Ep176- Google Ads Limited Ad Serving Policy: What You Need to Know

Episode 176 contains the notable Digital Marketing News and Updates from the week of August 28 - Sep 1, 2023.1. Google Announces Lighthouse 11 with New Accessibility Audits, and LCP Bug Fix - Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a free tool to help you find and fix issues slowing down your web application. PageSpeed Insights (PSI) reports on the user experience of a page on both mobile and desktop devices, and provides suggestions on how that page may be improved. An open-source tool called Lighthouse collects and analyzes lab data that's combined with real-world data from the Chrome User Experience Report dataset. Google has released the latest version (v.11) of Lighthouse, an open-source tool that helps developers and webmasters measure the performance of their websites. Lighthouse 11 includes a number of new features and improvements, including:New accessibility audits: Website accessibility is not currently a ranking factor and quite likely not a quality signal. However it’s a best practice for a website to function correctly for as many people as possible. Lighthouse 11 introduces thirteen new accessibility audits that help developers identify and fix accessibility issues on their websites.Changes to how best practices are scored: Lighthouse 11 has changed the way that best practices are scored. This makes it easier for developers to understand how their websites are performing and what they can do to improve their scores.Largest Contentful Paint scoring bug fixed: Lighthouse 11 has fixed a bug that was affecting the scoring of Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). LCP is a measure of how long it takes for the largest content element on a page to become visible.Updated Interaction to Next Paint (INP) to reflect it's no longer experimental: Lighthouse 11 has updated the Interaction to Next Paint (INP) metric to reflect that it is no longer experimental. INP measures the time it takes for a user to be able to interact with a page after it has loaded. In my opinion, INP is in line to become an official Core Web Vital in 2024.These changes make Lighthouse 11 a more powerful and useful tool for developers and webmasters who want to improve the performance of their websites.2. YouTube Creators Can Now Remove Community Guideline Strikes - YouTube has announced that creators will now be able to remove Community Guideline strikes from their channels by completing educational courses. This is a new policy that was introduced in June 2023, and it is designed to help creators learn about the Community Guidelines and how to avoid violating them in the future.To remove a strike, creators will need to complete a course that covers the Community Guidelines and how to create compliant content. The course is available in several languages, and it takes about an hour to complete. Once the course is completed, the strike will be removed from the channel.This new policy is a positive step for YouTube creators. It provides them with a way to learn from their mistakes and avoid getting strikes in the future. It also shows that YouTube is committed to creating a safe and positive environment for its users.3. Your Site's Language Doesn't Protect It From Google’s Penalty - Google can issue manual actions to any site, regardless of the language it is written in. This means that sites written in non-native English can still be penalized by Google if they violate the company's webmaster guidelines.Google Search Advocate, John Muller was asked if Google penalizes sites written by non-native English writers. Mueller responded that manual actions and algorithm changes are independent of the native language of the authors or the site language. He also said that Google does not have a list of "bad" languages, and that all sites are treated equally.This means that site owners who write in non-native English need to be just as careful as those who write in English as their first language. They should avoid any practices that could lead to a manual action, such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, and duplicate content.4. How Googlebot Handles AI-Generated Content 🧐 - Google’s Martin Splitt was asked how Googlebot’s crawling and rendering was adapting to the increase in AI generated content during a webinar produced by Duda. Martin’s answer provided insights into how Google handles AI generated content and the role of quality control. The questioner wanted to know if there are any special processes happening on Google’s end in response to the AI content in order to deal with the increased crawling and rendering load?Martin did not explicitly confirm that Google was applying AI detection on the content. However he did confirm that Google was using Quality Detection at multiple stages. Remember, back in December 2022, Google published a research paper (after conducting extensive qualitative and quantitative analysis over 500 million web articles, the largest-scale study conducted on this topic) where they wrote that while their algorithm was written to find low quality content the researchers discovered that the algorithm was successful in detecting AI generated content.So if you are thinking of using AI generated content for your site then you need to ask yourself: What is the purpose of this content? Is it to get ranked? Or is it to look great in front of visitors who visits my site? And the most important question you should be asking: Can I live with a penalty from Google?You can watch the Duda webinar here.5. URL Structure Doesn't Matter for SEO, According to Google - Michael Baggelin asked Google's John Mueller if the URL structure plays a role when it comes to ranking. Here is the original question:“I realize today while research of company service and location in a combination at category structure. Always put /services/ before /location/ (site/service/location/) and bare in mind that location search might always differ on mobile search… automatically I would say ;) how about that?”John replied with this: “I'm trying to think of where this could play a role, and I don't think there's anything on the SEO side where it would. I could see it being relevant for UX or marketing though, maybe users care more about "service" or "location" and seeing it faster in the URL helps them (in search, we don't show URLs that much, but they can see them in the browser bar). For SEO, we see URLs more as identifiers, with very few exceptions.”In conclusion, your URL structure does not help you with ranking. You need quality content.6. Google Debunks Redirect Myths: What You Need to Know - In a recent video, Google Search Advocate John Mueller debunked several myths surrounding redirect types. The conversation dispelled long-standing confusion surrounding how Google handles various redirects. One myth is that the use of one redirect type over another can significantly impact PageRank. Mueller clarified that Google does not treat different redirect types differently when it comes to PageRank.Another myth is that permanent redi...