Using AWS Data Lake and S3 With SQL Server: A Detailed Guide With Research Paper Dataset Example

The integration of AWS Data Lake and Amazon S3 with SQL Server provides the ability to store data at any scale and leverage advanced analytics capabilities. This comprehensive guide will walk you through the process of setting up this integration, using a research paper dataset as a practical example.

What Is a Data Lake?

A data lake serves as a centralized repository for storing both structured and unstructured data, regardless of its size. It empowers users to perform a wide range of analytics, including visualizations, big data processing, real-time analytics, and machine learning.

When Should You Use Distributed PostgreSQL for Gen AI Apps?

Postgres continues to evolve the database landscape beyond traditional relational database use cases. Its rich ecosystem of extensions and derived solutions has made Postgres a formidable force, especially in areas such as time-series and geospatial, and most recently, gen(erative) AI workloads.

Pgvector has become a foundational extension for gen AI apps that want to use Postgres as a vector database. In brief, pgvector adds a new data type, operators, and index types to work with vectorized data (embeddings) in Postgres. This allows you to use the database for similarity searches over embeddings.

Comprehensive Guide to Data Analysis and Visualization With Pandas and Matplotlib

Data analysis and visualization are fundamental skills in the realm of data science. Python, a versatile programming language, offers robust libraries like Pandas and Matplotlib to facilitate these tasks. Pandas provides powerful data manipulation capabilities, while Matplotlib is excellent for creating a wide range of visualizations. This tutorial will walk you through the process of analyzing a dataset and creating insightful visualizations using these libraries. By the end of this tutorial, you will be equipped with the knowledge to handle data more effectively and present your findings visually.

Data Preparation

The first step in any data analysis project is to prepare the data. Data preparation involves collecting, cleaning, and organizing data into a structured format. We'll start by importing the necessary libraries and creating a sample dataset that includes information on various products, their sales, and profit figures.

The Role of Data Engineering in Building Scalable AI Systems

Data is the new oil. It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, etc. to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; so data must be broken down and analyzed for it to have value. — Clive Humby, 2006

One of the most clichéd yet true phrases is that technology changes every day and impacts everything. Artificial intelligence is one of the most prominent disciplines bringing disruptions to every industry around the world. With computing technology being upgraded and improved yearly, artificial intelligence (AI) technology is ushering in a new era of innovation across various industries. From healthcare and wellness to finance and manufacturing, AI-powered solutions are transforming the norm of how businesses operate, offer insights, and make well-informed decisions like never before. However, to be effective on a global scale, AI requires a massive amount of data to learn from and be trained on. Therefore, a robust foundation of data engineering is essential for every successful AI application.

Handling Alerts and Popups in Appium

It is common for any mobile application to show alerts and popups. These alerts and popups prompt users to grant various permissions, like contacts, notifications, etc. However, they need to be handled when performing mobile application testing. Though there are many approaches to handling these interactions, choosing the right tool and technique is important to ensure a seamless mobile app testing experience. 

Handling alerts and popups in Appium is essential for achieving efficient test execution, enhanced test coverage, and more. In this Appium tutorial, let’s understand the different types of alerts and popups in Appium and how to handle them in our mobile automated tests.

Even More OpenTelemetry!

I continue to work on my OpeneTelemetry demo. Its main idea is to showcase traces across various technology stacks, including asynchronous communication via an MQTT queue. This week, I added a couple of components and changed the architecture. Here are some noteworthy learnings; note that some of them might not be entirely connected to OpenTelemetry.

Here's an updated diagram. New components appear in violet, and updated components appear in green.

Getting Started With AI Functions

This past week we went "all-in" on AI functions. An AI function is the ability to create AI assistant logic, allowing the chatbot to "do things," instead of just passively generating text.

To understand the power of such functions you can read some of our previous articles about the subject.

How To Build a Simple GitHub Action To Deploy a Django Application to the Cloud

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) capabilities are basic expectations for modern development teams who want fast feedback on their changes and rapid deployment to the cloud. In recent years, we’ve seen the growing adoption of GitHub Actions, a feature-rich CI/CD system that dovetails nicely with cloud hosting platforms such as Heroku. In this article, we’ll demonstrate the power of these tools used in combination — specifically how GitHub Actions can be used to quickly deploy a Django application to the cloud.

A Quick Introduction to Django

Django is a Python web application framework that’s been around since the early 2000s. It follows a model-view-controller (MVC) architecture and is known as the “batteries-included” web framework for Python. That’s because it has lots of capabilities, including a strong object-relational mapping (ORM) for abstracting database operations and models. It also has a rich templating system with many object-oriented design features.

Embracing Responsible AI: Principles and Practices

Today we use AI to offer simpler solutions to intricate problems in various sectors such as education, transportation, finance, and healthcare. Due to this reason, it is very important to adhere to best practices and standards. Adhering to AI principles is not a matter of ethics but is essential for establishing trust promoting fairness and ensuring the advancement of AI technologies. These guiding principles are crafted to instill confidence, mitigate risks, and ensure that AI contributes positively to society while respecting rights and ethical values.

Microsoft Responsible AI Guidelines 

Ethical artificial intelligence encompasses creating, implementing, and overseeing AI systems in a responsible way. The goal is to optimize the benefits of intelligence while mitigating risks and negative impacts. Here are key reasons why embracing AI practices is paramount and Microsoft Identified the six principles below.

ChatGPT: Your Guide to SQL Query Translation Between Databases

Everyone knows that ChatGPT is perfect for translating between many human languages. But did you know that this language model can also convert SQL queries between various database dialects?

Whether you are transitioning from MySQL to PostgreSQL, SQL Server to Oracle, or any other combination, ChatGPT can assist in accurately translating your SQL queries. This capability extends beyond simple syntax changes, providing insights into how database systems handle data types, functions, and constraints. By leveraging ChatGPT for SQL translation, you can ensure a smoother and more efficient transition between database systems, maintaining data integrity and query performance.

Takeaways From Day 2 of the Snowflake Summit 2024

Snowflake Data Cloud Summit 2024 has taken the data world by storm, showcasing groundbreaking innovations that empower enterprises to harness the power of AI and drive unparalleled value from their data. From advancements in Snowflake Cortex AI and Snowflake ML to enhanced data collaboration and developer tools, the event has set the stage for a new era of enterprise AI.

Strengthening the Data Foundation

During the Product Keynote, Christian Kleinerman, SVP of Product at Snowflake, emphasized the importance of strengthening the data foundation. "Our single goal with the Snowflake AI Data Cloud is to help you get more value out of your data and help you achieve the goals for your company faster, better, and, of course, leverage trends like artificial intelligence," Kleinerman stated.

Useful CSS Tips And Techniques

If you’ve been in the web development game for longer, you might recall the days when CSS was utterly confusing and you had to come up with hacks and workarounds to make things work. Luckily, these days are over and new features such as container queries, cascade layers, CSS nesting, the :has selector, grid and subgrid, and even new color spaces make CSS more powerful than ever before.

And the innovation doesn’t stop here. We also might have style queries and perhaps even state queries, along with balanced text-wrapping and CSS anchor positioning coming our way.

With all these lovely new CSS features on the horizon, in this post, we dive into the world of CSS with a few helpful techniques, a deep-dive into specificity, hanging punctuation, and self-modifying CSS variables. We hope they’ll come in handy in your work.

Cascade And Specificity Primer

Many fear the cascade and specificity in CSS. However, the concept isn’t as hard to get to grips with as one might think. To help you get more comfortable with two of the most fundamental parts of CSS, Andy Bell wrote a wonderful primer on the cascade and specificity.

The guide explains how certain CSS property types will be prioritized over others and dives deeper into specificity scoring to help you assess how likely it is that the CSS of a specific rule will apply. Andy uses practical examples to illustrate the concepts and simplifies the underlying mental model to make it easy to adopt and utilize. A power boost for your CSS skills.

Testing HTML With Modern CSS

Have you ever considered testing HTML with CSS instead of JavaScript? CSS selectors today are so powerful that it is actually possible to test for most kinds of HTML patterns using CSS alone. A proponent of the practice, Heydon Pickering summarized everything you need to know about testing HTML with CSS, whether you want to test accessibility, uncover HTML bloat, or check the general usability.

As Heydon points out, testing with CSS has quite some benefits. Particularly if you work in the browser and prefer exploring visual regressions and inspector information over command line logs, testing with CSS could be for you. It also shines in situations where you don’t have direct access to a client’s stack: Just provide a test stylesheet, and clients can locate instances of bad patterns you have identified for them without having to onboard you to help them do so. Clever!

Self-Modifying CSS Variables

The CSS spec for custom properties does not allow a custom property to reference itself — although there are quite some use cases where such a feature would be useful. To close the gap, Lea Verou proposed an inherit() function in 2018, which the CSSWG added to the specs in 2021. It hasn’t been edited-in yet, but Roman Komarov found a workaround that makes it possible to start involving its behavior.

Roman’s approach uses container-style queries as a way to access the previous state of a custom property. It can be useful when you want to cycle through various hues without having a static list of values, to match the border-radius visually, or to nest menu lists, for example. The workaround is still strictly experimental (so do not use it in production!), but since it is likely that style queries will gain broad browser support before inherit(), it has great potential.

Hanging Punctuation In CSS

hanging-punctuation is a neat little CSS property. It extends punctuation marks such as opening quotes to cater to nice, clean blocks of text. And while it’s currently only supported in Safari, it doesn’t hurt to include it in your code, as the property is a perfect example of progressive enhancement: It leaves things as they are in browsers that don’t support it and adds the extra bit of polish in browsers that do.

Jeremy Keith noticed an unintended side-effect of hanging-punctuation, though. When you apply it globally, it’s also applied to form fields. So, if the text in a form field starts with a quotation mark or some other piece of punctuation, it’s pushed outside the field and hidden. Jeremy shares a fix for it: Add input, textarea { hanging-punctuation: none; } to prevent your quotation marks from disappearing. A small tip that can save you a lot of headaches.

Fixing aspect-ratio Issues

The aspect-ratio property shines in fluid environments. It can handle anything from inserting a square-shaped <div> to matching the 16:9 size of a <video>, without you thinking in exact dimensions. And most of the time, it does so flawlessly. However, there are some things that can break aspect-ratio. Chris Coyier takes a closer look at three reasons why your aspect-ratio might not work as expected.

As Chris explains, one potential breakage is setting both dimensions — which might seem obvious, but it can be confusing if one of the dimensions is set from somewhere you didn’t expect. Stretching and content that forces height can also lead to unexpected results. A great overview of what to look out for when aspect-ratio breaks.

Masonry Layout With CSS

CSS Grid has taken layouts on the web to the next level. However, as powerful as CSS is today, not every layout that can be imagined is feasible. Masonry layout is one of those things that can’t be accomplished with CSS alone. To change that, the CSS Working Group is asking for your help.

There are currently two approaches in discussion at the CSS Working Group about how CSS should handle masonry-style layouts — and they are asking for insights from real-world developers and designers to find the best solution.

The first approach would expand CSS Grid to include masonry, and the second approach would be to introduce a masonry layout as a display: masonry display type. Jen Simmons summarized what you need to know about the ongoing debate and how you can contribute your thoughts on which direction CSS should take.

Before you come to a conclusion, also be sure to read Rachel Andrew’s post on the topic. She explains why the Chrome team has concerns about implementing a masonry layout as a part of the CSS Grid specification and clarifies what the alternate proposal enables.

Boost Your CSS Skills

If you’d like to dive deeper into CSS, we’ve got your back — with a few friendly events and SmashingConfs coming up this year:

We’d be absolutely delighted to welcome you to one of our special Smashing experiences — be it online or in person!

Smashing Weekly Newsletter

With our weekly newsletter, we aim to bring you useful, practical tidbits and share some of the helpful things that folks are working on in the web industry. There are so many talented folks out there working on brilliant projects, and we’d appreciate it if you could help spread the word and give them the credit they deserve!

Also, by subscribing, there are no third-party mailings or hidden advertising, and your support really helps us pay the bills. ❤️

Interested in sponsoring? Feel free to check out our partnership options and get in touch with the team anytime — they’ll be sure to get back to you as soon as they can.

Collective #845

Three.js Shading Language * New magic for animations in CSS * Progressively Enhanced Popover Toggletips

How to Write an Affiliate Product Review (Expert Tips)

Do you want to learn how to write a product review for your affiliate products?

Writing affiliate product reviews on your WordPress site allows you to earn money online. It can also help your audience make an informed decision about the product that you are reviewing.

In this article, we will show you how to easily write an affiliate product review, step by step.

Write an Affiliate Product Review (with Templates)

We will cover a few different topics in this guide, and you can use the quick links below to jump to different sections:

Tips to Create an Attractive Affiliate Product Review

Affiliate marketing is an easy way to make some passive income online. By writing well-crafted product reviews, you can become a trusted advisor for your audience, encouraging them to buy the products you recommend.

However, with so many people writing product reviews, it can be difficult for your review to rank on Google or other search engines. Plus, generic-sounding review articles are unlikely to encourage trust and lead to conversions and sales.

That’s why we recommend using relevant keywords, adding an affiliate disclosure, creating catchy headlines, identifying your readers’ needs, and more.

Here are some tips that you should keep in mind when writing a product review:

Use Facts and Share Your Experience

When writing a review, it is important to start with facts such as specifications, ingredients, or features. This allows your audience to quickly determine if the product will be right for them.

For instance, if you are writing about a skincare product, it is a good idea to list its ingredients and skin type first.

Facts in a review

This automatically builds trust among your audience and establishes your credibility.

You can then add your own experience with the product to give it a more personal touch and provide real-world insights into how it really works.

Search for Customer Reviews

While you will want to provide your own experiences in product reviews, it can also help to read other customer feedback from different sources across the internet.

This will allow you to gain some valuable insights, find out common issues, and acknowledge the overall user experience.

For example, if you are promoting a WordPress plugin, then you can check for customer reviews on WordPress.org and learn about other customers’ experiences.

WPForms customer reviews

Create Transparency

When writing product reviews, you must be transparent. Part of this means adding a disclosure at the top of the blog post that you are going to talk about an affiliate product.

An example affiliate disclaimer on a blog

When you do that, it will show readers that you value their trust, and they are more likely to purchase a product you recommend.

For details, see our tutorial on how to add affiliate disclosure for each product automatically.

Being transparent also means highlighting the product’s positive and negative aspects. This allows readers to set realistic expectations, leading to a more positive user experience.

Identify Needs and Provide Solutions

Before starting a review, you must identify the common challenges faced by your target audience and write your review accordingly. To generate more leads, you must also choose affiliate products that are relevant to your audience’s needs.

For example, if you have a food blog, then you should recommend products that your audience may be interested in like cooking utensils, recipe plugins, and more.

Food plugin review

Use High-Quality Images

It is very important to use high-quality images in your affiliate product reviews to make them visually appealing. This will allow the audience to view the product in detail and examine its features, textures, or functionality, giving them a better understanding of the product.

However, you must remember to optimize your images. Otherwise, they can slow down your site speed, resulting in a negative experience.

To do that, you can use the correct image file format, use image editing software to adjust the image size, and use an image compression plugin.

Optimize image before saving

For more information, see our beginner’s guide on how to optimize images for web performance without losing quality.

Focus on SEO

To help your affiliate product reviews rank higher, you must optimize them for search engines. You can do this by doing keyword research and then adding relevant keywords in the first 150 words of the review.

Other than that, you should focus on long-tail keywords, adding informative and well-written content, adding internal links, using headings, and more. For details, see our tips to optimize your blog posts for SEO.

Create Attractive Affiliate Links

Default affiliate links can be very long and full of random letters and numbers. This can look suspicious or confusing to visitors and doesn’t enhance your branding.

That’s why we recommend using an affiliate marketing plugin to create custom affiliate links like domain.com/refer/affiliate-product-name. This type of link is more attractive, informative, and trustworthy.

For details on how to do this, you can see our guide on how to add affiliate links in WordPress.

Now that you know some tips for creating an engaging review, let’s take a look at how to write an affiliate product review easily.

How to Write a Product Review

Now, let’s take a look at how to actually write an affiliate product review. You can use the following template structure so that you don’t miss any important information.

1. Create a Catchy Headline

It is important to start your affiliate product review with a catchy headline that grabs the user’s attention and accurately represents the product. You should also use relevant keywords in this sentence to boost SEO.

To test if your headline is attractive, you can use WPBeginner’s free Headline Analyzer tool, which allows you to write attractive headlines that drive traffic.

Just type in your headline and click the ‘Analyze’ button.

WPBeginner Free Headline Analyzer Tool

The tool will then show an overall score and give you an analysis summary that you can use to improve the heading.

It will include the sentiment, headline type, and assessment of power words.

word balance headline analyzer

Once you have perfected your title, we recommend adding the affiliate disclosure directly below it to inform readers about the affiliate relationship and build trust.

2. Add a Short Introduction

Next, you can give a brief overview of the product, its intended use, and the target audience that it will be ideal for.

At this point, you can also add an image to showcase the product’s appearance.

Add a short product introduction

We recommend keeping this section short and to the point to boost its effectiveness and make sure that readers don’t feel overwhelmed by information.

3. Add a List of Features

After a brief product description, it is time for you to add a list of its features. This section will help the audience decide if they want to purchase this product or not.

For example, if you are writing an affiliate product review about a contact form plugin, then you can talk about features like premade templates, spam protection, payment gateways, drag-and-drop functionality, integration with other tools, and more.

Add a list of product features

We recommend providing a few lines of explanation for each feature to make your review comprehensive and detailed for the audience. However, if you want to keep your review brief, then you can just add the features as bullet points.

4. Write a List of Pros and Cons

Once you have done that, it’s time for you to add a list of pros and cons to demonstrate the good and not-so-good side of the product.

This helps you create an unbiased review and foster trust among your audience. By addressing some of the product’s downsides, you can set realistic expectations for users and address concerns that they may already have.

Add a pros and cons list

Bonus tip: If you mention a product drawback, then you can add a link to a different affiliate product that has provided a solution for it.

5. Add a CTA

After adding a pros and cons list, we recommend ending the review with a powerful CTA (call to action) that guides the readers towards the next step, which is usually buying the product.

To learn more, you can see CTA (Call To Action) best practices for landing page conversions.

Once you have done that, your product review should look like the following template.

Product review template

How to Design Custom Affiliate Product Review Pages

Now that you know the structure of creating an affiliate product review, you can use SeedProd to build high-converting product review pages.

SeedProd is the best page builder on the market that comes with drag-and-drop functionality, email marketing service integrations, and much more.

It also has hundreds of templates for different niches, which you can use to create an attractive and high-converting product review.

For example, if you are recommending a fitness tracker, then you can use the ‘Fitness and Health’ sales page. For more ideas, just see our list of the best SeedProd kits and templates.

Preview of a product review article in SeedProd

First, you need to install and activate the SeedProd plugin. For details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, visit the SeedProd » Landing Pages screen from the WordPress admin sidebar and click the ‘Add New Landing Page’ button.

Click the Add New Landing Page button

This will take you to a new screen with a list of premade templates. From here, you can use the search box to find the template that suits your affiliate product’s niche.

After that, the plugin will ask you to add a name for the landing page you are creating. Simply add those details and click the ‘Save and Start Editing the Page’ button.

Add a product review page name in SeedProd

Once SeedProd’s drag-and-drop builder opens up, you can use the headline, paragraph, image, and list blocks from the left column to create an attractive affiliate product review.

For details, you can see our tutorial on how to create a landing page in WordPress.

Use blocks to create a product review

You can also use the ‘Button’ block to add an attractive CTA.

Once you are done, just click the ‘Save’ and ‘Publish’ button at the top to store your settings.

Publish your product review page

Bonus: Create an Affiliate Product Box in WordPress

If you feel like it’s too much work to design an entire affiliate product review page, then you can use Pretty Links instead to create a simple product box.

This box will contain a product title, images, description, and a call to action (CTA) to allow users to purchase the product.

Plus, it can be added to any blog post or page, so you don’t need to create a separate page for it.

Product box preview

For more information, see our tutorial on how to create an affiliate product box in WordPress.

We hope this article helped you learn how to write an affiliate product review. You may also like to see our beginner’s guide on how to add affiliate links in WordPress with ThirstyAffiliates and our top picks for the best affiliate marketing tools for WordPress.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Write an Affiliate Product Review (Expert Tips) first appeared on WPBeginner.

Key Insights from Google’s Search Algorithm Leak

Find out how the recent leak of Googles internal documents affects SEO strategies: All key takeaways and the most important implications for optimizing your content in light of the leak.

google-leak-seo-takeaways.jpg

Its been one week since news about leaked API documents providing insights into Googles search algorithm surfaced, and the SEO community has been buzzing like hungry bees trying to extract every bit of valuable information. Google confirmed the authenticity of the documents but also stressed that they are out-of-context, outdated, or incomplete. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile for everyone in SEO to examine what the leaked data implies. Ive taken the time to go through all the details and in this article, Ill share with you the key takeaways and potential implications for SEO, along with a theory about the overall dynamics of searching and finding on the internet supported by this leak.

But first, lets quickly sum up how the Google leak came about and why it seems to contradict earlier statements by Google about the workings of its algorithm.

Google Leak: What has happened?

Although Google has published and regularly updates guidelines on how to rank on their search engine, the true workings of its algorithm remain a black box, and the entire SEO industry revolves around trying to decipher whats going on inside. This is why everyone is so excited about this leak, which involved over 2,500 pages of API documentation. It revealed various aspects of Googles data collection practices and internal systems related to search rankings and was first reported by SEO experts Rand Fishkin and Mike King on May 27, 2024. However, the documents were initially made public on GitHub two months prior on March 27 and removed on May 7, but had already been captured by archive bots. The leaked data included details about ranking factors, data storage practices, and user interaction metrics, although it did not specify the weight or usage of these factors in the actual ranking algorithm.

The documents also contradict several public statements made by Google representatives over the years, particularly regarding the use of clickstream data and the existence of systems like "NavBoost" and "Glue," which employ user click data to influence search rankings.

Key-Takeaways for SEO

The list of implications from the Google leak is extensive. While much of it is speculative due to Google's lack of commentary, Ive distilled the most critical takeaways for SEO to help you optimize your content effectively:

  • There are over 14,000 ranking features detailed in the API documentation.
  • Crucial ranking factors are content quality, link quality, link diversity, and user interactions.
  • Click data (good clicks, bad clicks, long clicks) can influence search rankings.
  • Building a strong, recognizable brand is critical for SEO success.
  • Chrome browser clickstreams are used to gather extensive interaction data.
  • Google has systems to demote pages based on various spam signals and poor user experiences.
  • Google measures siteAuthority, contradicting previous denials of using domain authority-like metrics.
  • Domain registration information and site age can impact ranking, with new sites potentially being sandboxed.
  • Font size and prominence of terms and links (e.g. bold text) matter.
  • Homepage PageRank and trust levels influence how new pages are initially treated.
  • Whitelists exist for queries related to topics such as Covid-19 and elections.
  • Google uses site embeddings to measure topical relevance and consistency.
  • Metrics like content originality scores and keyword stuffing scores impact rankings.
  • Token limits exist, emphasizing the importance of placing key information early.
  • There is no character count for metadata, debunking common SEO myths about optimal lengths.
  • High-quality, user-focused content and gaining diverse, authoritative links remain key strategies.

Theres a lot to unpack here. Before we dig deeper into SEO recommendations, lets focus on once crucial takeaway: Building a strong, recognizable brand is critical for SEO success. This has been theorized extensively and, in my opinion, clearly benefits mainly companies specializing in affiliate advertising, which isn't necessarily good for the broader market.

Why does the Rolling Stone write about Air Purifiers for Pets?

Yes, building a brand is a good way to achieve SEO success, but you know what works even better? Buying a brand. Because, apparently, as soon as a brand is established, the owners will be rewarded by the Google algorithm, no matter what. Lets look at the story of HouseFresh to illustrate this point:

HouseFresh is a site that specializes in product testing. They physically buy, test, and review every product featured on their site. As clearly stated on their site, they earn revenue from affiliate deals. Thus, their success largely depends on how well their content performs on Google. They strictly follow Googles E-E-A-T guidelines (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) for product reviews, so one might expect them to perform well. However, HouseFresh struggles to gain visibility and is consistently outranked by content on big media brands' pages, sometimes written by people who have obviously never seen the product. In two highly recommended blog articles (read them here and here), they describe their struggle for visibility on Google and unveil the questionable tactics of their competitors, backed up by convincing data.

In a nutshell, digital media companies buy and accumulate failing print publications with big brand names (e.g., Rolling Stone, Forbes, Popular Science). They then close print, fire most or all of the journalistic staff, and replace them with content writers who produce marketing content far off the brands original topics. Worse, this marketing content is usually disguised as an independent product test, though the testing seems superficial at best and, according to HouseFreshs analysis, tends to recommend the most expensive product over the best one (since higher-priced products yield higher affiliate commissions).

The huge boost that brand names receive for all their content seems already unfair enoughwhy should Rolling Stone even rank for non-music-related product reviews? Moreover, it incentivizes the complete destruction and commercialization of what used to be journalism. However, to completely overrun their competitors, the corporate conglomerates behind some of the biggest magazine brands of all time (often controlling many unrelated brands simultaneously) have developed an SEO tactic called keyword swarming: identifying valuable keywords or topics where small sites have established a presence and systematically publishing a large volume of content on those topics across multiple sites owned by the same parent company. The goal is to overwhelm and push down the rankings of smaller sites' content by increasing the perceived authority and relevance of their own content in the eyes of search engines. Hence, the strategy aims to drown out competitors by leveraging extensive publishing capabilities and network.

Keyword swarming is allegedly employed by Dotdash Meredith, a digital media company that unites dozens of brands like Peoples Magazine, Treehugger, InStyle, Lifewire, Investopedia, Southern Living, Liquor.com, and many more. Consumer society has conditioned a fair part of the population to trust brand names, and the strategies employed by these big online publishers apparently aim to abuse this trust by selling overpriced and sometimes nonfunctional products while outranking competitors who provide genuinely helpful reviews. We can only hope that Google will find a way to tie the boost for brands closer to their core business and does not continue to reward a cookie-brand that writes about construction work, so to speak.

Implications for SEO

The case of HouseFresh shows that affiliate marketing is not dead yet but threatens to drown in a sea of shiny spam. Regarding the Google leak and what you can do to strengthen your site's rankings, the biggest takeaway is closely related to the story you just heard: build your brand. The leak, along with countless real-life examples, suggests that a strong brand is the best way to guarantee good and stable rankings for your content. This means having a brand presence across social media networks and fostering a growing community of people who share certain interests around your content and brand is crucial. Strengthening your brand (even for small and local businesses) establishes a recognizable identity and trust with your audience and fosters customer loyalty and long-term success.

In terms of content creation, the key implications can be summarized as follows:

  1. Produce appealing, original content and follow E-E-A-T-guidelines.
  2. Use bold text and other ways of visual emphasis wisely.
  3. In information-management, stick to the iceberg-technique.

In conclusion, while the recent leak sheds some light on why certain content outranks its competitors, Googles algorithm remains a black box that can make or break a business. SEO experts must continue to test, tinker, and interpret data as much as possible to stay ahead of the game. As far as we know, the next update to the search algorithm could, once more, change everything. And who knows maybe even the monopoly of Googles search engine will start to crumble one day, and well wonder about the inner workings of DuckDuckGo or some other competitor. For now, I hope you found this article insightful and would love to hear your opinion in the comments!