Last week, a subscriber to this newsletter shot me a thank-you note for our high-level breakdown of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica data scandal. (You made my day, Sue!)
But there was a lot more to cover—like, why-oh-why was it so easy for one university lecturer in the UK to harvest personal data on more than 50 MILLION Facebook users?!
And then there’s another problem: 94% of marketers use Facebook as a marketing platform. (I sure do.)
Which means we’re going to get a lot of questions about our Facebook advertising strategies (especially if we’re running lead ads). We need to be able to explain what happened, and help protect our colleagues from making the same mistakes.
For those who haven’t used Partner Categories: this was a feature of the Facebook ad platform that allowed marketers like us to target people based on information that isn’t on Facebook. They pulled this data (anonymously) from companies like Acxiom, Epsilon, Experian, and TransUnion.
It was supposed to help marketers target people based on things like what car they drive, their likelihood to move, and even the amount of charitable donations they’d made.
Facebook ads expert Jon Loomer notes that these datasets never proved to be all that great for marketers anyway.
But given how creepy they sound to non-advertisers, it was probably in Facebook’s best interest to shut the project down.
The SEO scandal you never heard of So while everyone was losing their minds about Facebook, a UK SEO was finding a massive hole in the Google algorithm.
In September of 2017, Distilled’s Tom Anthony discovered that you could convince Google that the pages on your site actually belonged to a much larger, more reputable site. Anthony used this hack to rank on page one of Google for some very lucrative terms—ranking alongside Walmart and Amazon.
Anthony did the decent thing and reported the problem to Google. He shut down his experiments, too. Like a good guy.
It took six months for Google to fix it.
Wowee.
Why is this important?
Well, because this "evil" site (the experiment that Anthony ran) was getting traffic out the wazoo—but had zero inbound links. There was nothing to this site except the fact that Anthony used the hack to tell Google that the "evil" site was actually part of a reputable site.
In other words, all this site had going for it was being
(supposedly) part of a more authoritative domain. Which makes it hard for me to entirely believe Google when they insist that there’s no domain authority signal at play in their ranking algorithm.
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Keep doing smart things, friends.
Same time next week! -- Jeffrey Kranz Co-founder and editor Overthink Group
