The Friday Five: Curbs on Fake Reviews, Instagram Rewards OG Content, And, Is There a Big Google Update on the Way?

Bonjour everyone and welcome back to The Friday Five. It's been a short week thanks to the Easter holidays (hope you had a good one, by the way!) but that does not mean that there isn’t a smorgasbord of stories from the marketing world that we think you need to know about.

As with every Friday Five, today’s is varied and packed with loads of useful information that’s important regardless of whether you’re a paid social whizz or SEO guru.

Enough talk, let’s get to it.

1. Shopify Hoping to Get Creators’ Juices Flowing

Known as an eCom giant, Shopify appears to be making moves into the creator economy by acquiring Dovetale, a brand that helps create influencer marketing campaigns.

Shopify has already dipped its toe in the water by integrating its ability for users to sell goods into TikTok and Spotify. This though marks the Toronto based company’s attempts to really carve out a market share in this space.

Shopify, it seems, are in a great place to dominate this space. Firstly, they’ve been around for donkey’s years meaning they have a mammoth financial base from which to jump off. By acquiring Dovetale, Shopify can offer advantageous perks to creators, influencers, and video makers.

On top of that, everything remains free for users. These links in bio platforms usually cost a pretty penny but Shopify is offering their, and Dovetails, functionalities for free.

It’s hard to see how competitors such as Pico and Linktree can compete.

Check out Tubefilter’s full story below.

2. Original Content to Be Rewarded by Instagram in a New Algorithm Update

Upcoming changes to Instagram’s infamous algorithm will see a change to how they reward original content vs that which has been reposted.

The idea is to basically reward those who have been real-time and effort into creating new, fresh, relevant content.

In a statement, the head honcho at IG, Adam Mosseri said: “This is specifically focused on the idea of originality.”

He added: “If you create something from scratch, you should get more credit than if you are re-sharing something that you found from someone else.

“We’re going to do more to try and value original content more, particularly compared to reposted content.”

It’s not that IG will completely disregard reposted content they’ll just instead actively promote new and original stuff over it. This update may be viewed as ominous by your favourite meme accounts which re-share content in different formats. It could significantly affect their reach.

On the face of it, this seems like the right thing to do but try telling that to @ladbibile, @daquan, and @epicfunnypage who, with a combined following of 45 million, may well argue that they put as much time into curating their not-always-original content as those that make their own.

TechCrunch breaks it down in this article.

3. Google Update? Soon Come?

Semrush’s Google algorithm update sensor - the internet equivalent of the Richter scale — is flashing red.

As of Thursday 21st, it was saying that there were ‘constant and massive tremors on Google search results'.

It measures the chances of an update out of 10 and currently, it stands at 8.9/10.

Marketers and SEOs reading this everywhere may be trembling but y’all know how important it is to keep eyes on Google’s algorithms for your own website, or your clients’. This writer would gently suggest that readers go on their favourite ranking tracker tool to see how websites that they are invested in are doing in the Google rankings.

See Semrush’s tracker below.

4. Google Testing the Prominence of Forums in the SERPs

As well as updating its algorithm, Google seems to be increasing the prominence of forums in particular search engine results pages. It appears to be at the very early testing phase as users have not been able to replicate the results found by a few Twitter users.

In this screenshot of a SERP for the keyword “most people baby names 2022” (a query that makes as much grammatical sense to us as it does to you). It appears that Google has added a new section entitled “What people are saying”.

Our 2 cents on this is fairly straightforward and can be applied to any new feature Google tests/rolls out. It is this: Google’s whole way they stay relevant and generate revenue is by providing the most relevant answer to people’s queries. This potentially new type of SERP feature is just another manifestation of that. Users who are looking for baby names are, for this writer’s money, far more likely to get more value from reading the views of their peers than some clickbaity article like “You won’t BELIEVE these POPULAR baby names!”

SEO Roundtable summerise all of this here.

5. Fake Reviews to Get a 1-Star Rating by Government in New Legislation

Soon, people across the UK will become better protected from dodgy reviews that are bought by businesses.

Websites will have to take to ‘reasonable steps’ to ensure that the reviews that are being posted on their site are genuine and have no monetary incentive behind them. These new rules will prevent companies from paying users to leave fake reviews on their site, bigging up products that they have not tried or don’t have an honest opinion on.

Remarkably, the average UK household spends ￡900 a YEAR after being influenced by online reviews.

In these new proposals, watchdogs will be permitted to fine firms up to 10% of their global turnover if they are found to be purchasing reviews. Now, we of course know that those reading this don’t even entertain the idea of buying reviews but we figured it couldn’t hurt to include it in the Friday Five.

The BBC expand on this new legislation in this article.

That's all folks! Have a great Friday and we'll see you next week.

P.S. If you fancy listening to something on your commute (once you've read The Friday Five of course!) then why not check out our brand-new podcast Never Mind The Keywords. You can listen to it here:

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