Ecommerce Management Advisors
Ecommerce Management Advisors
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This week, we heard that Tom Brady had his dog cloned. The former quarterback revealed that his Junie is actually a clone of Lua, a
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The first new
Kevlyn Walsh is a Denver-based art teacher turned entrepreneur. She launched Festive Gal, an Etsy shop, in 2019 after her handmade headband was a hit among Christmas party attendees.
Fast forward to 2025, and Festive Gal is thriving, selling custom gifts and party supplies. A new second site, Bake It Fancy, on Shopify, sells cooking accessories.
Amid the growth, Kevlyn manages employees, production, and, yes, Etsy constraints. She addressed those challenges and more in our recent conversation.
Our entire audio is embedded below. The transcript is edited for clarity and length.
Eric Bandholz: Who are you, and what do you do?
Kevlyn Walsh: I run two brands. My first, Festive Gal, grew mainly on Etsy and offers custom gifts and party supplies to make life more fun. My second, Bake It Fancy, is a new brand focused on baking accessories that help people create beautiful cookies.
Bake It Fancy evolved from a best-selling Festive Gal product. It performed so well that I decided it deserved its own identity. Festive Gal celebrates parties and gifting; Bake It Fancy is all about creativity in the kitchen.
Etsy is how I became a business owner. Before opening my shop, I had no idea what a conversion rate was or how to sell online. It all started with an ugly Christmas sweater party. I made an over-the-top holiday headband covered in tinsel, bows, and a tiny elf.
Everyone loved it, so I made more, opened an Etsy shop, and sold out by Christmas. That success inspired me to keep creating new products and following party trends.
At first, I was still teaching full-time, but my Etsy sales eventually surpassed my teacher salary. By 2019, I quit teaching to run my shop full time — and I’ve never looked back.
The original headbands were too labor-intensive to scale, so I simplified them into paper party headbands with customizable phrases. They became Festive Gal’s signature product. I created designs for birthdays, bachelorette parties, and trending themes — like Game of Thrones fans hosting viewing parties. I made headbands with phrases such as “Hold the Door” and “I Drink and I Know Things,” and they sold like crazy.
Back then, I didn’t think much about trademarks and used pop-culture phrases freely. Now that my business is bigger, I avoid those entirely. Using names like “Game of Thrones” could get a shop flagged. It’s frustrating because Etsy is still full of Disney and other IP-based items, yet enforcement feels aimed at successful sellers. I’ve explored licensing, but the costs, reporting, and low margins made it more hassle than it was worth.
Bandholz: How do you manage custom orders on Etsy?
Walsh: Etsy’s basic customization tools aree limited. Each listing includes an input field that customers must complete before adding an item to their cart, to help prevent missed details. However, sellers only get two dropdown menus and one text box. I have to simplify the listing or get creative for buyers to choose multiple options, such as color, font, and size.
That lack of flexibility makes Etsy’s user interface challenging for complex customizations. In contrast, Shopify has apps that allow unlimited dropdowns and far more personalization features. On Etsy, if a buyer forgets to include key details such as the name for a custom item, I have to message her directly. That extra communication can be time-consuming and slow down production.
Bandholz: How does Etsy define “handmade”?
Walsh: It’s ironic that Etsy promotes itself as a handmade platform. Real success there requires efficiency and operations. To scale, you need systems, employees, and streamlined production — but you can’t build that until you have sales. It’s a catch-22. I’ve had products go viral, but there’s a limit to how many we can make before delays frustrate customers. Etsy doesn’t provide the tools sellers need to manage growth efficiently.
For example, there’s no multi-user access. I can’t give a virtual assistant or employee their own login to handle messages or shipping without sharing my banking information. That makes delegation risky.
As for “handmade,” there’s a lot of gray area. Some sellers import mostly finished products — items 90% made in China — and add customization in the U.S. through embroidery or vinyl. Etsy allows some flexibility there, but the rules are vague. The guidelines mention terms such as “made, sourced, or designed by seller,” which are open to interpretation.
In Etsy forums, sellers debate what those definitions mean and worry whether new policies could jeopardize their shops.
Bandholz: What advice would you give someone considering selling on Etsy?
Walsh: First, define your goals. The platform is perfect if you want only to make “fun money” from a craft you love. Enjoy the creative process, make products that delight you, and celebrate each sale.
But if your goal is to replace your full-time income, you have to approach Etsy strategically. Choose a product that can scale efficiently. On Etsy, sales compound. The algorithm rewards momentum, so when a listing sells, it signals that people want that product. Etsy earns a percentage of each sale, and it promotes listings that generate revenue. So the more you sell, the more exposure your products get.
Plan early for operations. Will you hire help? How will you handle shipping? Can you manage rush orders for personalized gifts?
Etsy customers often order last-minute, so reliability is key. I’ve worked through the flu to meet deadlines because I didn’t want to disappoint buyers. Now that I have employees, that stress is lighter, but it took planning and growth.
Bandholz: Is Etsy your main sales channel?
Walsh: Yes, Etsy is still my primary source of sales, and I’ve had great success there. But the platform’s overall traffic has declined. I think part of the issue is quality control — Etsy has allowed too many low-quality sellers. Cheap, mass-produced items clutter search results. It’s lost some of the curated, handmade charm that made it special.
Because of that, I’m working to grow off-platform. Relying solely on Etsy feels risky, especially with how inconsistent their seller support has become. Recently, Etsy deployed AI bots to remove non-handmade listings, but the system often flags legitimate shops.
Many legitimate sellers have had top-performing products or entire shops deactivated with no way to reach a human for help. It’s a tough situation for honest creators trying to run real handmade businesses.
Bandholz: Is the new baking brand on Etsy, too?
Walsh: No, I’m building Bake It Fancy on Shopify and driving traffic through Meta ads and content creation. I even converted part of my warehouse into a “media room” with a fake kitchen and a real oven from Home Depot, so I can film baking videos and tutorials. My goal is to grow this brand independently, without relying on third-party marketplaces.
I’ve learned a lot about ecommerce after years of running Festive Gal on Etsy. Now I’m ready to apply those lessons — using Shopify, ads, and content — to build a brand with full control.
Content creation used to be hard for me. I have a three-year-old and a one-year-old, and my home kitchen isn’t ideal for filming. This new setup makes it easier and more fun. Plus, baking content is naturally engaging. Watching someone decorate cookies is satisfying and creative.
With Festive Gal, I never relied on content since Etsy brought steady traffic. But Bake It Fancy is different. Cooking is so demonstrable and visual that I can easily film with just my hands, and I don’t even need to get camera-ready every time.
Bandholz: Where can folks buy your products and follow you?
Walsh: My Etsy shop is Festive Gal. Festive Gal also has a Shopify website, FestiveGal.com. BakeItFancy.com is ramping up. I’m on Instagram and LinkedIn.
If you’ve been working on your website for a couple of years, chances are that your website has become a giant collection of posts and pages. When writing a post, you might find out you’ve already written a similar article (maybe even twice), or you might get a feeling that you’ve written something related that you can’t find anymore. This can become even more complex when you’re not the only one writing for this website. Cleaning up your older content can be overwhelming; that’s why regular content maintenance is key. In this post, we’ll give you some tips to create a good content maintenance strategy!
Table of contents
Key takeaways
Regular content maintenance is crucial for managing a vast collection of posts and pages on your website.
Reserve dedicated time for content audits and pruning to prevent confusion for site visitors and competition between similar articles.
Utilize data from Google Analytics and Search Console to assess content performance and decide what needs updating, merging, or deleting.
Focus on monitoring key content that drives conversions or ranks well in search engines, and enhance internal linking to improve visibility.
Employ tools like Yoast SEO Premium to streamline the content maintenance process, ensuring your website remains organized and effective.
1. Reserve time for content maintenance
It might be tempting, especially if you love writing, to keep on producing new content and never look back. But if you do this, you might be shooting yourself in the foot. Your articles that are very similar to each other can start competing with each other in the search results. Having too much content that isn’t structured can also confuse site visitors; they might not know where to go on your website. And the more content you get, the more overwhelming cleaning up your content becomes. So, don’t wait too long with the implementation of a proper content maintenance strategy.
It’s a good idea to plan regular SEO audits and reserve some time for content pruning. How often you should do that depends on a few factors, such as the amount of content you already have, how often you publish new articles, and how many people you have on your editorial team.
At Yoast, we try to plan structured sessions with our content team to improve existing content. We create lists or do an audit (more on that later) and start cleaning up. But in addition to these sessions, we also improve and update blog content in our usual publication flow. When we encounter articles that need updates, we add them to our backlog, assign them to a team member, and update or even republish them on our blog.
2. What does the data say?
When you sit down to actually go through your content and tidy up, it’s sensible to base your decisions on data. Apart from looking at the content on the page itself, you should answer the following questions:
Does the page get any traffic?
Does it have value (meaning that the visitor completed one of your goals during the same session on your site)?
How is the engagement?
How long do people stay on this page?
This kind of data can all be found in Google Analytics. If you go to Reports > Engagement > Pages and screens in the left-hand menu, you’ll get a nice overview of the traffic on your pages. You can even export this to a spreadsheet to keep track of what you did or decided to do with a page.
If you want to know how your articles perform in the search results, Google Search Console is a great help. Especially the performance tab tells you a lot about how your pages perform in Google. It tells you the average position you hold for a keyword, but also how many impressions and clicks your pages get. Check out our beginner’s guide to Google Search Console.
There are a number of tools that make this process easier by providing a list of your content and how it performs. This makes it easier to compare how certain (related) articles rank and get their traffic. One tool we like to use at Yoast is the content audit template by ahrefs. This gives you insights into which content is still of value to your site and which low-quality content is dragging you down. It will give you advice (leave as is/manually review/redirect or update/delete) per URL. Of course, we wouldn’t recommend blindly following such automated advice, but it gives you a lot of insight and is a great starting point to take a critical look at your content.
3. Always keep an eye on your most important content
While it’s not harmful if some older posts escape your attention while working on new content, there are posts and pages that you always need to keep an eye on. You’re probably already monitoring pages that convert, whether that’s in terms of sales, newsletter subscriptions, or a contact or reservation page. But you might also have pages that do (or could do) really well in the search engines. For instance, some evergreen, complete, and informative posts or pages about topics you’re really an expert on. This is the content you want to keep fresh and relevant, and regularly link to. These are the posts and pages that should end up high in the search results.
In Yoast SEO Premium, you can mark these types of guides as cornerstone content. This will trigger some specific actions in Yoast SEO. For instance, if you haven’t updated a cornerstone post in six months, it gets added to the stale cornerstone content filter. You’ll find that filter in your post overview. It helps you stay on top of your SEO game by telling you whether any important content needs an update. Ideally, your score should be zero there. If you do find some articles in this filter, it’s time to review those. Make sure all the information is still correct, add new insights, and perhaps check competitors’ posts on the same topic to see if you’re not missing anything.
The stale cornerstone content filter in Yoast SEO for WordPress
4. Improve your internal linking
A content maintenance activity that is often highly underrated is working on your internal linking. Why invest time in internal linking? Well, first and foremost, because the content you link to is of interest to your readers and helps you keep them on your site. But these links help search engines, such as Google, crawl your content and determine its importance. An article that gets a lot of links (internally or externally) is deemed important by Google. It also helps Google understand what content is related to each other. Therefore, internal linking is an important part of a cornerstone content strategy. All your pages, but especially the evergreen guides we discussed above, need attention, regular updates, and lots of links!
So it’s good to link to your other posts while writing a new one. The internal linking suggestions tool in Yoast SEO Premium makes this super easy for you. But while it’s quite common to link to existing content from our new articles, don’t forget that those new articles also need links pointing to them. At Yoast, we regularly check whether our new posts have enough links pointing to them, especially if we want them to rank!
Implementing a cornerstone strategy
But what about the cornerstone content we discussed above? How do you make sure your most valuable content gets enough links? If you want to focus on these articles, Yoast SEO Premium has just the tool for you: the Cornerstone workout. In a few steps, it lets you select your most important articles and mark them as cornerstones. Then, it shows you how many internal links there are pointing to this post. Do you feel this isn’t in line with the number of links it should have? We’ll give you suggestions on which related posts to link from. And in just a few clicks, you can add the link from the right spot in the related post:
The cornerstone workout in Yoast SEO Premium
As you probably (hopefully!) don’t change your cornerstone strategy every month, it’s not necessary to do this workout every month. If you have a vast amount of content that performs quite well, checking this, let’s say, every 3 or 6 months, you should be fine. However, if you’re starting out, publishing a lot of new content, or making big changes to your site, you should probably do this workout more often. As your site grows, your focal point might change, and this workout will help you make sure you stay focused on the content you really want to rank.
5. Clean up the attic once in a while
We mostly discussed your best and most important content until now. But on the other side of the spectrum, we have your older (and more lonely) content that you haven’t touched in a while. Announcements of events that took place years ago, new product launches from when you just started, and blog posts that simply aren’t relevant anymore. These posts keep filling up your attic, and at one point, you should clean your attic thoroughly. You don’t want people or Google to find low-quality pages or pages showing outdated or irrelevant information and get lost up there.
There are some ways to go about this. You can, of course, go to your blog post archive and clean up while going through your oldest post. Never just delete something, though! Take a closer look at the content and always check whether a post still gets traffic in Google Analytics. In doubt whether you should keep it? Read our blog on updating or deleting old content to help you with that choice. And, if you think a post is irrelevant and you want to delete it, you should either redirect it to a good equivalent URL or have it show a 410 page, indicating that it’s been deleted on purpose. You can read all about properly deleting a post here.
Cleaning up orphaned content
Yoast SEO Premium also has an SEO workout to help you maintain old and forgotten content: the Orphaned content workout. It lists all of your unlinked content for you. Because you never or hardly linked to these pages, we can assume they’re pages you’ve once created but never looked back at. Or, they don’t fit into your current content strategy anymore. That’s why this is a good place to start cleaning up! With the workout, you can go through the posts and pages one by one and consider: is this post not relevant anymore? Then delete and redirect the URL to a better destination in a few clicks! Is it still relevant but outdated? Then update it and start adding links to it from related posts. Did you just forget to link to this post? Then start adding some links! The workout takes you by the hand through all these steps, so it’s easy to keep track of your progress.
The orphaned content workout in Yoast SEO Premium
How often should you do this workout? It’s hard to make a general statement about this because it very much depends on the amount of old content you have, how good your internal linking is, and how much new content you’re creating. If you have a bigger site, it will probably be quite a time investment when you do it for the first time. But if you maintain it and do this workout regularly, on a monthly basis, for instance, you will get it done faster every time!
6. Check your content per topic/tag
When you have a lot of similar articles, they can start competing with each other in the search engines. We call that content or keyword cannibalization. That’s why it’s good to look at all the articles you have on a certain topic from time to time. Do they differ enough? Are they right below each other in Google’s search results on page 2? Then you might have to merge two articles into one to make that one perform better. Depending on the size of your site, you can look at this on a category or tag level or even on smaller subtopics.
In the aforementioned post, we describe in detail how to go about this content maintenance process of fixing keyword cannibalization. In short, you’ll have to create an overview of the posts on that topic. Then look at how all of these articles perform with the help of Google Search Console and Google Analytics. This will help you decide what to keep, merge, or delete!
Content maintenance: you need time and tools!
As you might have already noticed, content maintenance can be quite a task. But if you do it regularly and use the right tools, it gets easier over time. And the easier it gets, the more fun! Who doesn’t want a tidied-up website? It will make you, your site visitors, and Google very happy. So, don’t wait too long to implement a good content maintenance strategy and use the right tools to make your life easier!
Read more: Your website needs SEO maintenance! »
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Edwin Toonen
Edwin is an experienced strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he worked for a top-tier web design magazine, where he developed a keen understanding of how to create great content.
Twenty-five years ago, Google launched a modest advertising product that would evolve into one of the most influential tools in digital marketing.Back then, it was called Google AdWords; today, it is Google Ads.
Over that quarter-century, the platform has transformed in format, scope, and ambition.
While the technology behind Google Ads has evolved dramatically, one question continues to spark debate among marketers: “Was Google Ads better back then, or now?”
To answer that, let’s first look at the major moments that shaped its evolution.
The Evolution Of Google Ads Through the Years
Few platforms have changed as dramatically as Google Ads.
In the early 2000s, advertisers logged into something simple and intuitive: an interface centered around keywords and bids.
But over time, the product grew alongside shifts in consumer behavior, device adoption, and technology. Here are some of the most defining moments in that evolution, as shared through Google’s own product history.
2000: Google AdWords Launches
Google AdWords officially went live in October 2000 with about 350 advertisers. The platform allows self-serve text ads on search results, based on cost-per-click bids.
2002: The Pay-Per-Click Model Expands
AdWords transitioned fully to a PPC model, giving advertisers the ability to pay only when users click their ads. This shift laid the groundwork for the accountability marketers still expect from digital ads today.
2005: Analytics And Conversion Tracking Arrive
After acquiring Urchin Software, Google launched Google Analytics, bringing much-needed visibility into campaign performance and website behavior. Conversion tracking follows soon after, tightening the connection between clicks and measurable outcomes.
2005: Quality Score Enters The Auction
In July, Google introduced Quality Score and quality-based minimum bids, tying ad eligibility to keyword relevance and performance rather than pure bid amount. In December, landing page quality was added to the algorithm.
2010: Remarketing Makes Its Debut
Advertisers can now reach users who’ve previously visited their site. This marked Google’s entry into behavioral targeting, which would later become the backbone of the Display Network.
2012: Google Shopping Transitions To A Paid Model
In May 2012, Google announced that Google Product Search (originally Froogle) would become Google Shopping, shifting from free product listings to a paid model using Product Listing Ads. The change, completed in the U.S. by October, aims to improve product data quality and merchant participation.
2013: Enhanced Campaigns Unify Devices
Google launched Enhanced Campaigns, consolidating desktop, mobile, and tablet targeting into a single structure. This simplifies management and allows bid adjustments based on device, location, and time.
2018: Rebranding To Google Ads
Google retired the AdWords name and introduced “Google Ads,” reflecting a unified platform for Search, Display, YouTube, Shopping, and app campaigns. Smart Campaigns debut, aimed at helping small businesses use automation effectively.
2021: Performance Max launches
In November, Google unveiled Performance Max, an AI-powered campaign type that reaches audiences across all Google properties from a single goal-based campaign. It represents a major step toward automation and multi-channel integration.
2023-2025: Generative AI And Transparency Updates
Google introduced Gemini-powered tools for creative generation and conversational campaign setup, alongside new transparency features in Performance Max. Advertisers gain asset-level insights and expanded brand controls.
What The Early Years of Google Ads Offered
The early years of Google Ads were simpler. In some ways, that simplicity was its biggest strength.
Advertisers had complete control over their campaigns. You picked your keywords, set bids manually, and saw immediate cause and effect. Every metric was transparent. If performance changed, you knew (almost) exactly why.
The learning curve was also more manageable. Smaller advertisers could compete with minimal budgets and basic knowledge of keyword matching.
Many early adopters built thriving businesses from nothing more than a spreadsheet of bids and a few lines of ad copy. In those days, optimization was a craft defined by hands-on management, not machine learning.
Ad costs were also lower, and competition was thinner. A small business could afford to experiment without being priced out by large brands or aggressive automated bidding strategies.
But simplicity came at a cost. Campaign management was time-consuming, requiring manual bid adjustments and constant monitoring.
There was no formal cross-device attribution (reports didn’t arrive until 2016), no remarketing (until 2010), and no way to scale campaigns beyond a few thousand keywords without significant effort. Reporting was limited, and insights were confined to surface-level performance data.
The early Google Ads environment rewarded technical skill and persistence. It was direct, measurable, and transparent. But, it was also labor-intensive and limited in scale.
What Google Ads Offers Advertisers Today
Today’s Google Ads platform bears little resemblance to its early years.
Campaigns are no longer built around individual keywords or devices, but around audiences, signals, and outcomes. Machine learning drives bidding, creative, and placements in real time, analyzing millions of data points per second.
Advertisers now have access to tools that were once unimaginable.
Smart Bidding strategies like Maximize Conversion Value and Target ROAS use historical and contextual signals to optimize bids automatically.
Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns reach users across Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, and Maps without manual segmentation.
Creative tools have appeared just as rapidly. Gemini-powered AI features can generate ad copy, images, and videos aligned with brand tone and performance goals. Advertisers spend less time on repetitive tasks and more on strategy, messaging, and measurement.
At the same time, data integration has reached new levels. With Google Analytics 4, enhanced conversions, and first-party data connections, advertisers can measure and optimize complex user journeys while staying compliant with privacy standards.
The trade-off, of course, is control.
As automation grows, transparency into individual performance levers diminishes. You can’t always pinpoint which keyword, audience, or placement drove a conversion.
For some advertisers, that loss of granularity remains frustrating. But for many others, the efficiency and predictive power of automation far outweigh what was lost.
Modern measurement also operates under tighter privacy standards. With the loss of cookies and growing restrictions on user-level tracking, Google Ads has leaned on modeled conversions and consented first-party data to maintain accuracy.
For seasoned advertisers, this has shifted the skillset required for success. It’s gone from purely tactical management to data stewardship and strategy.
Teams that can align CRM data, offline conversions, and privacy-safe remarketing signals now have a competitive edge. It’s no longer just about optimizing for clicks; it’s about understanding the full data pipeline that powers automation.
How Google Is Responding To Advertiser Feedback In Its AI Era
Google’s 25th anniversary message emphasized one clear theme: Advertisers are still at the center of our evolution. That statement reflects an ongoing effort to balance automation with transparency and trust.
Performance Max, initially criticized for its lack of reporting detail, now includes asset-level performance and improved search term visibility.
Advertisers can better understand which creative elements drive results and where their ads appear.
Google also added account-level negative keywords and brand exclusion controls to address long-standing requests for greater oversight.
These updates are also a reflection of how the advertising landscape itself has changed.
Privacy regulations like GDPR and the phase-out of third-party cookies are forcing all ad platforms to rethink data transparency. Advertisers are demanding clearer insight into how machine-learning models use their data, while consumers are insisting on greater privacy.
Google’s move toward more transparent reporting, automated creative controls, and first-party data integrations is as much a response to market pressure as it is to advertiser feedback. The company knows that trust is now a competitive advantage.
When agencies and in-house teams can confidently explain how automation makes decisions, they’re more likely to scale their budgets across Google’s platform. In many ways, Google’s AI transparency efforts are as much about rebuilding confidence as they are about innovation.
The new conversational campaign setup, where marketers describe their goals and creative ideas in natural language, is another potential example of responding to feedback. Many small businesses found campaign setup intimidating; conversational AI simplifies the process without removing human judgment.
Google also continues to reinforce the role of human decision-making.
In its 2025 anniversary blog, Google reiterated that AI’s role is to support advertisers. It emphasizes collaboration between human creativity and automation rather than replacement.
It signals that even as automation deepens, Google recognizes advertisers’ desire to maintain control and understand what the system is doing on their behalf.
The relationship between advertisers and Google Ads has always been one of collaboration, and sometimes tension. But recent changes show a genuine effort to listen, adapt, and make the platform more transparent in an AI-first atmosphere.
“Better” Depends On What You Value
The question of whether Google Ads was better then or now ultimately depends on what you value most as an advertiser.
If you prize simplicity, transparency, and full control, the early years of AdWords were unmatched. Campaigns were manual but predictable. You could see every moving part and trace every click to a decision you made.
If you value scale, efficiency, and advanced targeting, today’s Google Ads is undeniably better. The ability to reach audiences across channels, powered by real-time automation and predictive data, has expanded what’s possible in digital marketing.
What’s clear across both eras is Google’s willingness to evolve alongside advertisers. Every major shift has aimed to improve relevance, performance, and user experience.
While not every change has been universally welcomed, the intent, to balance automation with advertiser trust, has remained consistent.
After 25 years, Google Ads continues to define the standard for paid media. The platform may look different, but its purpose hasn’t changed: helping businesses connect with people in meaningful, measurable ways.
Whether that’s better or worse depends less on the tool itself, and more on how we choose to use and embrace its technology.
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Featured Image: Who is Danny/Shutterstock
Google’s Preferred Sources tool is meant to let fans of certain websites tell Google they want to see more of their favorite sites in the Top News feature. However, Google is surfacing copycat spam sites, random sites, and parked domains. Some of the sites appearing in the tool are so low quality that only their home pages are indexed. Shouldn’t this tool just show legitimate websites and not spam?Google Preferred Sources
Google’s Preferred Sources feature gives users control over which news outlets appear more often in Google’s Top Stories feature. Rather than relying on Google’s ranking system alone, users can make their preferred news sources appear more frequently. This change doesn’t block other sites from appearing, it only personalizes what a user sees to reflect their chosen sources. Preferred Sources enablers users to have more control over which news sources appear more often.
Similar Domains In Preferred Sources
What appears to be happening is that people are registering domains that are similar to those of well-known websites. One way they’re doing it is by domain squatting on an exact match to domain name using a different TLD. For example, when a popular domain name is registered with a .com or .net the domain squatters will register the same domain name using a .com.in or .net.in domain name.
Screenshot Of A Random Subdomain Ranking For Automattic
Preferred Sources Errors
It’s unclear if people are registering domain names and adding them to the Preferred Sources tool or if they are being added in some different manner. A search for a popular SEO tool surfaces the correct domain but also a parked domain in the Indian .com.in ccTLD:
Screenshot Of An Indian Parked Domain
What is known is that people are registering copycat domains but how they’re getting into Google’s Preferred Sources tool is not well known. Preferred Sources is currently available in the USA and in India, which may explain the Indian domains showing up in the tool.
Screenshot Of Indian NYTimes Parked Domain
For example, a search within the Preferred Sources tool for Huffpost surfaces a copycat site on an Indian country code level domain.
Screenshot Of HuffPost In Source Preferences
That site Indian Huffpost site features articles (and links) to topics like payday loans, personal injury lawyers, and luxury watches. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t look like Google is indexing more than the home page of that site.
Screenshot Of A Site Search
There’s also an Indian site squatting on Search Engine Journal’s domain name.
Screenshot Of SEJ In Source Preferences Tool
What Is Going On?
It’s possible that SEOs are registering copycat domains and then submitting their domains to the Preferred Sources tool. Or it could be that Google picks them up automatically and is just listing whatever is out there.
Picture it: I’m minding my business at a party, parked by the snack table (of course). A friend of a friend wanders up, and we