The Insider's Inbox - News from a Pro SEO

We explore the concept of an "SEO insider's inbox," sharing noteworthy updates from Google and discussing digital ownership strategies for content creators.

In this episode:

• Google Business Profile emails reminding owners to follow policies
• Introduction of Google's experimental AI mode
• Building content on YouTube vs your own site
• How building your presence on "rented ground" (social platforms) creates vulnerability
• Real experience with Google Business Profile suspension
• Improvements in Google's appeal process
• Prevalence of SEO spam emails offering SEO services
  
  Stay tuned for a follow-up episode where we'll document the entire Google Business Profile appeal process and timeline.
  
  
  

--

CONTACT
Leave Feedback or Request Topics:
https://forms.gle/bqxbwDWBySoiUYxL7

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:24

All right. One thing I was thinking. You know one of the recent episode we did on the new Squarespace AI.

Speaker 2 0:29

Yes.

Speaker 1 0:30

So that came in, that came to my attention because you got it in an email.

Speaker 2 0:33

Yes.

Speaker 1 0:34

And I think that was pretty good. At least it was timely. That got me thinking. I do occasionally get stuff in my inbox that I think, oh, that would. I should mention that on the podcast.

Speaker 2 0:45

Yeah.

Speaker 1 0:45

And it comes either from Google or it comes from other insider-type SEO sources. The problem is, those little things usually are not enough to make an episode out of Right. They're little bits of news.

Speaker 2 0:58

Right. However, what I was thinking— you could put a bunch of them together. Yes, exactly hey.

Speaker 1 1:04

I have three or four of them gathered up in a little— Folder. I have three or four of them gathered up in a little label or something inside my inbox. I said, yeah, let's do an episode where it's sort of like an insider's inbox, an SEO insider's inbox.

Speaker 2 1:22

Oh, I like that.

Speaker 1 1:24

Insider access to an SEO's inbox.

Speaker 2 1:26

Wow, we need music Insider access to an SEO's inbox. Wow, dun, dun, dun, dun we need music.

Google Business Profile Updates

Speaker 1 1:29

Yeah, insider access to an SEO's inbox. That sounds like a root canal while you're having an enema on top of a colonoscopy. So, like I said, I have four of these emails here. Okay, I have three. I have three and let's call this the fourth one a bonus, okay.

Speaker 1 1:47

But I have three things I had marked like hey, that would be interesting. I should mention that. I feel like I should mention something like that on the podcast. The first one was from, and I'll go through them in order. I'll just spend a couple minutes on each. The first one was directly from Google. It was about the Google business profile platform and it was titled Keep your Business, your business profile, trustworthy and reliable. And it gives it. It talks about hey, you got to keep your information up to date. Welcome, you have to welcome, all feedback, not just the good ones, and you need to avoid, uh, violating our, our policies here. Fair enough, all those things, um, and yeah, okay, I mean yeah, I mean if you are, if you have a business profile, chances are good. You got one of these emails but it links to some prohibited content. Good information to have to be fair, not that exciting, oh, that's it.

Speaker 1 2:41

Yet Okay, good, not that exciting yet oh Okay. The next one I received another email from Google, google and it says meet the new ai mode. So ai now has and I don't do you know this, have you seen this? I don't maybe so google has had for a while now. If you do a search in google, it has what used to be the, where the featured snippets used to be. There's now a generate. There's a response, generated by a paragraph.

New Google AI Mode Explained

Speaker 1 3:09

And I have found it quite helpful. I usually, most of the time when I'm doing a search, I just read that and then, if I want to know something else, I then drill down to one of the sources that they provide, and I don't even look at the list of websites. That, traditionally, is what SEO has all been about. Well, it's still no. This SEO is just going to be about the AI generated results. It's a change in the industry.

Speaker 2 3:34

Is this guy? Everything's going to change.

Speaker 1 3:36

So this AI mode is in an experimental phase, it's like a beta phase, so it's not. It won't be available to everyone, but it looks to me like it is available available to anyone with a free Gmail account. So if you have free there, you can, probably you can. I'm sure you can use it If you have a Gmail account behind your business domain, like you and I have. So you have an email, I have an email, but technically it's powered by the Gmail suite, the Gmail workplace.

Speaker 2 4:08

It's sweet, it is sweet.

Speaker 1 4:11

It is not available to those accounts, okay, because those are paid accounts. Google wants to put this through experiment.

Speaker 2 4:18

It wants to test it. Oh, it wants to protect those. It wants to test it. That's nice.

Speaker 1 4:21

It wants to make sure that the people who are paying are getting quality stuff Right. Google is really well known for this. They even do this. They are such a big company that they do what they call dogfooding what they do, is they release a new?

Speaker 1 4:34

No, it's not. If they release a new phone, for example, they will first give the phone to all of their employees and get feedback and then make improvements and they call that. I don't know why they call it dogfooding, but they feed it to their internal organization first before they give it to people who are paying for it. So that's kind of one of their approaches. So this has probably gone through their internal team, gotten approval there. Now it's rolling out to free accounts. If you have a free account, just like an email address that ends in at Gmail, you should have access to this. If you just go to Google without logging in at all, I actually don't know if you would have access to this, but if you go to Google and do a search, you know how. At the top there are tabs that says like all results, images, videos, news, maps. So right there, the first one is going to be AI mode. If you click on that, you're going to go to something that looks very much like the chat GPT interface.

Speaker 1 5:36

Yes, and this reminds me of something that I said. I said Google's going to adapt. Don't worry. Whatever GPT yes, they do have a head start. They are really good. They are better than Google right now, but Google is going to adapt. So this to me just the way it looks visually. They are adapting.

Speaker 2 5:55

And that's Gemini.

Speaker 1 5:58

I actually don't know if this is Gemini. I mean, it probably is built on the same framework that Gemini was but they're calling it AI mode. Oh, there you go. Google is terrible with names. They always change their names. They change their names way too often for my liking, anyway, dear Google. So if you want to try that out and I have tried it out a little bit seems fine. It seems kind of just like chat. Gpt seems like a natural extension of what they're already doing. I got to say I wasn't that impressed with the results, like okay, they still have a ways to go, I feel personally.

Speaker 2 6:34

Everyone has to start somewhere.

Speaker 1 6:35

Okay, that.

Speaker 2 6:37

That's the first one.

Speaker 1 6:38

That was the second. That was the second.

Speaker 2 6:39

Well, we got two in there.

Speaker 1 6:41

Yeah, remember the reminder from Google business profiles. Okay, the next one didn't come from Google, it came from. Well, it looks like it came from search engine land. Actually, I don't even know how I got this email. I don't know why I don't know why I'm receiving this, but I got it and it is a forum looks like on search engine.

Speaker 1 7:05

Forum or form forum. People are discussing, chatting about a topic called youtube channel versus website. Which is the better path to earning money, youtube or website? So so building a youtube channel right or building a website? Which which one is going to be more profitable in 2020, like now, and moving forward? So this got me thinking. Yeah, is this a discussion that you feel people are having?

YouTube vs Website Monetization Debate

Speaker 2 7:30

Not me, not you. I live in a hole.

Speaker 1 7:35

I know this has been an issue in the past and I thought like I mean, I thought the discussion was kind of settled, but when I saw this and I read the comments, it seems like it's not so. The question is do you build your content on YouTube or on your blog? Basically, that's kind of at the heart of this question.

Speaker 2 7:54

But how could it be monetized if it's on your website as a blog?

Speaker 1 7:59

Well, that's how that, if you sell something, if you are selling a product as a blog, well, that's how that, if you sell something, if you are selling a product most, I think that many I won't say most but I certainly think that a lot of monetized channels on YouTube are also selling something right? You know, there is something you really want to consider here. I'm not going to say it's a problem and tell you which one you should do social media or your blog but one thing that you really have to understand and I thought this was kind of taken as fact now, but evidently it's not from looking at these comments when you create your content on YouTube or on Facebook or on Instagram or on TikTok and you build up your empire there, that's somebody else's website.

Speaker 2 8:41

Right, and that could be taken away from you at any moment it could easily and often is.

Speaker 1 8:46

I don't know how many times I've heard stories about people who had a robust Facebook business page and all of a sudden it was deactivated or somehow, or they just went from like getting, say, 10,000 impressions per month to like 10.

Speaker 2 8:59

Yeah.

Speaker 1 9:00

Okay. So this reminds me of the saying don't build your house on rented ground. Have you ever heard that Like? So you got to understand. Like, if you are building, yes, yeah, Same thing. If you are building content and you're relying on the social media channel, that's great. I mean, there are millions upon millions and millions of eyeballs on social media. It's a great place to get eyeballs. But if you're not pulling people off of those platforms onto your own, you don't have direct access to those people Right and, like you said, you could lose it at any time. This, to me, is one of the most brilliant things about social media, from the perspective of the people who created it. So content like this is a general kind of rule of thumb. It's not easy to create content right, but to be successful online, you kind of need to create content.

Speaker 1 10:38

So the genius to me, again the genius part about social media is they figure it out a way for other people to create their content. Zuckerberg doesn't create any content. He doesn't have content teams, it's you and me who are creating content.

Speaker 2 10:53

Once you put it on their platform, they own it and they can use it however they want.

Speaker 1 10:58

I think legally that is true.

Speaker 2 11:00

That is so. Whatever you put on there, they can then take and use anywhere in the world, however, they want. However, they want your voice, your image your words.

Speaker 1 11:10

So the problem with that, I mean, is twofold. You're creating content to help make somebody else money and, yes, if your YouTube channel is monetized, you're getting a sliver of that money. You know who knows how much they're making. The other thing thing it could be taken away, yeah, at any point, and at that point you have no like. Let's say you have a really great youtube channel.

Speaker 1 11:34

It's getting lots of views like, say, you have a million subscribers oh my god if all of a sudden, your youtube channel is shut down or demonetized or something for some reason, which happens often. All of a sudden, you can't just email, you can't send a text to those million subscribers. Okay, if you build a list off your site, yeah, it'll probably be smaller, but it's your list. Like you have that content.

Speaker 2 11:57

And control.

Speaker 1 11:58

Yeah, Like somebody, I was listening to a talk one time and I don't remember who it was, but somebody. They were talking about this and they said does anybody remember Arsenio Hall? Yeah, yeah, of course we remember Arsenio Hall. Arsenio Hall had a very, very, very popular show.

Speaker 2 12:13

Yeah.

Speaker 1 12:13

Arsenio, yeah, and it was before social media, right? Okay, so it was in the days, if you're old enough to remember, when TV shows were. They're just on the TV, what? And?

Speaker 2 12:26

only when they say it's going to be and you have to get a book to know when that is.

Speaker 1 12:31

They didn't have a podcast, they didn't have a website, they didn't have anything. What did people? Do with their time, I don't know, and one day, I believe, arsenio was on Fox. Fox canceled his show. Now he had oh man, I have no idea how many viewers, how many lists.

Speaker 2 12:47

He had so many lists.

Speaker 1 12:49

I was going to say listeners, but he had viewers, like probably tens of millions of viewers. Now, once his show was taken off the air, what happened to Arsenio Hall? Like we saw him occasionally on movies? Arsenio Hall, like we saw him occasionally on movies, but somebody talked about this because he was on an episode of a TV show which I won't describe, but he was trying to call people who would be influencers in the entertainment industry and nobody would take his call.

Speaker 2 13:19

Wait, is this for real?

Speaker 1 13:21

Yeah, this is for real and this is years later. Like he would, he was calling all these people and it was part of this reality TV show and nobody would take his call. And this is an example like yes, it's from 20 plus years ago, and who knows what kind of a person he is but he didn't have his list, he didn't own his list.

Google Profile Suspension Experience

Speaker 1 13:39

He was building his and there was no other options not his fault, but he had a TV show on somebody else's network and that network decided no, we don't like your TV show. And then he was done. So there is the danger of that. If you are building content for Instagram or YouTube or TikTok or wherever, realize that is a potential danger, Okay Okay. So, whatever you're doing, try and this is not easy, but try to brainstorm how you can start to own your list, more than be borrowing it from Zuckerberg or whoever is going to buy it Now.

Speaker 2 14:14

Dangerous is a big word, but it's Okay.

Speaker 1 14:17

Well, it's a. I said potentially, yeah, I mean it is a potential downside. Yeah, yeah, I mean it? Is a potential downside. Yeah, okay, a lot of business is just evaluating potential downside and minimizing your risk. So you want to minimize your risk? Yeah, that's all I'm saying.

Speaker 2 14:33

I hear you loud and clear All.

Speaker 1 14:35

I'm saying Okay, all I'm saying, all I'm saying Back to the SEO's inbox yes, email number four. Yes, remember, the first email was about following the Google business profile policies, and this one is the bonus. Yeah, this is the bonus. So this email, the subject line is Meredith's husband yes Me, it's me, it's you. Your profile has been disabled.

Speaker 2 14:56

Really it was disabled. Yes, really. Oh, it's not a spam.

Speaker 1 14:59

No, it's really been suspended. This is the second time this has happened to me. Here's an example of Google has decided to suspend my profile, so it's no longer getting views. What? Yeah, a prime example. Now, I don't know. The email says your business profile has been removed by Google. Learn more about our restriction policy. To appeal this decision Click appeal below. Google. Learn more about our restriction policy. To appeal this decision click appeal below. Now Google, frustratingly, never gives a reason why your profile is suspended like this. Like I said, this is the second time. Yeah, it's shitty. I know it's frustrating Now. My profile was suspended the first time because the name business Meredith's husband doesn't sound like a business.

Speaker 2 15:43

It's wonderful.

Speaker 1 15:45

And I actually had to. I actually have a business license with the name of the company. Being Meredith's husband, I had to send it to Google to prove to them that it was actually a business. That might be the same problem here. I literally just got this email yesterday, so I don't know. Problem here I literally just got this email yesterday, so I don't know. So one thing I will do is I will as I go through the appeal process, which I know is frustrating, but I don't have any other options.

Speaker 1 16:09

I have to do it, and this is a service that I mean Google is providing for free. I'm not paying to have my business profile listed. I'm not paying for Google to show my information to anybody, so this is a necessary evil, I guess.

Speaker 2 16:25

Not necessary. It's not necessary, it's just it's common, I know, so I got to deal with it and it shows that they're actually doing their job and trying to make sure everything's verified.

Speaker 1 16:37

Yeah, and I will say I would rather they be, let's say, over diligent and occasionally deactivate something that shouldn't be, rather than the opposite.

Speaker 2 16:49

Yes, I agree.

Speaker 1 16:51

Because then the results would, then the general results in Google would probably be kind of shitty. So I need to go through this process.

Speaker 1 16:58

I'm going to kind of document it as I go and I'm going to measure how much it as I go, and I'm going to measure how much time it takes. Oh, very good, because in the past I've had students where this takes like three months. In my case it took about a month. The whole appeal process over the last few years that they offer has gotten much better. Okay, it's gotten way better.

Speaker 2 17:20

That's good.

Speaker 1 17:22

Like a few years ago, like the first time my business was suspended, I did not get an email, they don't notify you, they don't give you a chance to appeal, there is no appeal process, they don't provide a link. It took me a good hour just to figure out what my next step was and to figure out where to go to do that. So the appeal process is easier and I will document it and we'll probably do an episode in the future about what happens.

Speaker 2 17:47

That sounds good.

Speaker 1 17:48

I hope I get it back. You know students say they freak out about this and I say don't worry.

Speaker 2 17:54

I have never seen a situation where a legitimate business didn't get their profile back until and now I'm freaking out, freaking the fuck and now you understand why they're yes, yeah, you know, I do understand I do understand.

SEO Spam and Scam Calls

Speaker 1 18:09

I tried, I try to ease their mind, but I certainly understand.

Speaker 2 18:13

And here I am again um, I have one thing that you can delete. So I've noticed that in my junk mail there are so many people telling me about SEO and offering SEO services.

Speaker 1 18:31

Yeah.

Speaker 2 18:32

Do you ever so do I.

Speaker 1 18:34

So do I. I have in my spam, literally, and every once in a while I'm like you know what I'm going to reply to this person and I give them my name and eventually the conversation comes up Well, what is your business about? And I say SEO. And it's silence. I've done that on the phone too. I've gotten those calls. Somebody called me and they said yeah, we're a data provider for Google and we have a vacancy at the top of the listings for your industry and we have a vacancy at the top of the listings for your industry.

Speaker 1 19:02

I was like, no fucking way, I am so lucky Like I'm going to call this guy back. I called him back and we're talking to him and he's like yeah, so you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, what's your business? I said SEO, click, hang up.

Speaker 2 19:18

Those are scams. I know they are. I know they are. Yeah, I know they are, but they're so. I'm always, when I go through my junk box, I'm amazed at how many there are.

Speaker 1 19:29

There's a ton.

Speaker 2 19:32

Well, it's practically free to send those emails and, as they say in White Lotus, it's a number game.

Speaker 1 19:37

You got to play the numbers.

Speaker 2 19:39

You got to play the numbers.

Speaker 1 19:40

Yeah.