For as long as online search has existed, there has been a subset of marketers, webmasters, and SEOs eager to cheat the system to gain an unfair and undeserved advantage. Black Hat SEO is only less common these days because Google spent two-plus decades developing ever-more sophisticated algorithms to neutralize and penalize the techniques they […]
Google Ads appears to be reviving — or reinventing — its old Website Optimizer, after new help docs quietly surfaced detailing a tool that would live directly inside the Google Ads interface. Driving the news. Several new Google support pages were spotted describing Website Optimizer, a tool expected to show up under the Reporting tab. […]
Google announces delays in Search Console’s Page indexing report. The company confirms crawling, indexing, and ranking remain unaffected by the reporting issue. Google is experiencing longer than usual delays in the Page indexing report within Search Console. The issue affects reporting only, not actual crawling, indexing, or ranking of websites. Google will provide an update […]
Marketing leaders often believe they have a performance problem when, in reality, they have a goal problem. A PPC strategy built around generating leads behaves very differently than one optimized for revenue. The campaigns you choose, how you measure success, and even how your sales team operates all depend on which objective governs the budget. […]
Google has confirmed that the Search Console index coverage report, also the page indexing report, are now delayed about two weeks. Google confirmed the issue and is working to resolve the issue, but said this only impacts reporting and that crawling; indexing and ranking of websites are not impacted. Page indexing report. The page indexing […]
Bing published a blog post about how clicks from AI Search are improving conversion rates, explaining that the entire research part of the consumer journey has moved into conversational AI search, which means that content must follow that shift in order to stay relevant. AI Repurposes Your Content They write: “Instead of sending users through […]
In this series (here and here), I’ve covered why founder-led marketing works and the systems you need to stay consistent, based on the playbook I co-authored for LinkedIn (my employer). You’ve built the content engine and the operational frameworks to avoid burnout. Now comes the final, most critical part: proving it works. Your founder provides […]
For years, marketers measured digital success through impressions, backlinks and clicks. If you ranked high in search results and won the click, you had visibility and control of the funnel. But that landscape is already shifting. Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are rapidly becoming the first place decision-makers go for […]
Performance Max (like the more upper-funnel Demand Gen) is different enough from other Google Ads campaigns that it requires a different approach, even if the underlying search behavior and marketing principles are the same as they’ve always been. For what it’s worth, Performance Max is typically not the first campaign to launch in any account. […]
The European Commission has proposed a “Digital Omnibus” package that would relax parts of the GDPR, the AI Act, and Europe’s cookie rules in the name of competitiveness and simplification. If you work with EU traffic or rely on European data for analytics, advertising, or AI features, it’s worth tracking this proposal even though nothing […]