Welcome to Part I of Edition No. 47 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
Contents
Tip: Should I Disavow This Link?
Analysis: Make Your GA4 Data Beautiful (Part I)
Tip: Should I Disavow This Link?
A backlink is any link on another website that links to your site. While their impact is much debated (and apparently declining), they are a ranking factor.
Just as important as having backlinks, though, is the nature of those backlinks. i.e. Are they high-quality? Are they from reputable sites? Are they relevant, based on the context of the page and site where they appear?
If not, you may want to “disavow” them.
From Google’s official documentation:
You should disavow backlinks only if:
You have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site,
ANDThe links have caused a manual action, or likely will cause a manual action, on your site.
What, then, is disavowing a link?
We should answer that within the context of a Google Search Console tool that allows you to disavow links to your site.
In practice, this tool is used to let Google know there’s a spammy site linking to your site, and you don’t want anything to do with it.
Kind of like when you’re on a date and an embarrassing acquaintance tries to wave you down from across the street. You tell your date, “I have no idea who that is. Let’s get out of here.”
Why? Because the negative association hurts your reputation. (I’m back to talking about Google Search now.) But unless you did something to acquire that backlink – say, pay for it – you don’t need to use the disavow tool.
Just like if you really didn’t know that person across the street, you wouldn’t be as eager to disassociate yourself from them. Even if they did approach you, it would quickly be apparent to your date that you didn’t know them.
It works the same way with Google. If a spammy site is linking to your site and you have nothing to do with it, they’re able to suss that out. (Don’t ask me how.)
Now, if that person really is part of your past – er, if that backlink really is something you paid to acquire – the disavow tool is for you. Otherwise, Google Search Advocate John Mueller (above tweet) says not to worry about it.
Did you find this tip useful? Share it to help spread the word.
Analysis: Make Your GA4 Data Beautiful (Part I)
If you loved using Google Data Studio to visualize your Universal Analytics data, you’ll probably want to keep doing so with Google Analytics 4.
There are a few changes, though.
You may have noticed that if you connected Google Analytics 4 directly to Looker Studio (formerly GDS), you’re likely to run into an API query limit.
Fortunately, there’s a workaround. And I know this is going to shock you, but it’s to use a third Google product (Big Query) to connect the other two Google products (GA4 and Looker).
Since this is a less-than-minor inconvenience that most of you probably haven’t dealt with, I’m going to show you how to connect GA4 to BigQuery. It’s a straightforward process, but requires quite a few steps.
That being the case, we’re going to connect GA4 to BigQuery this week, and next week in a “part II,” if you will, I’ll show you how to get the data that’s now in BigQuery into Looker Studio.
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