Good morning, SEO can be a bumpy ride, even when you do everything right.
Google confirmed late Thursday that it was experiencing indexing issues with both canonicalization and mobile indexing. Those problems may have started more than a week prior. As we noted in Search Shorts over the last week, many SEOs began noticing big search results changes around September 22 and 23. There is no action to take any time Google has indexing snags other than to wait until the company confirms the issue has been resolved. If your rankings return, you’ll know it was Google, not you.
The brand search ads debate is as old as, well, keyword bidding itself. I still vividly remember George Michie’s presentation on testing brand ad cannibalism at an SMX around 2011. He wrote about it here and again here, too. Aside from the +1 references (remember?), they’re still evergreen articles.
So, I was delighted to see contributor Marcel Smal reference Michie in his new column, “How to bid on your brand name based on incrementality.” As Marcel notes, “CPA targets for your branded keywords are very different when you take incrementality into account.”
Keep reading and I hope you have a successful Monday.
Ginny Marvin,
Editor-In-Chief