Employee on Youtube

Ask a Google employee anything. And it’s one of our own, Mr. Danny Sullivan, former SEO who is one of the prime example of a dude who built a beautiful career finishing up working at Google, as a public liaison, he’s basically in charge of the Twitter account @searchliaison and then the rest of the time, I don’t know, he’s chillin’ and playing good for him.
So if you know a lot about search, it’s not a video for you but if you want to learn some interesting stuff about Google. Check it out.

A proof that Google must be broken up: Google Photos becomes a paid service.

Updating Google photo storage policy to build for the future, on the official Google blog.
Five years ago they launched Google Photos and today you have four trillion photos stored on Google photo every week 28 billion new photos and videos uploaded. And now they want to make it paid.
OK, the problem is that it’s exactly what Congress what Department of Justice was afraid of and was telling us about. This is unfair practice.
“Hey, people, give us your trillion photos so we can work our machine learning, our deep learning, our artificial intelligence on your photos.”
And then because it’s a publicly traded company and on a quarterly, they have to do a quarterly report, they have to report to the investors.
And most definitely I don’t want to know the cost of hosting four trillion photos, but someone at Alphabet said, “hey, look at this line on the Excel sheet, that’s not working for us anymore. So change it.”
And that’s solely unfair practice because that was the one single competitive advantage that Google Photos had of any other player.
And none of them could offer the same thing, free hosting.

That’s it for this week, thanks for your time.

Stay safe.

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