Welcome to Part II of Edition No. 50 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
Contents
I. How To Not Get Accidentally Indexed on Google
II. Media Orgs Decline to Pay for Twitter Verification
III. The Latest Stop on Elon’s Revenge Tour
IV. New GA4 Property Setup Process
V. Initial Learnings from Snapchat’s AI Chatbot
VI. TikTok Teeters with Teens (Just Barely)
I. How To Not Get Accidentally Indexed on Google
On the latest episode of the Search Off the Record podcast, hosted by Google’s Search team, they talk about “Staging and launching a site.”
Two interesting things to note:
If you register a new domain (like, by buying [website].com on GoDaddy, though you shouldn’t use GoDaddy), Google can find it through domain records.
If you have a staging site, Google could also find and index it if you don’t prevent it from doing so.
(I recommend listening to this podcast regularly if you want to learn about the inner workings of SEO.)
🛠 Why does this matter? For No. 1, this could mean buying a domain, publishing a website on it and having it appear in Google search results before you intend it to. The better thing to do while you’re in testing mode would be to have a staging site, which brings us to No. 2.
If your staging site – a test site where you can play around and break things with limited consequences – is live and accessible to anyone with the URL, it could also appear on Google.
What should you do – in either case – to make sure your website doesn’t appear on Google search (or any other search engine for that matter)?
While there are other ways to do this that are beyond my technical know-how, the two most common and reliable ones would be:
Password-protect your site. Search bots won’t be able to crawl any site to which they don’t have the password.
Put a noindex tag on every page of your site.
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II. Media Orgs Decline to Pay for Twitter Verification
The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, BuzzFeed, POLITICO, and Vox all scoffed at the notion on Thursday that they would pay Twitter for the feature, which has been free since it was introduced years ago but will soon be phased out.
CNN said it has no intention of paying for Twitter’s subscription service for its accounts but would make a few exceptions for some key staff.
-CNN
🛠 Why does this matter? What used to be an ego-boosting, prestigious recognition of notoriety – the verified checkmark on social media – continues to lose value, if not be something worth mocking.
Musk wants to charge organizations $1,000 per month to keep their Blue Checkmark – a shrewd but apparently ineffective attempt at making money.
The downside is that it could leave these organizations more vulnerable to impersonators, which was one of the main points of verification in the first place. But bigger organizations that have millions of followers have much less to lose by not paying for verification. (POLITICO, for example, has 4.6 million.)
The ones who really get hurt here are local news sites that only have a few thousand, and can easily be mistaken for a skilled impersonator who wants to wreak havoc and spread misinformation.
This puts the onus even more on users to distinguish between both legitimate accounts and legitimate information, and that’s not encouraging at all.
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