Funny how 25 years of Google Organic SEO algorithm changes have various names like Panda, Penguin, Medic, E-A-T etc that marked significant steps in the evolution of Google's improvement of organic search-engine marketing.
Believe me, Google has been very, very good to me. Surely. But one of my not-so-favorite follow ups to that is the phrase "Google giveth and Google taketh away"...
In terms of a 25 year recap, there seems to be nothing similar in the PPC universe of literature that I can find. Surely someone's got some nicknames for when the AdWords / Advertising algo got tweaked and everyone in the industry scurried to figure things out.
A couple of examples for me were when the Search Term Report (later the Search Query Report) got explained to me by a Google Rep and it became obvious what next steps were in terms of new keywords, negative keywords and overall strategy. A very positive step.
Next was when Google started obscuring words on this critical concept / report - first for organic traffic - and then later for AdWords traffic. A little (like 2-3%) seemed explainable as removed for privacy reasons, but as this number increased - in the organic world (in some cases) to over 90% - with similar, slower changes in AdWords, it seemed quite like something else was going on. Bigger and bigger numbers did not comport with a similar increase in queries that contained private information. Besides, we all remember back in the day when we could see what seemed to be 100% of the actual terms used as found in logfiles and later Google Analytics, what percentage of that dataset was actually containing private information? (Yes, there were clever ways to reveal extremely useful information, but it usually didn't include keywords that contained any private information - it usually ended up with finding the "money" keywords rather than starting with them, but that's a different story.)
Also - hard to put these in order - xml uploads for shopping, AdWords Editor, smart bidding, autobidding - Quality Score - Ad Rank - expanded broad match - ETA - RSA - customer lists - the removal of useful tracking cookies, the increasing death of the longtail, etc etc all on the way to what seems to be their ultimate goal of what I call "the rise of keywordless" advertising as CPC continued to rise and rise and rise.
I had several decent clients for over a decade - several who I never met in person, spent well over a million in ad spend, and while these clients happily grew on PPC driven lead-gen and shopping cart sales, they got acquired by much larger companies and I got sidelined by internal teams that did what I did and of course that was the end of that - so I lost track of some of the larger changes a few years ago. One particular memorable client over 10 years ago fired me when I surfaced the junk traffic they were purchasing and explained about negative keywords as they had sold their boss on the increasing numbers of PPC driven traffic - and they were increasingly rewarded as the ad spend increased. More budget allocated to their department was supposedly making them look better and better inside the company. I was glad to lose them.
Recently, I reactivated an old, very small client which had become blocked, likely because an SSL cert had failed and in the process of sorting this out, I learned that Google had killed their otherwise excellent technical support department. First it was due to Covid? Then it was gone without so much as a whimper. Remember 1-866-2-Google (866-246-6453)? It still works - but it leads to a dead end. This is a real loss and it seems to have died without a whimper. Funny that.
So, when a nice Google Advertising rep called me to imply she was my own tech support person I took the bait. This seemed to be the right thing, at the exact right time for me. Her intent it seems was to sell me on PMAX (which she never named or explained) and we all know what happens when THAT mess is turned on without regard to extreme modification to make it sort-of work. There were lies, misdirection, phony transferal of calls to departments that no longer existed, failure to refund money wasted on phony bot traffic, etc. You know the drill.
Some of these changes were well done, needed, and quite positive. Others, not so much.
There are plenty more significant algo changes, most of which I have either forgotten or missed in real-time.
I have a few friends in the industry and I was able to ask questions of them to figure out what was going on. I may write up that a bit later on but it would be cool to get other's opinions, stories, etc.
Now along comes the actual admission (leak?) about how Google manipulates a phony auction to increase their profits.
Remember how Google once had a corporate code of conduct that was "Don't be Evil?" They fired the employees who tried to complain that Google was increasingly stepping away from this code. They probably silenced them too.
My puny understanding of these few issues set up a skeleton of significant changes which deserve names, dates and discussion - many of which follows their public stock offering. This all seems to need fleshing out - especially after SEL celebrated this 25 year anniversary with "Google Search at 25: SEO experts share memorable moments" which never even mentions the word PPC.
Can WebmasterWorld peeps flesh this out a bit more than I can?
This here is a good start - [
ppchero.com...] and I'm sure there's much more.
If this isn't the place for this kind of discussion, my apologies - please sticky me or suggest here where I might learn more or hash this out elsewhere to conduct this type of discussion.
Thanks - as always!
- C
PS - wasn't Bill once a part of this forum? I definitely recall the name from years ago. Maybe it is time to update this article?
[
billhartzer.com...]
