Hi Readers,
I hope this message finds you:
- Listening to your favorite music
- Looking forward to the changing season
- Enjoying the current projects you are working on
Can you believe we are already into September and 4th quarter begins in less than a month? I was on the phone with a client yesterday and he made a joke of it, “how is it already September when last month was just January?”. For real though. Where does the time go?
We’ve been putting out the Eminent SEO newsletter for a long time now. We started Eminent in 2009 but didn’t officially launch our website or until August 2011. Still, it’s always fun to look back at where you started to see how far you’ve come.
In our 2011 newsletter we talked about:
- How we just launched the first ever version of our company website. I can’t believe we’ve had this site for 13 years now! She’s still cute.
- The Google Panda update. What’s that? Basically, it targeted low quality content. You can read more about it here.
- Google+ was the new “hot” social network everyone had to jump on, which was shut down officially on April 2nd, 2019. But, let’s be honest, it was never that great to begin with…
- A Google Blogger account we set up as an internal “Think Tank”. Does anyone remember Blogger? Fun fact: Blogger is one of the oldest blogging platforms, launched in 1999 and acquired by Google in 2003. Technically it’s still around, but other blogging platforms like WordPress, Tumblr, and Medium have become more popular due to their more extensive customization options.
- A contest to help us name our brand mascot. In case you missed it, Max The Monster won. I thought we would do a lot more with him over the years, but even though he only rarely makes an appearance these days, he’s still our company business card and I always get a smile when I hand it out.
Good To Know in SEO
In its early years, Google only made a handful of updates to its algorithms each year and it was a big deal. Now, Google makes thousands of changes every year. Most of these updates are so slight that they go completely unnoticed. However, from time to time, they roll out major updates that significantly impact the SERPs.
These are the big ones documented over the years:
- Florida
- Big Daddy
- Jagger
- Vince
- Caffeine
- Panda
- Freshness Algorithm
- Page Layout Algorithm
- Venice Update
- Penguin
- EMD (Exact Match Domain)
- Payday
- Hummingbird
- Pigeon
- Mobilegeddon
- Quality Updates
- RankBrain
- Fred
On September 3rd Google Search Central announced the latest update just completed, after 19 days. When they announced the launch they stated: “Today we released the August 2024 core update. It continues our work to improve the quality of our search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search.”
Personally, I am not mad at this. Certain industries are still practicing outdated SEO techniques like keyword stuffing, making city + service pages for every keyword combination, adding misspellings and “near me” terms to titles and headers, etc. and it’s blatantly obvious this is for search engines and not users. However, I think it’s so much more than that. With the introduction of AI and the influx of free and cheap tools, everyone and their grandma is using AI to make content. Problem is, it’s not always that great and a lot of these tools (even the paid ones) are not reliable in terms of generating factual content. Not to mention the blatant copywriting issues and knockoff content. But, that’s nothing new. People have been trying to make shortcuts to content generation for years. I can’t tell you how many spun articles and gibberish content used to rank because spammers were able to get away with crappy content as long as they were able to get enough links to it. Luckily duplicate content and spun articles were addressed pretty early on, but that doesn’t mean that the spammers haven’t continued to look for new shortcuts and ways to manipulate the algorithm. Instead of, I don’t know, just actually making quality content?
Sigh.
If you want to take a closer look at the algorithm changes over the years, check out The Evolution of SEO on our site.
Other Marketing News
Here is a roundup of a few important announcements we think you should know about:
WordPress Just Locked Down Security For All Plugins & Themes
WordPress tightens security with two improvements that will help protect the integrity of all plugins and themes.
Google Ads to upgrade Video Action Campaigns to Demand Gen in 2025
In Q2 2025, Google Ads will upgrade VAC to Demand Gen, offering advertisers expanded reach, creative flexibility and enhanced targeting.
New Google Analytics 4 Benchmarking Data
Google Analytics, GA4, seems to be rolling out benchmarking data, similar to Universal Analytics before it. This feature lets you compare your analytics data to others in your same industry – so you can benchmark how well or poorly you are doing.
From Our Blog
As today’s market continues to change, it’s important for us to evolve and adapt to these circumstances. By leveraging agile marketing strategies, your team can revamp strategies using real-time data and feedback. I wrote a post about it. Check out:
Why Agility Is Crucial to Successful Digital Marketing (and Beyond)
See how crucial agility is for driving a successful digital marketing campaign. Discover how quick adaptation can push your business to new heights.
Should you feel like you want to have a conversation with me about your current marketing strategies, please book a free consultation. I’ll take a look at your needs and we can talk about how my team might be able to help you reach your digital marketing goals. If not, you’ll still get some free insights from me (and an interesting convo!).
Thanks for reading. Looking forward to what the next season brings. Wishing you the best in whatever you are focused on next.
Now get at it!
Jenny
SEO Term of the Day
“Geo-Targeting”
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