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Update transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to a new Yoast SEO update.

It’s very good to see that you’re all here.

And before I introduce you to our awesome experts, let me introduce myself.

My name is Florie van Hummel, and I’m your host for today.

And today, we’re hosting this in Crowdcast.

And in case you don’t know this program, there’s a couple of things that are good to know.

So first of all, you find the chat at this side of your screen.

And if you press on that question mark, you’ll go to the Q&A section, where you can also upload questions of others.

What’s very good to know is that, yes, we are recording this.

And you can find the recording afterwards on our website.

And after we went through all the news that’s relevant for you, there’s room for questions.

So as I said, make sure to use that Q&A button on the side.

All right, let me introduce you to our two heroes of today.

First of all, meet Carolyn.

She’s been lighting up the digital marketing scene since ’94 and has been everywhere.

From news SEO to e-commerce SEO, you can ask her anything.

I’m super excited to introduce you to our one and only female principal SEO at Yoast, Carolyn Shelby.

Get ready for some serious insights.

Secondly, the man who is always busy, but never too busy, to bring cookies when he’s coming to the office, Alex Moss.

Alex is our other principal SEO at Yoast and is also a director of a UK-based agency.

And he designed his own dog bag.

Alex has also been an SEO for a very long time, so buckle up for an informative SEO update.

In today’s update, Alex and Carolyn will talk about advice for people that are affected by the helpful content updates, the renaming of Woo back to WooCommerce, and much, much more.

So without further ado, let’s get started.

Thanks for having us, Florie.

Enjoy asking you at the Q&A.

Yes, he’s in.

Good job on your first trip as a host.

So welcome to everyone.

I think we need to get my slides in the window.

Yeah, we’re in that.

I can see them.

OK.

If you guys have any questions today, please feel free to ask.

I think Florie already directed you over to the sidebar, but do ask questions.

Do upvote the questions that you like.

That helps us decide which ones we’re going to answer.

And I think we’re ready to get started.

First, before we get started, I want to remind everyone that if you need to learn more about today’s topics, you can go to yoa.st/update-april-2024.

This changes, obviously, for every update that we do, but this is where you’re going to be able to find the recording afterwards if you need it.

We also have how to start with SEO bi-weekly webinars.

That means every other week.

The next one is coming up on May 7.

It starts at 4 PM European Central Time, which is not Central Time in the US.

But if you have more questions or you want to just get signed up ahead of time so that you are pre-signed up, you can follow that QR code, and it will take you where you need to go.

All right, SEO news.

You ready, Alex?

I am ready, always ready.

OK, all right, because I feel like I’ve not had enough coffee today, but I will muddle through.

Let’s do it.

We’ll do it.

All right, so first thing, Google’s offering advice for those affected by the helpful content update.

This was issued on, I think, March 23, maybe 25.

I can’t see the date. 25, yeah.

Over a month ago now already.

So this is now over a month ago.

Well, so this– we cover the news that happened since the last update.

And this must have come out right after the last update, which is why it’s still from March.

But basically, what Google’s saying now is that they’re using a variety of innovative signals and approaches to show more helpful results.

Danny Sullivan specifically is advising people to self-assess their pages.

So what he’s saying is, don’t just whine that you’ve lost traffic.

Look at your content.

Do some critical thinking about your own content.

And be objective in that criticism.

And then make sure you’re iteratively correcting what needs to be corrected.

I know everyone has a tendency to think their baby is the prettiest.

But what Google’s advising is to look at your own content with a dispassionate eye to make sure that you’re providing value.

I like that.

It was just a formal way of saying, your baby is fugly.

Reassess your baby.

Make it look prettier.

Put some nice sunglasses on it.

And maybe more people will like it.

Yeah, yeah.

And it’s always hard to admit that your baby may not be the prettiest baby on the planet, because we all want to think that our baby is beautiful.

But when it comes to the helpful content update, if you find that you suffered after that update rolled out, you do need to take a look at your content and make sure that it’s not only useful, but offering something unique.

Because if you’re saying the same thing that everyone else has said, or something that’s common sense, why should Google promote your content over someone else’s?

And I think that’s really the lens you have to look through.

Yeah.

And I mean, if you go back to the baby thing, weirdly, it does– I mean, I’m a father of a two-year-old.

And I remember that when they’re first born, you get all of these other parents that are telling you how to do something the way that they did it.

But the way that they present that is that that’s the right way of doing it.

And it is different for each person.

But one thing that I can relate to this is that it’s not unique.

Did you know that putting them in a dark room helps them sleep longer than if they were under direct sunlight?

You know what I mean?

Some of it is just common sense.

So that should make sense with content that you’re making.

Don’t make something that’s so obvious that it’s unoriginal, because you just won’t get noticed.

Because it’s not helpful, essentially.

If you’re adding something to it, you can.

Put your baby in a dark room.

And I find also that playing soothing music helps with that kind of thing.

It’s OK to repeat information that everyone else knows.

But you do need to add– you need to add your own twist to it.

You need to add some additional value.

Are you adding value to the academic discourse?

And I think that’s really what they’re talking about.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But it’s good that, at least, they’re being transparent with ways that you can do those things.

But it’s also obvious advice.

Very true.

There was another– Google’s really doubling down on this.

So the helpful content system has changed.

Google’s now saying that, rather than looking at the totality of the content on your site and basing their judgments on, I guess, the percentage of helpful content versus unhelpful content on your site, they are looking at individual sites now in– I won’t say in a vacuum.

But they’ll evaluate single pieces of content on its own merit, rather than painting a broad brush and punishing all of your content.

If you do happen to have one piece of content that’s valuable, they don’t want to punish that one piece of content because all the rest of your content sucks.

So that’s good.

That is a nice thing to do.

I feel like I have that with my ideas, that I’ve got a lot of terrible ideas, but I do have to go through them to get to that good idea.

Every now and then, what is it?

A blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I have idea spam.

But then you get rid of it.

You just purge the bad ideas, and then you have just the good ones at the end, which is a content version of what Google wants to see.

Or you rewrite the bad ideas to make them better.

Yeah.

But yes, all of these bullet points, they’re all things that we’ve been saying for the last months and even years.

It’s the same ethics.

Just be unique, be helpful, make sure you instill trust, and everything else should organically follow.

But yeah, Marie has quite a lengthy post about the way in which the helpful content system has changed, which people should give a read, which of course we’ll share inside the chat and on the post after this is out.

Absolutely.

There will be links to all of these articles in the post afterwards.

So if you want to read it for yourself, which we strongly encourage that you do, you’ll be able to find all of those.

All right.

Let’s move on to the SGE.

There was a study done that reveals a potential disruption for brands and SEO.

And I think we talked about this last time, the SGE box, which most of you can’t see unless you’re in the US.

They are rolling out the test to the UK now.

But even in the UK, not everyone can see it.

When you do see it, you will find that the Search Generative Experience box displaces the top of the search results by about 1,200 pixels on average, which is enough to shove the regular organic results completely down below the fold.

Of the links that they pull for the carousel that is SGE, more than half of them are not from the top organic search results.

So this results in– if you search for a brand, you might get answers in the SGE about the brand, but not from the brand’s website.

They could all be from other websites talking about that brand rather than the brand talking about itself.

And this is going to be very upsetting for product marketers and people from big brands.

It’s really interesting that, right?

Because it’s as though it comes to that perspectives angle as well, a perspective on a brand even that may bring out a more relevant result than what the brand thinks of themselves.

So it may be more objective and therefore more relevant to add in there, which is interesting, right?

Because you’ll cite different sources to cite yourself.

So if we use Yoast as an example, there may be a non-Yoast website talking about Yoast, about us that may be a better angle than how we would define ourselves on our own website, right?

I don’t know that that’s necessarily– I don’t know that that was their goal.

I do know that it seems that they’re favoring long form text content that has– when I did a study of a brand, the brand did not come up in their own carousel, which was disconcerting.

But if I looked at every single article that did come up in that carousel, it was long form text.

And the first word in the title and the headline and repeated a number of times in subheadings and within the text was that brand name.

Now, what do big brands not do on their websites normally?

They don’t talk about themselves.

On their home page, most people have gotten away from having the first word on your home page or in your title be your brand name.

Because a lot of brand markers go, well, they can see our logo.

They know it’s our page.

They came to our site.

They’re not remembering that the search engines aren’t looking at the content in situ.

They’re not looking at it in the context that you see it.

They’re looking at it sort of in the vacuum of space.

So you need to be really obvious about what you’re writing.

I think to get into that carousel form your brand, if you had a very robust about page where you did long form content and had the name of your company first and the name of your company in the H1 and then long form article, not a lot of images or you can have images but make sure you’ve got a lot of text.

Write something to compete with whatever is showing up first and make sure that you’ve linked to it prominently from your footer and probably off of your home page, possibly off of your top nav to give it the juice that it needs.

I think then you can overpower these other brands, these other sites that have written about you because it will be your authority plus you’re satisfying all of the desires of the SGE, which is a lot of content.

Does that make sense?

It does, but now I’m thinking what that mean as an piece of advice to the audience, which you then say maybe on your about page instead of saying about us, you say about Yoast.

So you’re mentioning yourself in the third person.

I would say Yoast colon about us or Yoast colon and then our slogan.

I would make sure that our name is prominent.

What?

Is that natural?

That feels unnatural as though we’re injecting a branded keyword in just for the sake of the search engine, which in turn is something they’re telling us not to do.

But I think it’s perfectly natural because I’m telling people what the page is about rather than being ham fisted and ambiguous by saying about us.

Yeah, I’m just thinking of the way I write my own company website now and again.

I don’t say about the company name.

I’d say about us because you’re already on the site.

Because you’re already on the site and you’re not thinking about that page in a vacuum.

That’s why.

Yeah, well, hopefully that answers Steve’s question of how do you counteract and does this using your own brand name not sound not human.

But like you say, there is definitely arguments say that it is human, right?

I think you can justify it.

I don’t think that’s an unjustifiable position.

Cool.

I hope that answers your question, Meg.

All right.

There was an– let’s see, Gary Illyes said at PubCon that over focusing on links could be a waste of time.

He also said that– you know, Gary– what is over focusing mean?

Gary said– Gary said very specifically that links are not in the top three of ranking factors.

To me, when I hear that because I’m accustomed to dissecting things that people say, when you say it’s not in the top three, that means it’s number four.

Like we know that there are– we know that there are hundreds of ranking factors.

And if it was not in the top 20, wouldn’t he have said it’s not in the top 20?

Why would he say it’s not in the top three if it wasn’t number four?

I think that they’re still– I think they’re still quite important.

And I could cite it a number of cases where I could prove it.

I think they’re pretty important.

But no one should ever obsessively pursue links because links can’t overcome everything.

No, they can’t.

And again, you were right.

What does over focusing mean?

Because if you’re a small business that does something very, very specific, then you probably won’t need to focus too much on links at all or citations or acquiring mentions elsewhere on the web.

Whereas in a very competitive niche, such as payday loans, which I know that not a lot of people in this audience may be doing, but they’re in a world of a search engine resort where I would– I’d be astonished if you could get an SEO who’s in that niche to come on here and say how they made a success of building a site without focusing on links.

So then I look at over focusing.

What is over?

You still need to focus on them, right?

Because otherwise, you will have no visibility.

That’s like saying, try and market something without word of mouth.

It’s very hard to do that.

It’s still possible, but without people talking about your products or service, it won’t spread and the visibility won’t be there.

And therefore, you need to kind of think about links, but not obsess about them.

Yeah, don’t obsess.

There’s a question in the comments, do the links have to be in context rather than an image in order to be counted?

You can absolutely count linked images as links, but to be useful, they need to have alt text that has good anchor text in it, because that alt text becomes what would be the anchor text in a text link.

So hope that’s helpful, but you should definitely continue building links.

Don’t ignore them and don’t– but also don’t buy them or spend tons of money on them, unless, of course, you’re in one of those niches that require it, obviously.

Yes, of course.

And also, with images and alt text, remember you did mention context there, John.

That’s important.

A picture of, I don’t know, a view of mountains may be being used in one post to describe, I don’t know, getting offline and going in the great outdoors.

And another one may be talking about altitude sickness.

And they’ll still use the picture of mountains maybe to describe that element of the post, but that alt text will describe not only what may be in the image if you want it to be, but also describe the context in which you’re using it.

Yeah, it always has to be in context.

Yeah.

Gary also shared that this article, basically, the gist of it is he says that crawl budget is largely a myth and that Google is shifting their focus to URLs are more deserving of crawling.

So therefore, you don’t need to worry about crawl budget.

I would– Alex, you pointed out when we were talking earlier that the word largely in crawl budget is largely a myth sort of negates the it’s a myth thing because it’s either a myth or it’s not.

Yeah, and we know that Google choose every word wisely, especially spokespeople like Gary, especially when you’re in writing as well and not on a panel being asked questions on the spot.

This will have been read three times at least.

It’ll be self-assessed to make sure it’s helpful.

So the word largely, that was all that sprung out to me.

It was in much larger form in my brain.

And I was saying, well, if it’s largely a myth, that means that there’s a small minority that isn’t.

And therefore, something is still useful in a crawl budget.

Why would we ever talk about it?

Why would it even be there if it wasn’t useful for some situation?

Did you see the Princess Bride?

It’s like mostly dead.

You’re either dead or you’re not.

If you’re mostly dead, that means you’re alive a little bit.

So there is still a crawl budget.

But because this was confusing and I think the way they said deserving content will get crawled more often, I think that was a little vague.

So I wrote this slide.

What does this even mean, because I find myself asking that a lot, right?

I think when Gary says that deserving content is going to be crawled more often based on search demand, what he means is the frequency of the crawl is related to the popularity, which is usually volume plus velocity, of a search topic.

So if it’s summer and you sell beach towels, the search demand for beach towels is going to be great.

So they’re going to crawl content that they know contains information about beach towels a lot more frequently during that time while the demand is great.

And in the middle of winter, they’re not going to bother crawling your beach towel site because it’s the middle of winter and people don’t want beach towels.

Exactly.

So basically the message is you should have two businesses, one that peaks in the summer and one that peaks in the winter.

Some businesses legitimately don’t have seasonality, but they do have topics that are sometimes more popular than others.

I think it’s rare to have a site that is going to have in demand topical information 100% of the time.

And you could have stuff that becomes popular randomly.

Like what if you sell vitamins and all of a sudden someone announces that vitamin D is definitely going to help you not catch the latest strain of whatever.

Suddenly there will be a surge in popularity and demand for the term vitamin D supplements.

You happen to have vitamin D supplement stuff.

Google knows that you have vitamin D supplement content.

So you’re going to start getting crawled much more often because Google knows that you’ve got that information.

So what this means is you need to also monitor trends.

And if something relevant to your niche– niche, niche, whatever– spikes in popularity all of a sudden, for whatever reason, make sure that you go in and you update your content.

Which is the best way.

Yeah.

We’ve been doing that with the March Core updates just finished, which we’ll chat about soon, obviously.

But we had to go in there and update something quite on the fly to ensure that it’s up to date.

But hopefully that works with everyone.

And of course, we’ve got crawl optimization in Premium for anyone that does want to use things where they need to.

Yeah.

All of this means that you should not do crawl optimization.

You should absolutely do it.

And if you need more information about optimizing your crawl budget, we have a whole article which is on our blog about crawl optimization.

And then the Yoast SEO Premium users do have access to a crawl optimization tool.

So you can get information on that.

And I do not think it means don’t worry about crawl budget.

I think most people don’t need to worry about it.

But big sites do.

Yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

And there’s a button below here, by the way, that goes to that blog on how to optimize crawl budget.

So do leave that on producers in the back end for a little bit while we talk about the next slide.

OK.

What’s– what happened next?

Microsoft.

Why don’t you take this one?

Because I know you’ve been following this and I have opinions.

Yeah.

So Fabrice Canel was talking about how people don’t realize or SEOs don’t realize the actual level of Bing search usage and that it’s higher than what people think.

And it does go beyond what we just think.

Because we’re so in tuned with Google, because it is the monopoly.

And we can say that it is the monopoly because of that graph that’s right there.

And if we do look really closely and squint our eyes a bit, you’ll see that the gap is going from this to that.

So although there was a little shift, right?

So 2% seems like a lot.

But in reality, 97 out of every 100 searches are still going to be on Google.

So I like Fabrice’s optimism.

But the reality is that it’s still 97%.

But again, it depends what kind of business you are.

Because if you are a business who, say, caters to a demographic that are not technologically minded or maybe they’re older, set in their ways of lack of change, you will have this whole audience of people who have had a Windows machine.

They’ll never go on Mac because that’s what they’ve had since the ’90s.

That’s different.

They’re not doing that.

And with that, they’ll come on.

They won’t know what Firefox is or Brave or any browser.

They’ll just use the default that’s on, which is Edge.

And of course, with that comes Bing as default.

So there’s this whole subset of audiences that people do kind of forget.

And people should use Webmaster Tools inside Bing as well.

Because it does have not differing data.

It has complementary data.

And we shouldn’t just rely on what Google Search Console is telling us in short, and all the other third parties.

We should take as much data as we can from as many data sets that we can.

I would say that if you have a site that sells things, so you’re reliant on conversions, rather than looking at how much traffic you get from Bing versus Google, look at how many conversions you get from Bing versus Google.

And go where the money is.

If people are more likely to– people coming in from Bing are more likely to spend money on your site, go after increasing the number of people that come in from Bing.

Because that’s– I am definitely in the camp of, wow, 2%.

That’s 2%.

That means Google’s still got 98%, 97%.

So what, 2% Bing, 1% Yahoo, 97% saw Google?

That makes it sound like everything is Google’s domain.

But when you start looking at raw numbers, if Google’s doing 8.5 billion searches per day, 2% of, let’s say, 10 billion total is still– it’s still a lot. 2% of 8 billion total is still a lot.

So if your money comes from selling 100 units every month, you could get those 100 units from Bing.

You could get those 100 units from Yahoo.

It doesn’t have to be coming from Google.

So know where your money is coming from, and then go where the money is.

Yeah, and lastly on that, I mean, if I can give someone a 97% statistic, 97% of SEOs are not even going to consider Bing as a strategy, whereas whoever’s listening now can take that 2% of what no one else is thinking about in that niche and optimize as well for Bing and do things that Bing are telling you to do and diagnose those problems.

And you’ll find that 100% of 2% is still something, right?

Yep, absolutely.

Well, in other news– and this is kind of a branding thing– WooCommerce migrated to woo.com as a branding exercise.

They are now reverting to woocommerce.com, because as you can see from the chart, I don’t think the migration was done quite right.

And then I also don’t think that they necessarily gave it enough time to stick.

But as most brand marketers do, if something doesn’t pop right away, they panic and they revert.

So that’s kind of what happened.

However, maybe it was a good thing, because everyone’s talking about it.

They probably picked up a bunch of links.

And– yeah, someone’s made a benefit from a bad thing in a way.

And whilst I don’t know what happened economically for woo as a result of that, if it did, that will have had a knock-on effect with marketplace sellers, things like that.

But it is interesting, because you look at the graph from Sistrix here and in the blues, woo, and it does go up initially.

So for that first month, I bet everyone was like, this is great.

Things are going down.

It’s not gone up as usual, but never quite does get back to where it was if you’re doing a migration, not immediately anyway.

But then when it came down, I can imagine people did panic.

And the way it’s gone back up, but nowhere near to the level that it was once at the peak– where was that?

December.

I would have panicked, but I maybe would have gone into a deeper assessment, because I’m thinking long term as well.

If I do want to stay as woo.com over WooCommerce, then maybe I would have tried a little longer.

But again, we don’t know what was under the hood.

There may have been an impact that was far greater than wasting it out.

And even if they did say it was because of the March update, I guarantee you it was not because of the March update.

If they’re popping back so hard after reverting, it was not because of the content on the site.

It was because there was something borked with the migration.

So I– Yeah.

Remember this, Ben.

The March migrate– no content changed, and the March update didn’t happen in December last year.

I think people are blaming their tools, not maybe the process in which it was done.

And it wasn’t done 100%.

So for example, content, word content, like page, blog post, did go from WooCommerce to Woo.

But images were all WooCommerce.com.

And that never changed over.

And I didn’t look into whether there was an image at both Woo.com and WooCommerce, and there was duplicate, or whether they just didn’t move over, but something wasn’t playing ball.

But now they’re back, and it’s grown quite well.

But I don’t know.

It’s gone down in that last week from maybe the end of the March update.

So maybe we’ll have a look.

And in a month, if it’s still worth talking about the impacts of this, then definitely we will.

Yeah.

People like to blame updates when they don’t know what happened, because everyone’s like, oh, yeah, that’s obviously what happened.

The New York Times had a drop because they screwed something up technically back when RankBrain came out.

And everyone’s like, oh, it’s RankBrain.

It’s RankBrain.

It was not.

It was not.

And everyone just kept repeating it.

So that was annoying.

Yeah, I won’t rant.

So OK.

So our good friend Gary, again, explained how Google processes queries and ranks content.

And I was happy with this, because this is basically the same stuff that I’ve been saying since– I looked at a deck that I did from 2015 or 2013.

2013.

Said all the same stuff.

So I’m happy to see that they are confirming it.

The main goal of ranking is to push websites that are high quality, trustworthy, relevant.

OK.

Avoid stop words where possible.

OK.

Content is the most important factor when ranking.

OK.

Quality is defined as the uniqueness of the content.

Amen.

I’m happy with this.

Yeah.

This is probably the shortest slide we’re going to go through, because you can’t get more concise and obvious than all of these things.

And again, it backs up everything that Gary– Gary’s had a busy month in April.

He has.

He’s been off on one.

But yeah, this is the same stuff.

Just make sure– the last bullet points may basically the takeaway is the uniqueness.

And that’s what everyone should be focusing on.

If you’re doing a post that you know someone’s done before, then don’t do it.

Think of something more unique and creative.

Go back to the drawing board.

If you have a question about stop words, you can actually Google stop words.

What are they?

And there will be a number of lists that you can look at.

The gist is you want to minimize the number of meaningless words that you use in sentences so that the words that are left have meaning and value.

So valueless words would be– I don’t remember what part of speech they are.

Oh, no.

We’re not content writers.

Apparently, I’m not an English student either.

We’ll move on to the next slide, but we’ll circle back on that one because I had something intelligent to say, and it has fled my brain.

It’ll come two minutes after we’ve stopped, of course.

So why don’t you take this one?

Because I am so over dealing with the March update.

Yeah, well, the March update went through March and all the way through April, nearly.

It stopped on the 19th of April, but they didn’t tell us until a week later during Brighton SEO, which is something I know they always like doing.

Interesting, though.

Don’t want to cover it too much because it’s just finished and it’s dangerous for us to say what data has been collected, what analysis has been done.

But I would definitely say this time next month, when we’re on May’s talking about what happened in May, there’ll be a lot more discussion about this.

But they do claim that unhelpful or spammy content, which they’ve kind of bowled into the same thing, unhelpful and spam is the same thing, but they’ve reduced it by 45%.

But again, we’ve made sure we put an asterisk in here because they’ve not backed it up with any actual data.

So they’re saying they exceeded the stated goal of the update, which I think was 40%.

I feel like someone in an office just say, just say 45.

And we’ve done better than we said we would.

I think that the newsreaders like to say, Google has claimed without proof that they’ve reduced it by 45%.

From an anonymous source.

So it must be true, right?

But again, everything we’ve been saying in all the previous slides has kind of been coming up to this.

Make it unique, make it helpful, make sure you’re just not writing stuff for the search engines, and you should be all right.

But that being said, I know that there are genuine publishers who have, from their opinion, have the most helpful content, whether or not if another person’s opinion or their algorithm’s opinion is up for debate.

I know that a lot of large publishers are in the middle of dying a death right now.

And there already have been publications that have gone into complete ceasing trading since September, which is kind of a shame because there is still spam also showing up.

So it’s still a bit volatile at the moment.

But I foresee the next three months still being a little bit volatile.

But for some reason, I see Q4 calming down a bit as they master what the effects of all these updates have really been.

And if you feel that you have been hard done to, there’s a form that you can fill in with an example.

What’s the keyword that you were ranking for that you’re not?

And you can report things to give feedback back to Google.

And maybe that will help it in a future update.

Maybe.

I worry about the whole feedback thing.

I feel like that’s what bosses tell you.

It’s like, oh, my office door’s always open for feedback.

No, it’s not.

So long as it’s positive.

So long as it’s not problematic.

All right.

Just as a refresher, this was last month’s Google core and spam updates were all outside.

We told you then it was going to take about a month.

It took longer than a month.

But urging patience and waiting before deciding on what changes to make is still valid.

The three new spam policies that they were going after, just in case you’re wondering why you got hit, expired domain abuse, which they’ve always kind of said was a bad thing to do.

But I guess now they’re trying to really knuckle down on that.

Scaled content abuse, which is where you’re just churning out content mill/AI content to become an authority on something overnight, which is– Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Can’t become an expert overnight.

And site reputation abuse, which is where you’re kind of piggybacking on another site’s authority with a subdomain.

So a subdomain or even a subdirectory would be like renting from the Chicago Tribune coupons.chicagotribune.com.

And then you’re piggybacking on their authority.

Those sites have been annihilated, which I’m secretly happy about.

So there’s that.

It is spam.

It wasn’t helpful.

Well, it wasn’t helpful, and they were buying the authority.

And I find that dirty.

Yeah, although it’s not been in the news, I’m sure, I read, was it Forbes that have completely blocked now their coupon subdomain in preparation for this kind of stuff?

As they should have, because they’re renting out that subdomain.

Somebody’s making money on it, and so are they.

Yeah, and now it will stop, thankfully.

Yeah.

Cool.

So also in the news– Abash is out– Google responds to claims where search results can be harmful and dangerous.

Google, in short, saying that nothing is harmful and dangerous.

Of course, they would say that because they can’t admit that.

So Google, don’t disallow internal footer links.

So whilst we say that internal linking is very good practice, again, don’t try and abuse it by not following things to your contact page and your terms and conditions and your privacy.

It knows, the algorithm knows what that page is for and what the intent is.

So don’t try and game it too much.

Bing tests removing the cache link from search results.

I find that interesting mainly because Google’s taken it away.

Maybe it’s just storage, or there’s no use for it, or as much as there was anymore.

Maybe it’s just people like us, like you and me, and technical people who just want to see an older version.

But that’s what archive.org is for.

But again, funnily enough, Google whacked them.

Didn’t they?

They’ve not got as much visibility whatsoever that they used to, which is interesting.

Google have also dropped video carousel markup.

They say it just wasn’t used that much and interacted with.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use the markup.

Don’t get rid of the markup because it can be used elsewhere, not just in search, but elsewhere in Google’s app suite and things like Bing.

And lastly, Google– oh, you were going to say?

Go on, Carolyn.

Were you going to say anything about video?

But they drop markup for lots of things, and they bring it back.

So just because it’s gone now doesn’t mean it’s gone forever.

No, no, exactly.

And lastly, Google delays third-party cookie phase out until maybe 2025.

Absolutely unsurprising for me because they keep warning you, but no one takes it seriously until they actually put their foot down.

And I realized that they said, what was it, Q4 this year?

And then everyone still went, Jonathan?

Yeah.

Why?

Why is that happening?

So no news is good news, I guess.

I guess.

Well, let’s move on to AI news because I think we’ve got a little bit there.

ChatGPT is making links more prominent.

I know you had an opinion about this.

Yeah, I find it weird that you’re in a conundrum.

We have to pay to see ads?

Is it an ad now?

It’s a citation, but we’re paying to see the source of something.

Personally, I believe you shouldn’t have to pay to see the source or understand what the source of the answer is because ChatGPT is getting that source from somewhere.

And naturally, it should cite it.

But then again, you made a good point that at that point, they’re getting traffic if someone wants to go in.

So there can be an argument either way.

What I find interesting here personally also is the results, the way in which it’s done, it kind of looks like a reverse SERP.

So the end, it ends with a blue link, which is just the brand name.

But maybe the title of where that’s going is actually what’s bold in the bullet point or kind of optimized to be bullet point form.

So it’s like they are still using websites to bring in content to then reproduce for the answer.

And it’s nice to see that they are citing things.

I just find it weird that you should have to pay for it.

It should be all or nothing.

I think the logic might be we think that if you need to have the links in here and you need to have it presented in a way that you can copy and paste it out into something else, that you’re probably using this for your job.

And if you’re using it for your job, you’re getting paid.

So if you’re getting paid for this work product, we would also like to get paid for this work product.

So I feel like that’s what’s going on.

But who knows?

Yeah, we’ll see.

What else has happened?

Google’s rolling out SGE tests in the UK.

So you, my friend, should be getting access to the SGE soon.

Should?

Soon?

I don’t know.

No one I know in the UK has said I’ve got SGE access now.

Not one person.

So I’ve not got it.

And therefore, I can’t see it.

I’ve been obviously using desktop Google search every day.

I use it on my mobile.

I’ve not seen anything.

And that’s both with my Yoast Google Apps account and my personal Gmail, which I’ve had forever.

So wait and see.

And I’m sure we’ll do more screenshots.

Because I think it’ll be interesting to also compare the US and what the UK show you on SGE as well.

But Sistrix have claimed that there is some data in the wild.

If you go onto Sistrix’s blog, there may be a post.

But I think Steve Payne only posted about it yesterday and said there’s a little bit trickling in.

So again, I’ll speak to Steve.

And maybe in the next update, we’ll have some cool SGE UK versus US data to look at.

Interesting.

And I think what’s going to remain the same between the two is the advice on the long form content.

Because I don’t see SGE as the way they’ve written it, the way it appears to be looking for content.

I think that long form is going to trump just individual brand power in most cases.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Google CEO has said that they’re not talking about having AI replace the search engines completely.

They’re really into having it improve search.

But they don’t want it to replace search.

And I don’t know if that’s strictly because that’s how they make their money or they’re worried about it affecting– adversely affecting revenue.

But it’s interesting that that’s where they’re going with it.

Yeah.

And we didn’t want to cover this too much for the audience because it’s a really interesting post that I’ve now put in the chat.

People should read it and actually read for themselves everything that was said in the interview and go into detail.

But I like the last point here.

So AI is not going to replace the search.

It’s not going to be a replacement.

And this guy knows that.

He’s got this long term strategy of looking at the future of search.

And I think if he’s saying that now, then I think for at least three years that statement won’t change, you would think.

Three years feels like a long time right now.

So hopefully– It does.

It does.

In ChatGPT land anyway, or AI in general.

That’s true.

Well, rolling on, Brave announces AI search engine and shares insights for SEO.

So Brave is a new search engine that’s almost– it’s like SGE, but that’s all it is, is like SGE.

And they say that they’re doing 10 billion search queries per year, which makes them the largest.

I don’t know if you remember what I said earlier, but I think it’s interesting to note that Brave’s doing 10 billion searches a year and Google is doing 8.5 billion searches per day.

So some context.

It is interesting.

But it’s good to know, like Brave, if anyone doesn’t know that they’ve been a browser for a bit.

They go around privacy and stuff like that.

It’s built off Chromium as well.

But they’re doing a lot more.

And it’s also interesting to know that there’s another browser called Arc that are doing a lot of AI assisted search experiences where they’re trying to remove the element of the SERP as a middleman for your experience by taking you directly to where you need to be.

So that, I think, is going to be really interesting for the future.

And even for Google, because they’ve got Chrome.

So they may start doing things where you don’t see a SERP in Chrome and that they might go this way and just deal with Gemini straight off the bat.

But that’s something maybe in the next year.

I don’t know.

We’ll see.

Well, the interesting thing I thought was their advice is to help sites rank better in Brave.

They’re saying use schema.org.

So all of that extra markup is going to help things perform better in Brave.

And Brave is said to be kind of like SGE, right?

So maybe you could test things in Brave with the hopes that that will then translate to SGE, even though SGE is run by Gemini.

Yeah.

Once you know Brave are advocates of schema and structured data as are we, it’s, of course, ingrained in both the free and additional parts in the Premium products as well.

But it’s really nice to see that schema’s going to still play an important part in the way in which data is retrieved, even for any kind of search experience.

Absolutely.

Let’s move on to some WordPress news.

WordPress 6.5 Regina was released.

I’ve been playing with it a little bit.

It’s– I don’t see any major differences personally.

But I hear people are happy with it.

Yeah, there’s been a lot of performance updates.

Things like the font library, it’s not going to be in your face as part of the experience.

But I think in time, it will just– things like developing and creating new themes and elements within themes of blocks and things like that are just going to be much easier to do, both to build out and for the end user to use.

So I’ve been using a lot more full site editing.

And I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

But I get, like Gutenberg, at the beginning of Gutenberg, I saw the potential in the long term of how full site editing could really change the way that even themes are made.

So yeah, it’s going to be interesting.

But yeah, even though, of course, it was 6.5, there was always– there’s always a security issue or some other bug that someone finds within 24 hours.

So not long after 6.5 was released, we’ve got 6.5.2, which gets rid of an x-axis vulnerability.

And I think there was something else that was much lower down.

But that was closed very quickly.

And now that’s a much more stable release.

So do you make sure you update?

Speaking of updates, let’s go to Yoast news.

We had two updates in April.

We had 22.5 and 22.6.

22.5, it was general maintenance.

It was a little bit bigger than 22.6.

The big difference, though, is that we changed the guidance and advice for taxonomy pages.

So it’s going to be, I guess, easier to get the green light on your taxonomy pages.

We had been advising a lot more text on those taxonomy pages.

And we’ve reduced the amount of text that we’re recommending for that paragraph above the actual results or the aggregated content for those pages.

So I think you’ll like it.

If you haven’t updated, please make sure you do.

And then in Premium, there was a bug fix.

The table of contents block was sometimes working.

And that’s been fixed.

So yay for that.

And then in 22.6, there was a streamlining of the way the data is stored for the metadata for individual users, which reduces the size of the database, makes things faster, especially when it’s generating author site maps.

So that should help your content, especially your author content, get indexed faster.

Also, WordPress is changing the minimum requirements for PHP.

So we, Yoast, are going to drop support for PHP lower than 7.4 beginning on November 1.

So you have time to make those updates.

But you’ll need to check with your hosting provider to make sure that you’re not using a version of PHP that is less than 7.4.

I think 8.2, I think.

It’s over 8.

Over 8 is pretty much what most sites are on.

If you have not updated your PHP in a very long time, you may want to ask someone about that.

Because eventually, WordPress will stop working.

Our plugin will stop working if you’re on 7.3 or lower.

And then finally, we have a new AI for SEO course in Yoast SEO academy.

So if you have not yet visited Yoast SEO academy, I encourage you to do so.

If you’re a Premium member, you already have total access to all of the training courses.

So please, please, please go check out AI for SEO in the Yoast SEO academy.

Yeah.

Big props to Anne, by the way, who devised all of that and produced it.

Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah.

And then finally, we’re going to be at these upcoming events.

We’ve got two events coming up, one in the US and one in Europe.

In Chicago, if you’re in the Midwest, on June 6, there is called the Conference Pop-Up.

In Chicago, I believe you can Google for SEO Conference Pop-Up Chicago 2024 or some collection of those words.

And you should be able to find it.

And I will be there.

Looking forward to seeing whoever in the US wants to come visit.

And then WordCamp Europe is June 13 through 15 in Italy, which should be very fun, jealous.

And Alex is going to be at that one.

I don’t know yet.

Maybe I am.

I don’t know.

Maybe I’m not.

I don’t know.

We’ll see.

Well, the rest of the group will be there.

Yeah, on a coach, I’ve heard, like a coach full of Yoasties.

Wow.

Yoasties.

That sounds like a real trip.

That’ll be fun.

I know.

I know.

I don’t know how many– do you go straight into Italy?

You may even cross through other countries as well.

Floral tellers.

Floral tellers.

But yeah, of course you do.

I’m pretty sure you cross into other countries.

Yeah.

So what’s next?

When is our next update now that this one’s nearly over?

Next one is Tuesday, May 28, which I believe is– I was going to say it’s a day after Memorial Day, but I don’t actually remember if that’s what it is.

But it’s Tuesday, May 28.

It’ll be at 4 PM Central European Time, 10 AM Eastern Standard Time.

And it will be, again, hosted by Florrie.

Great.

And then now we have Q&A.

That was my cue, I guess.

Well, that was a very, very full SEO update again.

Thank you so much.

We’ve got a lot of questions and not so much time.

So let’s get started with the question.

The most upvoted one was from Marion.

And she asked, after the March core updates, our GA4 shows a hit in organic search traffic, but our Google Search Console performance is actually steady and increasing.

Why is there a discrepancy?

Who wants to go first?

Is there a discrepancy?

Because it gives you different data.

GA4 gives you who lands on your website.

And Search Console gives you information on who sees keywords and pages that are being searched for.

Well, it shows you click-throughs too.

Click-throughs too, but it will definitely never give you that 100% of everyone that’s coming in.

And again, it’s only showing you what’s in Google as well.

So it’s only showing you 97% of the data, not all 100, right?

I’d have to look at it.

That’s a tricky question where we’d have to kind of dig through.

So I would say, it depends.

But I don’t think I can answer that without– Yeah, but the good thing to do is always to look at Search Console and compare it with the time before.

So for this, it’s very important to look at your last 28 days and then compare that with the 28 days before that.

Look at both the keywords that have stopped ranking or gone down, as well as the pages that have disappeared.

And there may be a connection, but there may also not be.

Maybe something interesting.

Yeah.

Hope that answers their question.

All right.

Good luck, Maria.

The next one.

What does Google say nowadays about how often you should blog on your website or update your websites?

Oh, they don’t have specific guidance for that, because that was that one slide we talked about where they’re trying to devote more resources to things that have greater search demand.

So that’s really going to depend on how in demand your topic is.

You can look at your server logs to see how often Google’s crawling you and maybe time updates to coincide with that.

But there really is no– there’s no hard and fast rules on that anymore.

And is it going to be helpful?

Like, if you’re– I always use a baker as an example, but let’s face it, how much does a local baker really have to talk about?

They just need to get the bread made, and anything after that.

There may be content, of course, that baker will be able to make, but one a week?

Is that a number that you should commit to?

No.

But then there’ll be another niche where there is something happening every week, like the SEO industry.

So there is a reason to actually write a blog post every week about– well, maybe not every week.

But you know what I mean.

There is definitely a reason to do more quantity there.

Quality over quantity, that’s the name of the game.

Always, always.

All right.

Hope that helps.

All right, on to our next one.

I’m not sure how easy this one is.

Could you share a screenshot displaying a SGE example so we can get on the same page?

Not right now.

That was the answer.

Yeah, although I’m sure we can get a screenshot and shove it in the Yoast.com page where this video is.

So if you’re watching a replay, scroll down, and someone, Neringa, will be able to put something in there at the end for you.

I could definitely grab one for you.

We just can’t do it this second.

Yeah, sure.

So let’s see how many replays we get this time.

Yeah, and next month, hopefully, we’ll have a UK versus US SGE screenshot as well, which would be quite interesting.

Yeah, so May 28.

You can also wait until then.

All right, our next question is from Jen.

Jen asks, I was recently certified in SEO and content marketing.

We learned that we should read the top five or top 10 results in a SERPs and make sure our posts set the same thing in different terms because Google knows that info is what people are searching for.

Is this ancient information or just completely wrong?

Well, I mean, but what if it’s wrong?

What if that information is– I feel like that’s a little outdated.

I’m not going to lie.

I would go with it depends again.

Because to me, what you’re describing is competitor analysis.

But that doesn’t mean that the analysis you do means you have to take on everything on board.

It may be helpful to the SERP, but it may not be helpful to your brand or to get a conversion.

So I hope that answers the question.

I would say, yeah, look at it, but don’t take everything you see in the other four positions as gospel.

Don’t interpret that to mean I copy what they wrote and then just rewrite it differently.

That’s not what that guidance means.

That means look to see what’s performing well, but you need to write your own content.

You need to have your own research.

You need to know that the information you’re putting out is useful.

And if you’re putting out exactly the same information, why would you outrank the other people?

Write something useful.

Add to the conversation.

Add to the academic discourse.

You have to be unique and helpful.

If everyone else is already saying it, you’re not adding anything helpful.

Do what Gary said, be unique.

That’s a great bottom line.

All right, I think this is a very specific question, but here we go.

Is there a reason my website is pulling up in one market, top five, but not in another?

I thought I had optimized each location equally.

There’s different competing factors in each market.

So while you may be performing well in one, there’s something else going on in another.

You could have optimized better than your competitors here, but over here, you have competitors that are doing something different, better, more than you are.

So it’s a very specific to your situation kind of answer, but just because you’ve optimized for one market doesn’t mean you’re going to dominate everywhere.

Yeah, and if you’re a specialist in bacon, don’t expect to get too many sales in places who keep kosher or halal.

That’s a location-based thing, and it might be a culture-based thing.

And searches in Wijchen compared to New York will bring out different results based on what hopefully is what is most helpful on that context.

OK.

So I see we have room for one more question.

Let’s go for this one.

You don’t really talk about other search engines much.

I get it.

Google has the fast market share, et cetera.

But from where I am sat, this is the right time for SEOs to be looking at how their sites rank in other search engines too.

Would you agree?

Maybe before the Fabrice Canel slide, but then we started talking about Bing.

But I get you.

But we have to talk about Google 97% of the time, because it’s 97% of the monopoly.

And whilst they make the rules, it’s still consistent amongst other search engines.

But why would Bing make a different rule than what Google is doing?

There’s got to be some consistency.

Like schema, you use schema, and it should work on universally.

But again, you’ll be optimizing maybe for locale based on– I know in Russia and China, there’s very specific country based ones that will bring out something like– again, it depends on your market.

If you’re massive in the Chinese market, of course, spend more time looking, is it Baidu?

And there’s a couple of others.

Where’s DuckDuckGo?

I feel like DuckDuckGo is China or Russia as well.

But it’s one of those– just look at your locale.

Maybe I’m wrong there.

But it’s definitely worth looking at everything.

And like I said before, go into Bing Webmaster Tools.

And there might be something to do in there that Google didn’t see.

And that will in turn help another platform that is neither of those two.

OK.

Thanks so much.

Then we’re officially done.

We’re one minute over our time.

Well, thank you so much, Alex and Carolyn.

But also thanks to you, everyone that watched, that asked questions, that upvoted.

And I just want to end with, if you learned something today, I’ll be popping a link in our chat.

Please let us know on Twitter.

We would love to see your interactions there as well.

Let’s see if we can get it as alive as this webinar today.

And we hope to see you next time.

Thank you all.

Bye bye.

Thank you.

Thank you, Florie.

Thank you.

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An example of a result from Google’s SGE (Search Generative Experience)

An example of a result from Google's SGE (Search Generative Experience)
This what some search results might look like in Google’s SGE

Presented by

<>Carolyn Shelby

Carolyn is our Principal SEO. She leverages more than two decades of hands-on experience optimizing websites for maximum visibility and engagement. She specializes in enterprise and news SEO, and is passionate about demystifying the intricacies of search engine optimization for businesses of all sizes.

<>Alex Moss

Alex is our Principal SEO. With a background in technical SEO, he has been working in Search since its infancy and also has years of knowledge of WordPress, developing several plugins over the years. He is involved within many aspects of Yoast from product roadmap to content strategy.

The post The SEO update by Yoast – April 2024 Edition appeared first on Yoast.

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The SEO update by Yoast – May 2024 Edition https://yoast.com/webinar/the-seo-update-by-yoast-may-2024-edition/ Thu, 25 Apr 2024 12:09:25 +0000 https://yoast.com/?post_type=yoast_webinar&p=3748711 Gain invaluable SEO insights and expert analysis Join our upcoming update as our esteemed SEO experts delve into the latest SEO news and developments. Stay ahead of the competition with invaluable insights and expert analysis from industry leaders Carolyn Shelby and Alex Moss. This update is a must-attend to stay up-to-date with the ever-changing SEO […]

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Join our upcoming update as our esteemed SEO experts delve into the latest SEO news and developments. Stay ahead of the competition with invaluable insights and expert analysis from industry leaders Carolyn Shelby and Alex Moss. This update is a must-attend to stay up-to-date with the ever-changing SEO landscape.

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Learn the basics and get practical tips

Starting with SEO can be overwhelming and sometimes you need help to get started. No worries; our SEO experts are here to help. Watch the webinar replay and get practical tips about all the SEO basics.

We’ll cover these 4 topics

  • How to do keyword research?
  • How to optimize content?
  • How to improve the structure of your website?
  • How to make your site visible to search engines?

Webinar level: beginner

Join us if you:

  • Feel that you need help in getting started with SEO on your website
  • Want to ask our hosts your SEO-related questions in the Q&A

Hosted by

<>Sabrina Joest

Sabrina is the Social Media Specialist at Yoast. She’s responsible for creating and curating engaging content to enhance Yoasts’ brand presence across various social platforms. She also loves helping our audience learn something new about SEO!

<>Taco Verdonschot

Taco is the Head of Relations at Yoast. In that capacity, he’s leading the community and support teams at Yoast. Coming from a support background himself, he’s always ready to be a helping hand and he loves to help all customers succeed!

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Webinar: How to start with SEO (May 23, 2024) https://yoast.com/webinar/webinar-how-to-start-with-seo-may-23-2024/ Tue, 09 Apr 2024 07:22:02 +0000 https://yoast.com/?post_type=yoast_webinar&p=3734649 Learn the basics and get practical tips Starting with SEO can be overwhelming and sometimes you need help to get started. No worries; our SEO experts are here to help. Join this FREE webinar and get practical tips about all the basics of SEO. We’ll cover these 4 topics Webinar level: beginner Join us if you: […]

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Learn the basics and get practical tips

Starting with SEO can be overwhelming and sometimes you need help to get started. No worries; our SEO experts are here to help. Join this FREE webinar and get practical tips about all the basics of SEO.

We’ll cover these 4 topics

  • How to do keyword research?
  • How to optimize content?
  • How to improve the structure of your website?
  • How to make your site visible to search engines?

Webinar level: beginner

Join us if you:

  • Feel that you need help in getting started with SEO on your website
  • Want to ask our hosts your SEO-related questions in the Q&A

Hosted by

<>Mabel Adekola

Mabel is a Support Engineer at Yoast, devoting her time to ensuring Yoast SEO customers make the most of the plugins. She’s also a WordPress enthusiast helping on the Yoast SEO for WordPress support forum.

<>Michael Quaranta

Michael is one of the Yoast support team leads. His focus is on improving the support team’s performance and satisfaction. His work background includes retail store management, customer support, and sales.

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Webinar: How to start with SEO (April 8, 2024) https://yoast.com/webinar/webinar-how-to-start-with-seo-april-8-2024/ Mon, 08 Apr 2024 07:09:14 +0000 https://yoast.com/?post_type=yoast_webinar&p=3710812 Learn the basics and get practical tips Starting with SEO can be overwhelming and sometimes you need help to get started. No worries; our SEO experts are here to help. Watch the webinar replay and get practical tips about all the SEO basics. We’ll cover these 4 topics Webinar level: beginner Join us if you: Hosted by

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Learn the basics and get practical tips

Starting with SEO can be overwhelming and sometimes you need help to get started. No worries; our SEO experts are here to help. Watch the webinar replay and get practical tips about all the SEO basics.

We’ll cover these 4 topics

  • How to do keyword research?
  • How to optimize content?
  • How to improve the structure of your website?
  • How to make your site visible to search engines?

Webinar level: beginner

Join us if you:

  • Feel that you need help in getting started with SEO on your website
  • Want to ask our hosts your SEO-related questions in the Q&A

Hosted by

<>Marina Koleva

Marina is a linguist and developer who works on Yoast SEO’s content analysis – the well-known checks on a text’s SEO, readability, inclusive language use, and all the rest. Marina is also very proud to be one of the people who developed support for Japanese for our analysis.

<>Nino van Tour

Nino manages the growth team at Yoast. Generating growth by looking at data and improving user experience is his main focus. 

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Webinar: How to start with SEO (March 27, 2024) https://yoast.com/webinar/webinar-how-to-start-with-seo-march-27-2024/ Tue, 26 Mar 2024 09:16:02 +0000 https://yoast.com/?post_type=yoast_webinar&p=3687643 Note! Due to the technical issues, this webinar did not happen. You can always join the next webinar or watch the past webinars 🙂. Learn the basics and get practical tips Starting with SEO can be overwhelming and sometimes you need help to get started. No worries; our SEO experts are here to help. We’ll […]

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Note! Due to the technical issues, this webinar did not happen. You can always join the next webinar or watch the past webinars 🙂.

Learn the basics and get practical tips

Starting with SEO can be overwhelming and sometimes you need help to get started. No worries; our SEO experts are here to help.

We’ll cover these 4 topics

  • How to do keyword research?
  • How to optimize content?
  • How to improve the structure of your website?
  • How to make your site visible to search engines?

Webinar level: beginner

Join us if you:

  • Feel that you need help to start with SEO on your website
  • Want to ask our hosts your SEO-related questions in the Q&A

Hosted by

<>Anne Noij

Anne is the E-learning Editor at Yoast. They’re always eager to explain SEO practices and teach you about using the Yoast SEO plugin, especially at the Yoast SEO academy!

<>Taco Verdonschot

Taco is the Head of Relations at Yoast. In that capacity, he’s leading the community and support teams at Yoast. Coming from a support background himself, he’s always ready to be a helping hand and he loves to help all customers succeed!

The post Webinar: How to start with SEO (March 27, 2024) appeared first on Yoast.

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Webinar: How to start with SEO (May 7, 2024) https://yoast.com/webinar/webinar-how-to-start-with-seo-may-7-2024/ Mon, 25 Mar 2024 09:50:11 +0000 https://yoast.com/?post_type=yoast_webinar&p=3722740 Learn the basics and get practical tips Starting with SEO can be overwhelming and sometimes you need help to get started. No worries; our SEO experts are here to help. Join this FREE webinar and get practical tips about all the basics of SEO. We’ll cover these 4 topics Webinar level: beginner Join us if you: […]

The post Webinar: How to start with SEO (May 7, 2024) appeared first on Yoast.

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Learn the basics and get practical tips

Starting with SEO can be overwhelming and sometimes you need help to get started. No worries; our SEO experts are here to help. Join this FREE webinar and get practical tips about all the basics of SEO.

We’ll cover these 4 topics

  • How to do keyword research?
  • How to optimize content?
  • How to improve the structure of your website?
  • How to make your site visible to search engines?

Webinar level: beginner

Join us if you:

  • Feel that you need help in getting started with SEO on your website
  • Want to ask our hosts your SEO-related questions in the Q&A

Hosted by

<>Mushrit Shabnam

Mushrit is a support engineer at Yoast. She is also a WordPress enthusiast and invests her time in creating documentation.

<>Wouter Meuleman

Wouter is one of the Yoast support team leads. His focus is on improving the support team’s performance and satisfaction. His work background includes training, teaching and customer support.

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The SEO update by Yoast – March 2024 Edition https://yoast.com/webinar/the-seo-update-by-yoast-march-2024-edition/ Mon, 25 Mar 2024 09:48:41 +0000 https://yoast.com/?post_type=yoast_webinar&p=3693597 Update transcript Topics & sources SEO news AI news WordPress news Yoast news Google SGE (Search Generative Experience) example result Presented by

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Update transcript

All right, there we are for this month’s SEO Update by Yoast.

Welcome everyone.

I can see that you already found the chat over on the side.

Make sure to say hi because we love to know who’s joining us today.

I think it’s time as we see people coming in to do a quick introduction.

So again, welcome to the March 2024 SEO Update by Yoast.

My name is Taco and I’m your MC today.

But before we dive into this month’s news, let me introduce our two experts for today.

First, please meet Carolyn, principal SEO at Yoast.

She has a longstanding background in digital marketing and SEO and is focusing on news publishing online.

And next to Carolyn, you’ll find Alex.

And Alex is a man with many talents.

For years, he owned a bar.

And currently, he’s building a pet brand, is the director of an agency named FireCask, and most importantly, is a principal SEO at Yoast.

Together, they form the dream team that will bring you this month’s SEO Updates.

So please put your virtual hands together for Alex and Carolyn.

And while I’m bringing them to the stage, if you don’t know Crowdcast, there is a button on the side that says Q&A.

If you click it, you can add your questions there.

And at the end of the webinar, we will have a Q&A for you.

So make sure to add your question and upvote others.

At the bottom of your screen, there’s also a green button.

And that says a lot of different things throughout the webinar.

So make sure you keep an eye on it, because that call to action will be updated as we go through today’s webinar.

And again, on the side, we have the chat.

So make sure to interact, because that obviously is the most fun.

And with that, Alex, Carolyn, you made it.

We made it.

I mean, I really enjoyed the tech checks are always the best, right?

But it’s all it’s all worked out, hasn’t it, for the best?

It was an adventure this morning, more so than usual.

Yeah.

And how are you doing today, Carolyn?

I sound a little raspy, but I assure you I’m at that point in my cold where I sound much worse than I feel.

So we’re OK.

Well, hopefully I won’t make you chat too much.

Maybe I can take over some if you’re really doing it.

I am under strict orders not to die on camera.

So I will endeavor to do that.

Let’s avoid that, shall we?

But OK, fine.

Well, let’s let’s get through it.

It’s been not the most amount, not the biggest quantity of news items, but I’d say the quality of the news items is one to talk about this week.

I know this is what we usually do.

SEO news and we’ll go out through any AI news that’s been happening, which has been quite a bit as well.

Then we’ll see if there’s anything happening in the world of WordPress.

And lastly, do any announcements about Yoast as a products in a company.

And lastly, we’ll go through Q&A.

As Taco mentioned before, you can feel free to chat using all the icons on the right.

But if you look at this one over here with the question mark in there, if you want to ask any questions, Carolyn and I may be happy to help you.

So, yeah, what next?

What’s where can we get the updates after this?

You can get that from our short URL, can’t we?

And I never know how to pronounce this.

It’s it’s Yoast, yoa.st/update-march-24.

The recording will be available later.

You can also go to yoast.com/webinars and you’ll find all of our current and upcoming webinars, plus links to the videos from the old webinars.

So if you have any questions or you want to just revisit some of your favorite memories, that’s where you would go.

Yeah.

And also, we’ve got if you don’t not just listening to us, right, you can get how to start with SEO, which is great for beginners.

Just starting out and wanting to learn a bit more.

Whereas this one’s you know, what’s happening each and every month in the world of SEO, WordPress and AI.

And I’m fairly certain.

So we did have a bit of an argument about this this morning.

Originally, it said biweekly.

I think they’re semi-monthly.

And if you’re confused about the about the difference there, biweekly is every other week and semi-monthly is twice a month on specific days.

I believe these are the first and last Wednesday of the month, but it’s entirely possible that I’m wrong.

The way to find out is to follow that QR code, go to the page and check the next date.

So please, by all means, if I have planted my flag on the wrong hill, please let me know.

But I do think it’s semi-monthly.

Yeah, to a month to a month.

There’s two a month for you to choose from.

And you can go to as many as you like.

And if you if you’re on mobile or anything, you can scan that QR code right there.

I’m going to remove it now because we’ve got to go through the SEO news.

Oh, what’s happened?

What’s happened this month?

Well, tell me more about core updates and spam updates, Carolyn, because there’s both.

So happened at the same time.

Yeah.

So Google has gotten into this this.

These where they’re rolling out tons of updates, either at once or stacked on top of each other, the latest core update, they said, could take up to a month.

I think we’re like three weeks into it at this point.

They’re urging patience, which I know no one has and no one wants to exercise before deciding how they’re going to react to the update.

I heard some chatter and some examples on X and around the community, especially over the weekend.

People are saying, I don’t know if I got hit by the update.

And the response that came back was, I assure you, if you got hit, you would not be asking that question.

So I think the consensus is if you saw a catastrophic drop in traffic, congratulations, you’ve been hit by the update.

If you’re asking yourself, I wonder if I’ve been hit by the update.

You haven’t, because you would know.

The three new spam policies that Google is implementing, one is expired domain abuse.

This one confuses me a little because I’m pretty sure this has always been a thing.

Maybe they’re just making it more clear.

Expired domain abuse is where you go out and you register an expired domain for because it ranked well and because it was doing well when it was active.

And it’s still got a lot of valuable backlinks to it.

So what you’re doing is you’re trying to capture all of those those old backlinks and redirect that authority to your new site.

In my experience, this has never worked well unless the expired domain that you captured was directly relevant to your current website.

And you could set up direct 301 to 301 redirects from the valuable backlink that was coming in from, say, Wikipedia to directly relevant analogous content on your new site.

And if you can’t do that, you kind of wasted your money and the boost that you’re going to get from that expired domain, unless it’s a type in, is going to be diminishing over time.

Scaled abuse, scaled content abuse, which is churning out AI contents, really, AI copy at mass scale.

I like this one because Google can tell that the rate at which you’re putting out new copy is just inhumanly fast.

And if it’s inhumanly fast, chances are it wasn’t done by a human.

And then they’re going to take an extra look at it and they’re going to ding you.

So if you if for some reason you are in that category where you’re putting out more content than Google believes that you’re capable of putting out, the solution there is to slow your role, make it.

I don’t want to phrase it like this.

I don’t want to phrase it like make it look human because it should be human.

But slow your role.

Don’t do something insanely fast, inhumanly fast, because it will be interpreted as inhumanly fast.

And then the reputation of use.

I’m a big fan of this one because it’s always bothered me that people with a lot of money could rent or borrow subdomains from high authority sites like newspaper sites.

Not to name names, but the Tribune used to do this all the time where they would like coupons.newspapername.com.

They would sell or rent out to a coupon site or a directory site.

I hated those directory sites to probably shouldn’t say that.

But it was it was low value sites and they were ranking almost instantly because they were directly attached to those big authority sites.

Google’s really coming down on that now and saying that if you have if you have these low value sites that you’re putting on your subdomain, it’s going to adversely affect the primary domain and no one’s going to be willing to to murder their golden goose for whatever profit they’re making from those subdomains.

So I’m happy about that one.

According to this, it completed on the 20th.

So we’re six days post.

I think if you had something to worry about, you would already be aware that you have something to worry about.

And if you don’t have if you’re not yet concerned and you’re not yet running around like a chicken with your head cut off, then you’re probably you probably survive this round, which is which is at least good to know, like the bandages or bandaid has been taken off.

Right.

Already.

You don’t have to.

You don’t have to know anymore.

Although from a core update, you don’t know anything yet because it’s not it’s not complete yet.

So it’s been three weeks today, I believe.

Yeah, three weeks today.

And it’s not completed rolling out.

I would suspect it would be done within the next month.

But there has been volatility.

I think Barry Schwartz noticed there was volatility overnight, which may signify signal in the beginning of the end of the rollout, maybe.

Or is it the beginning of a new rollout because they’ve been rolling them out so close.

It’s almost like we’re in a continuous rollout cycle.

Yeah, which is annoying because they do say that they try to avoid rolling more than one update out at a time.

But this one literally happened on the same day and one still happening.

Who knows?

Who knows what they tell us anymore?

Yeah, I really have to dissect what they say.

Well, at least on the other side of things, Bing are actually telling us more now as a site owner, which is great.

Bing Webmaster Tools, they’re adding features to what’s there already.

I’ve always found them kind of useful.

And even though they are the underdog, the amount of random posts and updates I’ve seen about people who diagnose something in Google.

And then they’ll also, of course, look in Bing Webmaster Tools and they’ll see different issues or issues that are more important to, you know, Bing’s platform that, again, enhance what’s happening on Google.

So it is definitely good to have a look at everything.

And IndexNow is even better.

And if you haven’t read enough on IndexNow, I will I will paste the link to the blog article that Fabrice, Fabrice, I forgot his last name, Canel, who’s basically Bing Webmaster Tools face has explained more.

So the updates happened on the 5th.

But this this one over here, the output now tells you much more about it.

And that was written on the 21st.

But, yeah, no, it’s really interesting to see that they’re adding more insightful stuff and actionable things in there.

So it is more of a workable dashboard in that one thing I also did notice, although they didn’t announce it anywhere, is that they may provide up to 24 months of data because believe it’s only six or something at the moment.

So it isn’t the best subset of data that you can look back on historically.

But none of that is confirmed.

That was in some mastodon or X post.

It would be interesting if they can offer up to 24 months because GSC only offers 16 months.

So that would be, you know.

I can’t do math a lot more.

Yeah, but it’s easier to do those reports.

I find 16 months is a bit of a random number.

It’s neither here nor there.

I don’t know.

There must be a logic behind it.

I thought maybe it was, you know, turning the volume up to 11 months.

I thought that was there.

But no.

Well, you know, two year reports could be directionally interesting.

So I would be I would be a fan of that.

Or maybe they’re just doing 24 because it’s slightly higher than 16.

You know, either way, I’m always a fan of more data, but I understand that it’s expensive to to house all of it.

Yeah, yeah.

But but yeah, there’ll be more stuff coming from Bing.

I am assuming quite soon, which is quite cool.

So the next interesting one is Google actually delivered manual penalties, which they kind of haven’t done in this way for quite some time.

If at all, kind of in my memory, maybe it was two or three times that they may have done it.

I’ve never seen it go out in such big batches like this before.

But the people that are nobody in my circles has been hit by these these manual penalties.

And it’s probably because I don’t really hang out with spammers.

But it seems like they’re getting serious about making examples of people and putting the fear of God into the spamming community.

Yeah.

And I mean, we’ve both been in SEO long enough to remember the BMWs and the interfloorers of the world where, you know, the context coordinates who weren’t around there.

This was this was I would say the Wild West of SEO where you could do anything.

This was pre-Panda/Penguin update.

BMW made essentially the door pages.

Yeah.

Doorway pages.

They did.

They did that.

And still stomping down on it now.

And into Florida, I forgot exactly what they did.

But all I remember is that Google knocked them off a lot of their organic rankings on the 10th of February, noting that before Mother’s Day.

Yeah.

It was so it was before Mother’s Day, did you say?

Yeah, I think it was before British Mother’s Day.

British Mother’s Day.

And you’ve got Valentine’s Day.

And this is a flower brand.

You know, they’ll they’ll get hit hard.

That’s like that’s like penalizing a Christmas shop in December.

That was back when they were hand picking people to hold up as being the cautionary tale.

Now it seems like it’s just more we’re just going to hit everybody and then you can all go cry to each other about it.

Yeah.

But I think it may get the confusion of or not confusion, the heated discussions that have been on X all this month on how people interpret everything that Danny Sullivan said.

Like, I do not envy his role right now, because as soon as one thing is answered, he not his own fault, you know, the community will ask five more questions, which he then has to elaborate on, which then creates five more questions and the web just opens and everything’s.

Maybe this is the way of being this is into floor and BMW, but you can’t just do it with one site.

You maybe have to do quite a few sites, give out manual penalties to quite a few that have different scenarios.

And therefore, there’s no there’s no pattern or maybe there is a pattern of what exactly each one does.

And people are trying to find that pattern.

Also, it will show that there’s many variables that go into why you may get a penalty nowadays and much more sophisticated ways of being able to identify that abuse.

I would say this is a lot more data points, though, so with all of these additional data points, it should be easier for the community to kind of triangulate what exactly the problems are and and mitigate those.

At least that’s why I would be a fan of the broad based issuance of the penalties so that we have.

Hundreds of data points instead of just this one company, what are they doing wrong?

Yeah, and it is it is annoying because you do see some people who are genuinely believe that they are producing helpful content, whether or not that’s subjective or not.

But there are so many examples of if you look at why they’re penalized, you will go, yeah, right.

Yeah, fine.

They should have been penalized like it.

But then you do get this minority or maybe it’s not a minority of webmasters who’ve been pumping out content for years and years and years.

But it’s not publishers game as much as it used to be.

Maybe that was this and I I come across lots of sites that don’t know they’ve been hacked and don’t know that they’ve got a problem.

And hundreds of pages that you don’t know about with bad content on them would be enough to color your entire site.

So I wonder how many of these are especially when we’re a reputable company, we’re we’re a nonprofit, we help people.

But it turns out that frequently it’s these small, these small, helpful sites that don’t have the best.

They don’t have world class security teams working for them 24 hours a day and it’s easy for them to get hacked and they don’t know that they’ve got a problem.

So it’s.

Well, it’ll be a wake up call either way.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

And not only have been Google been dishing out manual penalties, AI content websites have been deindexed and by the way, this for the audience, this isn’t something that Google has just gone out and been blatant.

They’ve not announced anything.

This is observations from other experts in the industry who look specifically at sites.

They’re seeing that sites that happen to have a lot of AI generated content got deindexed.

And, you know, I like to sit there thinking, well, who?

Oh, well, that’s Captain Obvious, right?

That eventually if you do too much AI scale content and you were probably showing off about it in December, weren’t you?

And all the HCU updates were hitting unhelpful content, but not AI produced content is now maybe they may be deleting those tweets as much or they’d be in ratio now, aren’t they?

I know at least from past history, if you found a tactic or a trick that you were using to manipulate Google, and then you talk about it, you announce it and brag to the community, don’t think they don’t pay attention to that.

Don’t think they don’t go, oh, oh, I see what you’re doing here.

I’m going to go.

I’m going to dig a little bit more into what you’re doing.

Hmm.

I wonder if that’s a violation of this.

Oh, look, it is a violation.

Now we’re going to clamp down on it because you made a lot of noise.

So it’s it’s almost not in your interest to to brag to everyone that you found an exploit that’s going to make everyone a million dollars because it will shorten the amount of time that it’s making people money and it will increase the amount of scrutiny that is going to get paid to that particular trick.

I would go as far as to say I would then create a stopwatch from the moment that you make about tweets or updates or whatever you do and see, make bets with your friends on how long it will take for your domain to to get penalized or deindexed, because that’s what will happen if you keep trying to abuse stuff.

Right.

Matt Cutts used to have a little a little black book that he kept, like a little notebook.

And every now and then he’d pull it out and he’d just start writing things down.

And I’m positive he was writing down websites to go look at later to see if they were doing anything naughty.

Yeah.

And people are even now in some of the paranoia of all these updates.

Like, I swear that there’s people inside Google who are going back years on what’s been doing well in the industry and what should be done here.

That enclosing all of those loopholes that have been all those that those processes of SEO that have been happening a few years ago, that even Google told the audience to actually do are now being changed, which obviously causes a bit of mistrust or distrust in in Google.

But we’ll see.

We’ll see where the AI driven content is going to go soon.

The next thing I know is FID has gone and INP, which is Interaction to Next Paint, has now been not only introduced because it was introduced about a year ago and Google did the whole, hey, look at this for a few months.

And then it was look at this more seriously.

And then they said this is going to be part of Core Web Vitals.

And now you can see it in Search Console.

Well, yes, for the people who don’t know, INP is like when you explain INP to the audience, Carolyn.

So the difference between INP and FID is that INP indicates how quickly a web page is going to respond to a user’s action where FID is more of a early input metric.

So it’s looking at that was looking at the timing from when the user is first able to successfully interact with the web site, which is a slight difference.

INP is more of a gauge of how much lag the user is experiencing when the site loads.

FID was waiting until the user was able to actually do something.

So I think what you’ll see is that most of your scores are probably going to get better because I think they’re the FID is just generally slower.

INP is the way they’re measuring it.

I think more of you will find that you’re doing better than you were when it was looking at FID.

But if you are having problems, it’s already showing in Core Web Vitals in the Google Search Console reports, it’s already providing feedback.

You can get Lighthouse reports on how to improve it.

The improvements are similar to the recommendations are pretty similar to what the recommendations for FID were.

The standard things, you know, limit the JS limit the the main thread blocking JavaScript, all that good stuff.

The interesting the other interesting thing, though, is that the day after they made the switch, Google then confirmed that the Core Web Vitals scores are used in the ranking system, which we all kind of knew.

But it was nice to get that confirmation because the naysayers were then silenced.

The nice thing about this all is we have a lovely blog post that explains all of this that Edwin wrote, and you can go get it.

It was just published at yoast.com/inp-interaction-next-paint/.

Yeah, and that explains everything.

And it also shows bits of what it looks like on yoast.com and the improvements that were made there.

But more importantly, it’s this to me is a more natural metric to look at a more sensible one anyway.

It looks at human interaction and the way that someone would actually work with the site and have a journey through it rather than just.

We just had a question asking how Google is judging this and if they’re using a bot or they’re adjusting it as if it was a real human interaction.

Core Web Vitals is actually sampled from real human interaction that Google is collecting over a 28 day rolling period.

So the Core Web Vitals scores that you’re getting, you can only get those if there is actual user feedback that’s coming back to Google.

So pages that don’t get any traffic probably aren’t going to really be they’re not going to be able to apply definite measurements to them.

They have to have a certain amount of traffic in order to generate a score.

So I would say, please don’t worry about the is it a bot?

Is it a person?

They are supposed to be using human feedback that they’re using to calculate those scores.

Yeah.

And also, lastly, don’t obsess about getting 100 percent.

Do not do that.

Just make sure things aren’t bad.

If it’s green, it’s good.

You don’t have to be 100 percent.

No, no, you don’t.

So next up is Liz Reed has been announced as the new head of search of Google.

This might be interesting because me and Carolyn were talking before and said she’s not really been in the SEO realm of someone to read up about.

And that’s seemingly because she’s not been in the general part search team.

And actually, she’s been in the product team for some time.

And that’s where her background is from, which also says a lot about her new role and what the next year might bring.

Right.

The consensus seems to be that they’re going they and she, by extension, are going to be all in on AI.

So I would I would interpret this to mean that we can expect a lot more integration into the general search experience.

Which is something we can chat about in the news.

But before that, I went to SMX Munich.

It was quite good.

I thought I’d share very quickly some stuff that might that might be good for people to think about.

And Paddy Moogan, who I’ve known for years, been speaking all the shows.

He’s great.

He had a cheat sheet on the best way to do e-commerce product pages, which I’m sure you can search for.

He said true strategy is about placing bets and making hard choices.

And the objective is not to is not to eliminate risk, but to increase the odds of success.

So I just found that interesting when everyone’s going through a strategy is you shouldn’t always be there for, you know, absolute figures right from the outset and that something is just placing a bet that something will succeed and that you don’t actually know it’s going to succeed until you actually partake in it.

I just always found that was good.

And it does go into SEO every day and with content production.

The other thing I found interesting was what Rand Fishkin said.

He said we only spend 11 minutes a day searching and we spend so much time on our devices doing things that I was.

I actually thought even as an SEO, maybe it’s because I am an SEO, that I search more than the average person.

But when you actually do come down to it and you think about it, how often do you actually spend on a Google on doing Google searches?

Do you want to do that as a verb in the day?

And the answer isn’t that much.

And it just made me think that there’s more to search in general because it isn’t just about answering keywords.

It’s about just experiencing the whole thing.

And now to me, search can be any form of discovery, whether you think you’re searching for it or not.

What do you think about the 11 minutes a day searching stat?

It shocked me, to be honest.

But then I thought about it and maybe I don’t use search as much as I think I do.

I’d love to know where that figure came from, because it logically it doesn’t seem right.

But then I have a hard time coming up with hard facts to disprove it.

So, well, any kids, though, the kids today, if I can sound like an old person getting off on their own, they don’t use search the way adults use search.

They tend to ask questions in forums.

They ask questions on.

They’ll search inside of other things.

They’re not using traditional search the way us oldies do.

Yeah, which I also found interesting, because even though it’s not listed here, Jono Alderson, our previous SEO here at Yoast, he did a talk on contentless marketing and elaborated on conversational based searches that are happening, which is exactly what you’re saying.

It’s more conversational where we’re old school.

We just I just type in the bare minimum short tail keyword for what I need at that moment.

And then I go from there.

And actually, it’s the younger folk and therefore the future users who are going to use it in a much more conversational way.

They seem to depend more on other people telling them things.

And it’s annoying to me because my tendency is to say, let me go Google that for you, which you could do yourself.

And they’re like, no, just tell me.

And I don’t know if that’s saying they don’t want to do their own homework.

I’m just jaded.

Probably I’m just jaded.

Probably.

Well, they want to know more, right?

I don’t know.

I was very inquisitive as a kid, but let’s not look.

Look, SEO is for the children, right?

Everything’s for the children, which is next lesson is Will Reynolds, who quoted Lily Ray, which I love.

This is: don’t confuse a loophole with a strategy.

And that’s exactly some of the previous stuff we’ve been saying with AI content.

It’s not a strategy.

It was a loophole and they closed it pretty quick.

And that is just a prime example of don’t try and abuse the algorithm, especially if you know that that’s what you’re trying to do, because it’s cleverer than you and your loophole strategy loophole.

Anything anything that cheats the system is going to get closed, that loophole is going to get closed and that trick is going to get squashed at some point.

So the only question is how long can you can you make money off of it before it stops working?

Exactly.

And Cindy Krum actually, well, she kind of compared EEAT with soup and you have lots of ingredients and there can be different methods and different ways of looking the same thing.

And what more of one ingredient can change the way that the soup tastes in general?

But when you order soup, you don’t get the soup, you get the mix and that’s what you get.

And you have to have different variations of each one.

She’s just I think she’s actually going to be uploading her talk to X at some point in the next few weeks.

So someone everyone do hound her for this video.

I’m sure she’ll share it if enough people do.

Cindy’s got a lot of great content.

So and she’ll upload content from almost all the talks she gives.

So I if you’re not following Mobile Moxie on X, I would I would recommend it.

She’s great.

And lastly, Marcus Tober from Semrush, he said something interesting about SGE and the way it’s taking over the normal the normal organic serps, right?

And the normal organic results, there’ll be less real estate.

And he said if there’ll be less real estate as time passes, this means that SEO will actually become more valuable because there’s less real estate to fight for and therefore more competition.

When you do get those two places instead of 10, that is more of a win than being on position four of the old set.

I just found that really interesting.

And in other news, because there were other things, I’m going to whip through these very quickly.

Google are releasing massive search quality enhancements.

They said in March, it’s near the end of March.

So I’m going to assume hopefully in the next week, which might delve a little bit more into content and general search quality in the way in which we should go about things.

They also explain doubling down on AI content may be a bad idea.

This was put in a couple of days before the actual the deindexation of the AI generated content.

That was a good warning shot.

Google replacing a perspective filter with forums filter because weirdly they probably just said, should we say perspective?

So it’s not just forums and realize that you can’t hide.

So we’re just going to call it forums because it is kind of the same thing.

We’ve got Google mitigating and migrating safe search.

So I think this all may not even apply to anyone, anyone who’s running an adult based store of any kind, anything to do with safe searches now inside Search Console for you.

And lastly, Uber were unable to remove an Uber Eats button from Google business profiles, which kind of suck for people who didn’t want it there.

I don’t know.

I’ve never read if that was even resolved.

I haven’t seen if it is resolved.

I think it’s still happening right now.

I think that was about a week ago, wasn’t it, that that happened?

Weird, weird.

Hopefully not.

This Google business profiles have been notoriously difficult to deal with and they’ve got a lot of problems.

I think I feel like that’s a kind of a problem child product for them because there’s so much competition and people are constantly trying to find ways to game it.

I think they.

I don’t think I don’t think the amount of trouble it’s worth is worth the money that Google’s making off of it.

So they they’re just kind of like, whatever.

Exactly.

Well, that’s all the SEO news.

Let’s crack on with AI news.

Let’s both chat about the AI Act.

It doesn’t affect you at all.

It’s only in Europe at the moment.

So it affects me amongst others.

Interestingly, it’s the first legal or sorry, not legal.

Is it legal?

It’s a set of regulations around AI technology, how it can be produced, add requirements and limits and other things that makes people stop doing what they want in AI systems and making something evil potentially.

And this is actually expected to take effect by the end of the year.

I feel like there’s been movies made about limiting AI so that the robots can’t kill us, but then the robots find a way to kill us anyway.

Yeah, well, knowing that singularity may happen in what, five years, that anything.

Probably next year at this point.

Well, they’ll probably take that loophole is not a strategy and not adopt that and find every loophole possible that humans come up with and say, we can’t do that.

You know, they’re going to be clever in those anyway, so hopefully they’ll be able to control themselves instead of realizing we’re only good for battery and power.

And that’s where AI has been established and Skynet’s response was, “Meh.”

Yeah, but at least something’s happening, right?

And even the even the leaders.

At least we’re trying.

That’s true.

Yeah, yeah.

Or it makes it seem as though we’re trying.

That goes into kind of a very long interview.

If anyone has heard of, I don’t know if it’s Lex Friedman or Fridman.

I learned today that it was Fridman.

I don’t know how you pronounce it, but very, very long interview and very in depth with Sam Altman going through lots of different stuff from OpenAI to, you know, this beef with Musk and all of that kind of stuff.

In that he he was talking a lot about the future of OpenAI, where AI in general was going, AGI, which is artificial general intelligence, which, for anyone who doesn’t know too much about AI, the one that we should be scared of.

That’s if I actually define it, there is difference.

In contrast, an AGI system can solve problems in various domains like a human being without manual intervention.

So right now, AI is information gathering, it just knows facts and things, and then it tries its very best to be right.

That’s the current AI system.

AGI goes beyond that into, well, it knows whether it’s doing something right or wrong and then adapts to that immediately.

Combating that is going to be a big thing for OpenAI, I think, like he said, mitigating bias as much as possible, making sure that these systems aren’t negative on on human evolution in general and that AGI and AI in general should just be helping humans.

But one thing I did take away from it, which I did like, is its impact on jobs shouldn’t be looked at so negatively.

So we hear and we’ve been speaking about in previous ones, is AI going to take our jobs?

And maybe if we should cast our eyes back to the early 90s and the birth of the Internet and mass adoption of the Internet and people thought that their jobs were going now.

Look at like the US Office and you look at a paper company going into a digital world, maybe a bad example.

But actually, it’s about adapting to that new technology and taking advantage of those things and being a bit of an innovative with it.

Right.

Yeah.

And one thing that since you gave the newspaper example, one thing that we learned from adapting to new technologies is you can’t use old traditional business models on these new technologies because they function so differently that if you try to apply the old onto the new without adapting for the new.

It just it doesn’t work well.

So there is a lot of retooling that needs to happen to some of these legacy businesses to make sure that they can continue to grow and survive with all of the changes that are happening.

Yeah, you look back 50 years and where the Internet didn’t this couldn’t happen right now.

This webinar, none of this stuff could happen.

And yet we’ve all kind of got jobs despite the technology that’s been put in front of us that we thought would have ruined those jobs.

And yeah, if the Internet wasn’t around, maybe I’d be a lawyer, but I wouldn’t have been as happy.

Right.

This is much more interesting to me.

And it keeps us going because there’s new stuff to learn all the time.

And there are things that have that have kind of phased out like the yellow pages.

One of the last time you got a phone book, a printed phone book.

They don’t they don’t even do those anymore.

So I got a phone book two weeks ago.

We don’t know why it was posted to us.

We’re never going to open it.

Went straight in the bin.

It was wasted.

Maybe that’s just a contract.

Someone’s legacy contract is trying to stay alive as long as possible.

I haven’t seen a phone book in so long.

You should save it for posterity.

Should start selling them in Antiques Roadshow or something.

But a lot of the phone books is SGE.

So this is interesting.

SGE is now being tested in a subset of a U.S. audience with a subset of search queries.

And I haven’t been able to experience it because I’m in the UK, but you have, Carolyn.

I have.

So I will say that I use it for things that I as an SEO, I probably should not.

Like I will ask it for answers to questions and then not go look at the website that it’s referencing.

If I do go look at the website, it’s just to make sure that I got the entire answer or that the answer wasn’t excerpted in a weird way.

But I do believe that it’s going to result in loss of traffic for websites, especially when it’s just information gathering and it’s not transactional.

The other thing I noticed, and this is someone asked a question about this, I saw the when when you search for, let’s say a brand and it pops a carousel of recommended pages, the pages that came up and the primary page that was recommended for this brand name were not the brand’s website.

And that confused me.

And what I saw that a common thread amongst all of the pages that were in the carousel was the brand name was first in the meta title and it was first in the H1.

It mentioned in the first sentence in the body copy once the body copy started, which is kind of a newsy thing to do.

But when you look at how big businesses, especially treat their home pages, the first word in your home page title is often not the name of your company.

It’s the word home or it’s your slogan.

And then you then you put your your business name at the end.

Whereas if someone’s writing a review of your website, they’ll have your business name first and they’ll have it first and prominent.

And that’s what happened.

We ended up with a lot of reviews of that business rather than pages from that business.

And it was.

I was able to manipulate that a little by going to the products website and saying, OK, I’m going to take this page because I know that the SGE’s already aware of it and I’m going to move words around it.

Oh, look, I was able to get more of the pages into that carousel, but not quite overtake the first the first results that it seems to me, especially in conjunction in consideration of Lily Ray posted some things, some screenshots of spam sites showing up in the SGE carousel.

The SGE carousel seems to be less picky about authority and Less able to detect spam.

I don’t know if there’s a more elegant way to say that.

Not that everything that it chooses is going to be spam, but it seems like its parameters are slightly less sensitive than the normal the normal search algorithm is.

So I think you might find in the SGE things that would have that are otherwise filtered out or not promoted in the regular search rankings, which is it’s going to be a tactic for a little while.

But I assure you that that tactic is going to get squished.

Yeah, it’s interesting because some of Lily’s examples are actually quite bad.

I think I remember seeing one that she went went to an adult site for a brand term.

I don’t know who it was, but she actually tagged the brand in the tweet.

I just found that was I mean, I guess there’s, you know, the search team are reading every single Lily Ray update and taking it right back to the office anyway.

So thanks for reporting it, Lily.

I bet they are best friends for yeah, yeah, but it’s good, though, because it is a good form of data and hopefully by the time it goes out for mass adoption.

So so yeah, and let’s see what’s happening.

It is interesting that they’re doing the updates now.

Google I.O. one of the big conferences is in.

I think you’re onto something there.

I think they’re going to have a big announcement about it at that.

Yeah, and they did start publicizing that only a few days before they started this testing as well.

So it’s all part press plan, right?

All part of the press plan.

That’s a I knew.

So WordPress news, not much news this month, except that WordPress six point five was about to be released today.

But it’s been pushed back a week probably to close some gaps and stuff like that.

But scheduled to be released on the second of April.

But there are lots of lots of features, not just one or two.

There’s a couple of things here.

And it’s actually a screenshot.

You can upload your own font soon, which is great, which has been a pet peeve of mine as a developer over the years.

And also, which is great for editorial style revisions, not content revisions, which we’ve already kind of got already, but specific style revisions.

So if the style of a page does change through time, you can see exactly who did it and when, which is great to see.

They also have been doing a faster method of sorting out translations.

So that’s just a performance update.

And of course, the interactive API, which is more of an advanced feature.

I wouldn’t think that the audience needs to go through.

But if you do want to know more, of course, we’ve written everything about it in a nice blog post at yoast.com/wordpress-6-5.

Lastly, we’ve got Yoast news.

So some products and company updates.

The first one I’ll do very quickly.

Very two quick updates in 22.2.

A lot more improved keyphrase detection and a lot of improved inclusive language stuff.

So don’t be not inclusive.

Is it exclusive?

Disclusive?

I’m not the content person.

I don’t know what the word is, but don’t be not inclusive.

That’s another Office thing.

Don’t not bother someone.

Don’t be exclusive.

Don’t be exclusive.

Don’t exclude people.

Marina has told us it’s non-inclusive.

Thank you, Marina.

It’s non-inclusive.

So don’t be non-inclusive in your language.

Don’t be.

OK, we’ll take your word for it.

We’re getting told big time in chat.

And the last one is in 22.3, we’ve finally introduced the AI features into taxonomies.

So it’s not just in singular posts and post types and pages.

So that’s Yoast product updates.

You could tell us more about Bluehost Cloud.

Bluehost Cloud is a big initiative that was just announced at WordCamp Asia.

It’s a hosting option that Bluehost is offering.

They developed it in conjunction with Automatic.

So it utilizes, you know, sometimes people talk about managed WordPress hosting.

This is WordPress hosting that only does WordPress.

It’s optimized for WordPress.

The entire breadth and height of the of the tech stack.

It’s only for WordPress.

So and I believe it could be wrong.

I believe it ships with Yoast kind of automatically.

But the nice thing about it is that it is it’s targeted for heavier users.

So if you’re a casual user or you have a small blog, this might not be for you.

The prices are a little bit higher than what people are accustomed to with traditional shared hosting, which is very inexpensive.

This, I believe, starts at like thirty dollars a month, which for managed WordPress hosting isn’t off the charts bad.

I don’t even that’s actually pretty reasonable now that I think about it.

OK, point is optimized for WordPress entirely great for speed, great for security availability.

The SLA, which is the service level agreement, includes 100 percent availability, which means you’re up all the time.

You get a dedicated special customer service and support branch.

So they’re just WordPress experts, they’re just experts in the cloud.

You don’t have to go through three layers of regular support to get to the specialists.

They shoot you straight into that.

It sounds like a really, you know, it’s a really great product.

There was there’s a lot of work done.

There was a lot of a lot of preparation.

They’re really proud of this.

And it was it was exciting to see the rollout.

So if anyone is curious, you can go over to bluehost.com and check out the cloud hosting because it’s it’s the jewel in the crown now.

Yeah, it looks really good.

It actually looks impressive.

I’m going to be trying it out a bit more.

I’ve done a little bit of tests, but it’s it’s been quite cool.

So there’s a lot.

They’re really targeting agencies and they’ve got a lot of agency offering.

So if you’ve got more than one website, like I think that the base offering can host up to five different websites.

So even at the base offering, you’ve got the opportunity to do multiple sites and still reap all the benefits of this really enterprise level service.

Yeah, I’m looking forward to delving in more.

But yeah, that’s all the news we have for this month.

Next month, if you’re in Brighton in the UK, I’ll be there attending with a few other Yoasties.

Giorgia, I think, is speaking as well, will be at your WordCamp Europe with bells on, I’m sure, which is in mid-June.

And also before all of that, in a few weeks, there’s a Yoast contributor day.

So if you want to contribute whatsoever towards WordPress Core, you can go in to contributor day itself.

And that’s on the 18th of April, which you’ll be able to find.

And lastly, the next SEO update with us will be on the 30th of April, because this is once monthly, this one, once monthly at the end last Tuesday, generally, isn’t it?

Last Tuesday.

So yeah, next month will be on the 30th of April, same time.

And we have 10 minutes for Q&A, as usual.

We still spare, there weren’t a lot of news items, but there was still enough to chat about.

Yes.

So as you’ve seen, we have a very active chat, but we also have a very active Q&A.

So we have more questions lined up than we can possibly answer, but we’ll try our best and start with the most popular one, which is a question by Sarah Scott, asking, there’s a lot of talk about sites experiencing adverse effects from the rollout.

Are there sites that are benefiting from the rollout?

I’ve not seen any personally.

There’s not been a lot of win kind of posts around.

There have been, and it depends, well, I guess it depends.

I’ve seen any wins of people who’ve survived where everyone else has lost.

So you’ve kind of stayed even, but as a result of someone else’s decline visibility, you get increased visibility, but I kind of, it’s kind of half skewed data.

Have you seen anything around Carolyn?

I haven’t seen anyone report any wins that are comparable and opposite to the depths of the losses.

So I would say, I would say if you didn’t get hit, that’s about as happy as you can generally hope for.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If you’re staying the same, that’s a win.

If you’re keeping your head above water, you’re still swimming.

I hope that answers your question, Sarah.

So the next one, as a news SEO specialist, how important are ranked popular keywords or keyphrases to a news article, especially to a niche regional B2B website, Louisa asks.

I can answer this one.

Okay.

So the thing with news SEO, oh, I’m making my monitor jiggle.

The thing with news SEO is you have about 48 to 72 hours for an article to rank and do well.

So it’s not really, that algorithm isn’t looking at particular topics and keyphrases that have been ranking traditionally very high for a long time.

It’s looking at what are people searching for right now.

So I would be more worried about what news is breaking right now, what news is trending right now, and make sure that you’re matching the phrases that are that Google’s favoring.

So let’s say there was a train wreck, which I know is horrible, but that’s one mind one.

Let’s say there was a train wreck.

You want to look and see what other articles, if any Google has, it’s ranking for that event.

And if you’re writing about it, if Google is favoring train crash over train wreck, that’s the phrase you want to use.

So you’re looking more at Google news and maybe Google trends for emerging breakout trends, then you are looking at anything that’s showing historical volume because the historical volume for breaking news is not really relevant.

What?

That’s a very clear answer.

Thank you.

Kelsey asks, do the Google updates affect Google ads in any way?

We noticed a drop in paid traffic, but not organic.

I mean, they never say it, but I mean, you always hear these stories about how your ad spend on the site and magically organic rankings seem to also increase and vice versa.

But generally, no, they don’t affect ads.

It may be more because I’m not a PPC specialist.

It might be more of a quality rating in terms of the paid quality score that they give as well.

If you know more about that, Carolyn.

I don’t know more about it, unfortunately, but I was thinking what if with more people dropping off the organic page because they’ve been hit by the update, the price of getting the premium positions in paid has gone up and your bid isn’t as high as other people’s.

I mean, I feel like that could be possibly related.

I don’t know.

We’re not PPC specialists.

Yeah, I’ve learned last week there’s a whole different world that does nothing but PPC.

Yeah, and it’s very different.

No, SEO is for everyone, not PPC.

PPC is for everyone with big deep pockets.

Okay, so Mike asked moving towards less SEO real estate on the SERP.

What should we be focusing on?

Are the core of SEO strategies still important, like keyword research, technical optimization, producing quality EEAT content?

Yes, to all of those things.

Still crack on and do those things because if you are the most helpful result, you should deserve to be there.

Like I was saying before with Marcus Tober’s quote about there’s less real estate, which means it’s even more valuable.

It’s probably from my opinion, even more important to ensure that you’re doing those things, again, without going over the top and showing things for Google, which again, I think John Mueller has specifically said this week, don’t do stuff just to show us that you’re doing stuff because we’re going to figure out that you’re doing stuff for us, not for your user.

Just try not to think about the search engine, and then you might find yourself being more naturally helpful.

And make sure that you’re handling all of your technical SEO because making sure that the search engines can easily crawl and see all of your content is the biggest hurdle right there.

What kind of analogy do I want to use?

So cakes.

If you could have the most beautiful frosting on your cake, it could be a masterpiece, but if the inside tastes like styrofoam, it’s still a bad cake.

That’s right.

Sorry.

I’ve heard better analogies, but I think I get it.

Getting very hungry.

So Adi asked, could you share suggestions to overcome the hits to impressions due to the core updates?

It’s knocked off over 50% of impressions and there must be a way to offset.

My answer is, I’m sorry, I can’t answer that question today, maybe next month.

That sounds bad because you have taken a 50% hit, but as people from within Google are saying, wait until the core updates rolled out completely, which should be in the next week, and then decide what to do next because that means that all that data can then be talked about a bit more.

There’s a lot of people, including Lily, who we keep mentioning, but she’s even said, I’m not saying too much because it has not completed rolling out.

And then once all of that’s there and it can be evaluated in full, that’s maybe where you get a better stance.

But hopefully Adi, if you’re here next month, we’ll have a better answer for you.

And you can’t just look at your overall site traffic.

You have to isolate it to, you lost it from specific keywords, I would imagine.

So you need to identify that, identify the pages those were attached to, look at who benefited from the roll out and what they’re doing differently than you are.

There’s a lot of factors that go into it.

So it’s really difficult for us to offer a solution on such little information.

Yeah.

So would it be worth already reaching out to an SEO specialist for help or wait until the rollout is complete?

You might be able to get started just to start identifying where you think the pain points are.

But it’s not going to be a quick answer.

No.

And if you want an SEO’s help, maybe you can look into looking for someone now, because by the time you’ve made your decision and picked someone, like the rollout should be complete and therefore in a better position.

But yeah, I would say don’t just go for anyone who go, oh yeah, I can sort it.

Anyone who claims that they can sort it now, never contact them again.

All right.

I think this is a related question by Carly.

What changes to site traffic would you deem as a result from the update?

A drop, a big drop.

A drop that doesn’t make sense for seasonal troughs as well.

And it puts the weekend or something like it’s something that you can sell after a week, maybe even less depending on your kind of site.

And you’re looking for the kind of drop, not like a gradual drop, it’ll be a cliff.

So if you see a cliff, I would say that’s an update related drop.

If you’ve been suffering from a gradual decline, that is probably not update related.

All right.

That’s a clear answer.

I think we have one more minute.

And I really like this question.

It is very much unrelated to most of what we’ve talked about today.

But it is interesting.

It’s a question by Timothy who says, is there a simple way for a neophyte to check if your site has been hacked and this is happening?

I would go to Google and do site colon and then your domain name.

So if your domain is abc.com, it would be site colon abc.com, no spaces.

See what comes up.

Go through all of the listings.

If there are more pages than you were anticipating, that could be a problem.

If there are pages you don’t recognize, that is 100% a problem.

If you’re selling Viagra and you didn’t know it, that’s a problem.

But that is a really quick way to see if Google’s indexing things on your site that you didn’t know about.

Yeah.

And there are security-based plugins out there.

Some which check the things.

Some which limit future occurrences.

And then there’s also CloudFlare as well which have their own layer away from the WordPress installation to handle some of these things like hacks or phishing.

Also, neophyte, great word.

I’ve learned a word today.

Scrabble player over there.

I was going to say.

I’m not playing with him.

I have to be fair.

As a non-native speaker, I had to Google it because I only know it as an artist.

But yeah, I did.

Anyway, that brings us to the full hour.

So I want to thank you again very, very much for sharing all your knowledge with us today.

We’ve had a very lively audience.

So thanks to everyone who joined us today, who participated in the chat, asked questions.

We couldn’t do this without you.

So see you again next month or maybe in one of the Intro to SEO webinars that happen bi-weekly, semi-monthly, every other week.

Hear something out.

But tomorrow for sure.

Thanks for having us.

And yeah, we’ll see you next month.

Bye.

Topics & sources

SEO news

AI news

WordPress news

Yoast news

Google SGE (Search Generative Experience) example result

an example of the AI-generated result in the Google Search Generative Experience
An example of an AI-generated result in the Google Search Generative Experience

Presented by

<>Carolyn Shelby

Carolyn is our Principal SEO. She leverages more than two decades of hands-on experience optimizing websites for maximum visibility and engagement. She specializes in enterprise and news SEO, and is passionate about demystifying the intricacies of search engine optimization for businesses of all sizes.

<>Alex Moss

Alex is our Principal SEO. With a background in technical SEO, he has been working in Search since its infancy and also has years of knowledge of WordPress, developing several plugins over the years. He is involved within many aspects of Yoast from product roadmap to content strategy.

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yoast-seo-google-sge-example
Webinar: How to start with SEO (March 12, 2024) https://yoast.com/webinar/webinar-how-to-start-with-seo-march-12-2024/ Mon, 11 Mar 2024 09:02:09 +0000 https://yoast.com/?post_type=yoast_webinar&p=3687635 Learn the basics and get practical tips Starting with SEO can be overwhelming and sometimes you need help to get started. No worries; our SEO experts are here to help. Watch the webinar replay and get practical tips about all the SEO basics. We’ll cover these 4 topics Webinar level: beginner Join us if you: Hosted by

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Learn the basics and get practical tips

Starting with SEO can be overwhelming and sometimes you need help to get started. No worries; our SEO experts are here to help. Watch the webinar replay and get practical tips about all the SEO basics.

We’ll cover these 4 topics

  • How to do keyword research?
  • How to optimize content?
  • How to improve the structure of your website?
  • How to make your site visible to search engines?

Webinar level: beginner

Join us if you:

  • Feel that you need help to start with SEO on your website
  • Want to ask our hosts your SEO-related questions in the Q&A

Hosted by

<>Mushrit Shabnam

Mushrit is a support engineer at Yoast. She is also a WordPress enthusiast and invests her time in creating documentation.

<>Nino van Tour

Nino manages the growth team at Yoast. Generating growth by looking at data and improving user experience is his main focus. 

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Webinar: How to start with SEO (February 29, 2024) https://yoast.com/webinar/webinar-how-to-start-with-seo-february-29-2024/ Thu, 29 Feb 2024 16:05:26 +0000 https://yoast.com/?post_type=yoast_webinar&p=3675582 Learn the basics and get practical tips Starting with SEO can be overwhelming and sometimes you need help to get started. No worries; our SEO experts are here to help. Watch the webinar replay and get practical tips about all the SEO basics. We’ll cover these 4 topics Webinar level: beginner Join us if you: Hosted […]

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Learn the basics and get practical tips

Starting with SEO can be overwhelming and sometimes you need help to get started. No worries; our SEO experts are here to help. Watch the webinar replay and get practical tips about all the SEO basics.

We’ll cover these 4 topics

  • How to do keyword research?
  • How to optimize content?
  • How to improve the structure of your website?
  • How to make your site visible to search engines?

Webinar level: beginner

Join us if you:

  • Feel that you need help to start with SEO on your website
  • Want to ask our hosts your SEO-related questions in the Q&A

Hosted by

<>Marina Koleva

Marina is a linguist and developer who works on Yoast SEO’s content analysis – the well-known checks on a text’s SEO, readability, inclusive language use, and all the rest. Marina is also very proud to be one of the people who developed support for Japanese for our analysis.

<>Michael Quaranta

Michael is one of the Yoast support team leads. His focus is on improving the support team’s performance and satisfaction. His work background includes retail store management, customer support, and sales.

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The SEO update by Yoast – February 2024 Edition https://yoast.com/webinar/the-seo-update-by-yoast-february-2024-edition/ Mon, 26 Feb 2024 16:33:14 +0000 https://yoast.com/?post_type=yoast_webinar&p=3673890 Update transcript Topics & sources SEO news AI news WordPress news Yoast news Presented by

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Update transcript

Hello everyone!

I hope you can all hear me and see me because I’m Nynke, I’m the host of today and I will make sure we’re all ready for the next SEO update by Yoast!

And it’s a really cool one because we have had the highest registrations since a few months so we’re really proud that you and happy that you are all joining us today.

Everybody’s doing this already but I’m super curious to see where you are joining from.

I’m currently in the Yoast headquarters as you might be able to see from the nice designed background behind me.

And I’ve seen people from all over Europe, all over North America already so that’s awesome to see.

While you’re sharing your location I’m gonna kick off with some household notices before we really deep dive into all the updates.

First of all, this session will be recorded and you will be able to find all the resources that you need on yoast.com.

There will be a nice green button below which you can click and then find all the resources for this webinar.

Also, we will do a Q&A at the end of all the updates and Crowdcast has a great function for Q&A where you can ask questions, you don’t have to put them in the chat but there’s a special place for that.

And you can even upvote questions of others so we know what the most urgent questions are that you want to get answered after today’s update.

If you’re on mobile it can be a little question mark sign at the bottom of your screen.

So, before we really start I want to introduce you to, you see their nice avatars on screen already, our hosts for today, Alex and Carolyn.

They are both principal SEOs with a lot of experience in all kinds of industries and they will make sure that everything that you will hear today is helpful and you will know the implications of all the updates of February.

I can promise you, there’s a lot that will come your way during this update.

And if you run an eCommerce business, I’m really curious to hear if you run an eCommerce business, I can recommend you to pay extra attention to an update in the SEO news category.

It’s a bit at the end but there’s something really nice in store for you in that update.

So, without further ado, I will invite Alex and Carolyn on the screen.

There you are.

Let’s see if Carolyn’s there.

Yes.

Please take it away.

I’ll be back when we start the Q&A.

Thank you very much.

It’s good to be here.

It’s been a busy month hasn’t it Carolyn.

It feels like the month went, I can’t believe it’s the end of February already.

Everything’s going so quickly.

I know, I know and I thought again it might be a slow news month but again we’ve been wrong.

But again, you were wrong.

It’s a good thing you’re not a betting man.

Exactly.

I never bet.

I don’t want to take these risks.

Essentially, it’s January.

Everyone’s done their January, get in there, need to do stuff in February.

Let’s do a load of updates that make a lot of confusing language that will make us debate a lot for the next month.

Let’s get through it because I know there’s so much to do.

What are we going to discuss today?

SEO news, which I reckon will take quite a lot of the time.

We’ve then got some AI news because there has been a lot happening in AI too.

It has been a busy month for a lot of people.

And then after that we’ll go through a couple of WordPress items and lastly we’ll have a couple of Yoast updates.

And of course Q&A.

So first for Q&A, always need to make sure on the right hand side, I don’t know which way I’m pointing, but on one side, on the right hand side, there is a nice question mark below the chat icon.

Make sure that if you have any questions in there, ask in there.

And also if you want a question asked that someone else has asked, then upvote it.

And most upvotes are probably, which is nice to know.

But of course you can chat, tell us where you’re from, tell us if you’ve got any other interests or anything else that you might have observed in the last month of SEO yourself.

If you want to learn more about anything today, you can go on to this, which is yoa.st.

I can’t say Yoast because it doesn’t spell right. yoa.st/update-feb2024 where you’ll be able to see this replayed video that you’ll be able to do in slow speed if I’m talking too fast as well.

And of course you can get all the links to the different stories we’ve been going through today.

And if you need to learn more over the month, you can learn from how to start with SEO.

And of course that’s within Yoast SEO academy.

And it’s also worth mentioning that this morning I published our updated SEO Glossary, which I will at some point during this course of the update will share in the chat so you can have a look and tell us what you think of it.

So SEO news.

What’s happened first?

INP.

Tell us about what you think about INP.

So it’s paving way in what?

Two weeks or something?

Yeah.

So there’s been confusion about what’s getting replaced and what’s not getting replaced with Core Web Vitals.

I know initially when this was announced, everyone’s like, oh, Core Web Vitals don’t matter anymore.

It’s just one facet of Core Web Vitals that’s being replaced or a metric that they think is more appropriate and actionable than the old one.

The old one was first input delay.

The new interaction is interaction to next paint.

Interaction to next paint is, I would imagine, similar to largest contentful paint.

So it’s just a metric.

It’s not the end of the world.

No one thinks that just making maxing this out at 100 is going to instantly give you any kind of ranking boost.

This is still a piece of the Core Web Vitals pie.

I would focus, if I were you, on getting the majority of your pages, if not all of your pages, into the good area.

Get them green.

Don’t worry about making everything perfect.

Don’t let good be the enemy of, or don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

I never get that right.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

You want good.

Everything has to be at least good.

You don’t want needs improvement.

You don’t want poor.

You want everything green.

But other than that, green is fine.

Doesn’t have to be 100 percent.

That’s why there’s a point of having space for green.

Otherwise, green would just be 99 and 100, if not just 100.

And then everything else would be orange.

So, yeah, don’t be too paranoid about every single metric, because you’ll spend more time on that than you should do on other, more natural elements of the website.

So it’s still good to know that don’t get too scared if something goes up or something goes down.

Breathe.

Have a look.

There might be something very easy to do.

And if there’s something more important to do, at least you’ve got a little bit more clearer information since we’re deaf and it isn’t just going to be a six month nightmare for you.

Cheers.

I wouldn’t panic too much.

This is fixable.

This is doable.

This is by no means the end of the world or even a seismic shift in your reality.

Just focus on getting it to green.

Don’t worry about getting things to 100 percent.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So talking about getting things to 100 percent, we had a very, very long post by Jarno van Driel, who I’m sure the fans here that were mentioning him here.

So what you can see here is a schema entry on one URL.

I think there was 700 in that.

I think he actually found something with 7000 entities and trying to take Jono for his money as the most complex schema entry ever.

But anyway, he went through a very big rabbit hole.

So if you’re in the mood for having a very complex read about structured data, EEAT and any, if at all, correlation, you can do here.

And he does it in a very nice way, bit of a storytelling way.

But in short, no, it doesn’t influence EEAT.

Structured data and EEAT, whilst they have a connection in code, don’t have a connection to do with actual more visibility.

Maybe you can elaborate more on the connection of structured data and EEAT and what people should think about it.

Oh, geez.

So I think what we’ve discovered from reading all this is that it’s complicated and that everybody, the way people’s brains make the connections from point A to point B when it comes to structured data and EEAT and rankings, they go in different directions.

I think the important thing is that we all kind of arrive at the same place.

The things to remember about EEAT is that it’s not a ranking factor directly.

And fixing your structured data is not going to necessarily improve or change what Google thinks about you as a person.

Actually, the more I think about this, the more confused I’m making myself.

I guess the short story is you need the structured data to help the search engines understand what’s on the page, what you’re talking about on the page, but mostly to make it easy for them to take pieces out of the page that they want to use and repurpose for other things.

It is not going to help with your rankings, other than it makes the engines understand what’s on the page better.

And if what’s on the page is worth ranking, then they will rank it.

You’re not going to tell them the page is about something it’s not because the structured data is there to make it clear.

EEAT is so subjective.

It’s not, you know, we talked about that.

What was the thing we talked about about Tucker Carlson?

Having his name on an article isn’t going to make that article rank better because he has more authority.

It’s because he is a more widely searched, higher search volume thing.

And that his entity is going to be attached to or associated with that article because his name is mentioned.

So whether he wrote the article or the articles about him, it will show up for his name.

It’s not going to magically provide fairy dust that will make your entire site have more authority.

Yeah, which I’m still not sure is entirely clear as mud.

Maybe I think we were trying to describe it in the simplest way and using Tucker Carlson was a good example because he’s such a well known.

Sorry, he’s got a lot of visibility online.

Right.

So our scenario was with Tucker Carlson do write a post in a very low authority news outlet and not talk about it anywhere.

And the only thing connecting him to this post would be structured data.

The point is, would that would it be influenced because of who Tucker Carlson is?

And the answer in short would be no.

The result of him publishing it and people seeing that and then linking to or citing that is the result of him as a person.

And that is the factor that goes into the ranking is what happens as a result, not because it’s him.

Yeah, so he is a person is popular and it will attract links because of who he is.

But I mean, that’s not really something you can affect your structured data.

That’s not a thing that you can affect through any machinations of your own.

That is a thing that is a fact.

He is as a part as an entity attracts links.

So it’s sort of like news jacking.

I don’t know.

News jacking a long time ago would be where you would write a news story about something and you would mention something that was related to it because you could work it into the article but the article really wasn’t about that.

Because you mentioned it, it would attract links and get more publicity.

So long time ago when Hillary Clinton and was running against Barack Obama and the Democratic primary in the US.

Hillary came to West Lafayette and did a rally.

Well, it never mentioned Barack Obama.

But at the time he had a much greater search volume and more velocity in the searches and in Google News than Hillary did.

So I added a line to the article that mentioned that her primary competitor in this race was Barack Obama.

All I said, I mentioned his name in the first paragraph.

The story got so much more traffic so many more views because I sort of hijacked that that mention and I feel like this is very similar.

But again, not a ranking signal.

You’re just taking advantage of the notoriety of something else.

Exactly.

Like this is very clear as mud.

Well, it’s good to know right good to know but if anyone wants to go even down an even deeper rabbit hole.

Do read that you’ll get you’ll get a link in the next email about it.

So what do we have next.

Google have revamped the SEO starter guide, which is interesting they’ve halved it in size.

And they’ve made it much simpler for a beginner to understand or a beginner to intermediate, which I think is really good.

I mean there’s not much to cover in there that you know it’s not a new update is it’s just repurposing the same content but the interesting thing is getting rid of that half because of a few reasons not to overcomplicate things.

And also because some things with technology kind of being dealt with, whether it’s through plugins like ours or whether it’s on Google side with how to read that stuff.

But it was, it was good to know that it’s done I know that advanced SEO is like why is it gone.

Dumber, but it hasn’t it’s just not for them.

I think sometimes you have to write.

You have to not get too complex or detailed, or even nuanced with your instructions to people at the beginner end of the scale, because it’s a lot to keep track of, and if you mess up any of the foundational points in your head.

Any more advanced stuff will start to not make sense.

Or if you skip over a foundational part and go straight to the advanced, you don’t understand the mechanics of why this is what it is.

Then I think the problem that you run into as people start making leaps of judgment and logic leaps that land them on not solid ground and things get messed up and there’s weird, weird interpretations, it’s best if you say less.

There’s less to misinterpret.

Yeah, exactly.

And which is, I’m talking about less to interpret you know that’s what Google have been doing this month which leads us to our next story of what’s a factor, what’s a signal what’s a system, and I don’t know if anyone has been looking at discussions on Twitter or not, or months and you’ve got people like Ryan Jones, who you know well who has been getting into discussions as well.

Well it first kind of started from a tweet, I think it was by Danny Sullivan or from the Search Liaison that said, call web vitals aren’t a ranking factor.

Now, other people may disagree with that and go how can you say that you’ve been telling us all this time about speed performance introducing CWV, making sure telling us, make sure everything’s better faster.

And then you’ve got that INP trying to get into green just then.

Why should we care if CWV isn’t a factor.

Well, he kind of answered that in there we look at many things and not one thing.

And it might not be a direct ranking factor but then they kind of, again, add fuel to the fire.

They say that it’s not a factor to signal.

And it’s kind of goes into like lawyer talk at that point.

Do you know what I mean?

What’s the interpretation of a word?

What is the word that you should use?

And I even I even made that gift myself when I was talking to Jarno funnily enough about this, you know, everyone’s pointing at different things of what is a signal ranking and system.

Again, overthinking right saying too much trying to interpret every word just.

I think when Google talks about ranking factors, they mean the actual algorithm, which to be fair, they don’t even know what that is at this point.

The contributor, the signal that Core Web Vitals is sending is.

All of those things make up fast page load and good user experience.

So, well, the Core Web Vitals themselves individually are not part of the algorithm officially.

We all know that your page speed and the user experience are ranking factors.

So Core Web Vitals explain to you the different things that go into a good user experience so that you can fix that.

That’s why it’s important.

But once you start.

Google has always spoken in a very Clintonian sort of way.

You have to semantically dissect everything they say and look at the words that are used in the context that they are used.

And that is really the only thing that those will be applicable towards.

They don’t.

They’re not in the business of giving away the secret sauce, assuming they know what the secret sauce is at this point.

So are Core Web Vitals signals or are they ranking factors?

Google says it’s not.

We all know that it is clearly important because we can see a change in how we rank when your Core Web Vitals go in the tank, because that means there’s something wrong with the site.

It’s slow.

The crawlers are having problems with it.

The users are having problems with it.

And when the users have problems with the site, Google is not going to recommend your site to the users because they want the users to be happy.

So it’s all it all goes into this mishash of how they’re going to rank things.

Just because Google says this is not officially part of the algorithm doesn’t mean that they’re not looking at it.

And it doesn’t mean you can ignore it.

It’s weird because as you were saying secret sauce in my head, my analogy was going to I was thinking about McDonald’s fries, for example, and the secret and the actual source, the Big Mac sauce.

And it is people try to replicate it and you can’t get it exact.

But does that mean that the sources are pretty sure it ‘s Russian dressing with relish?

I’m sure it is.

But like, for example, if you close your eyes and you eat McDonald’s fries, you know that’s McDonald’s fries quite I would be able to I think I’m that confident I’ll be able to distinguish that fries from another fries.

But the other fries are still fries.

It’s still fries and it’s still edible and it’s still very tasty.

But McDonald’s have that specific recipe on it.

But that doesn’t mean that no fries aren’t good fries.

Maybe it’s a bad example.

Maybe it is.

I don’t know.

Maybe I just like fries.

But you know, it’s one of those you can’t unless it’s clearly this is just a raw potato and you’ve not done anything with it.

You’ve not put it in the oven.

You’re not put anything around it nor seasoning on it.

It’s not proper fries.

But I guess it’s a potato.

They’re both potatoes.

Now we’re into entities.

We should get away from this, shouldn’t we?

I feel like we could go a lot deeper on the potato analogy.

Maybe we’ll work on that.

So what else have we got?

Well, Google’s taking stuff away again, aren’t they?

This is an interesting one.

So web stories evolved from AMP.

And I know everyone likes to hate on AMP and AMP is being kind of lost to the sands of time at this point.

That would explain why they’re taking away web stories.

Web stories are a complicated, pain in the butt way of generating effectively a text based HTMLized kind of reel or Instagram story, except it’s on Google and it’s kind of on AMP and Google’s putting it in their cache so they can serve it faster, which is what they did with AMP, which is why AMP was AMP.

The point is, though, it was hard to do.

There was no easy way to do this.

And it wasn’t generating.

It wasn’t generating enough revenue.

I looked at Google’s development site and I remember when they launched this, they were kind of twisting the arms of big news publishers to go into and invest heavily in these web stories.

And we’ll link to you.

We’ll use you as a case study.

One of the primary case studies was Vice.

Vice is shutting down this week.

So clearly that went well for them.

I think long story short, is it bad that they’re going away?

No.

Is anyone going to miss them?

No.

It’s a shame.

It’s a shame.

That’s what happens, doesn’t it?

But yeah, web stories.

It’s like, do they like the news or not like the news?

But we’ll see.

Probably next month they’ll have brought it back like FAQ snippets, right?

Yeah, I don’t think they will, though, because I don’t think there’s I think they’re going to just lean into the reels and the Instagram stories and the things that already exist that people are actually using and monetizing.

I just don’t think enough.

I don’t think there was enough adoption of these web stories to make them viable.

Which is good, though.

A little more real estate for everyone else as well.

Hopefully.

Yeah.

So what’s next?

HCU.

Haven’t heard that in a couple of months because nothing’s been updated or nothing’s turned.

But one thing that was interesting this month was a lot of debate about classifiers and timings on do I wait?

What do I do?

If I get if I got hit by helpful contents update and I do and I did everything I needed to theoretically the next day, do I have to wait until Google does something again updates the algorithm and in short the answer is no.

If you were to do something, everything you needed to do within 24 hours, well, at least what what Search Liaison saying you should be able to recover without waiting for what’s going to happen next.

And if you continue to do stuff in a positive way, the classifier runs continuously and therefore the quicker you do things, the quicker you’ll recover theoretically.

But you have to do the right things.

You have to do things that will actually make your content more helpful, not just rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Yeah, well, what’s the right thing here then?

So, so there’s no interpretation.

I mean, your content not crap.

Exactly.

So it’s interesting to see a lot of people who are saying I’ve not recovered.

I’ve done everything I can.

But part of me also says, well, an algorithm is a computer and it’s checking on you.

So clearly you’ve not done what it wants you to do.

Oh, I’ve covered when I’ve done everything that I can sounds an awful lot like my children when they say, I can’t find my shoes for school.

I looked everywhere.

And without fail, I will say, if I go check in your room under your bed, will I find your shoes?

No.

Did you look everywhere.

Yes.

Did you look there.

No.

Okay.

It just, it seems like a thing a kid would say.

Clearly, clearly if you have not recovered, you have not done the right things.

So you have not done everything.

The HCU is about helpful content.

If you got hit, your content was not helpful.

Therefore, make your content helpful.

Yeah.

I think one thing he didn’t answer though, or they didn’t answer whoever was behind the tweet that day was if you did everything you needed to and you completed your list today, how long it would be until that recovery happens.

There’s no, there was no set timeline.

So if the classifier is running all the time, then I guess it would be how long will it take the crawler to grab your data, recalculate it, and then determine that you’ve done enough to start seeing a change.

So if they’re looking at, let’s pretend that we know what they’re doing.

Let’s pretend they’re looking at the average of the content throughout the entirety of your site.

That means it’ll have to crawl all of the content on your site or at least enough of it to count as, you know, 50% plus one or whatever it is their magic number they’re looking for.

And everything that they’ve looked at has to add up to the right number.

I’m sure they know exactly how many pieces of content they have on your site has submitted to the index right if they know the total they know the magic number for that percentage.

They’ve got to recrawl everything and you’ve got to hit the magic number.

Do you know what the magic number is?

No.

Are they going to tell you?

Also, no.

Just go through all of your content, all of the content that they might be looking at, and make sure that it’s helpful.

If you have not touched every single piece of content to ensure that it is meeting that standard that helpful standard, then you have not in fact done everything that you can do.

Yeah, and things like, oh well I’ve connected them to a profile that’s now real, and I’ve done the bio and, you know, I’ve connected all the dots and all the schemes.

I’ve connected them to a profile that’s not real as opposed to the fake one that I was lying about 10 minutes ago so therefore you should totally trust me.

Exactly, exactly.

They know all of that, you know, it doesn’t even, it doesn’t take Google’s algorithm or much to figure out that if there was something written three years ago, and now a new person has written this same piece of content, you’re probably not helping yourself there.

Just, for the record, Google does not look at your site in a vacuum.

It’s what they know about your site is not exactly what is there right now they know everything ever it is like your permanent record from grade school.

They know that you ate paste in kindergarten.

They know that you were had chickenpox and we’re out of school for three weeks in second grade, they know these things and they’re not going to forget and they might hold it against you.

Yes, they will so don’t don’t do anything online is is the lesson which we’ve all failed at already haven’t we.

So, next, new search experiences, but only in the EEA, which is the European Economic Area.

Okay, let’s go with that I mean, it’s pretty small.

Yeah, it’s pretty close in Europe, right, they have changed the rules on what some comparison sites are doing and comparison based searches in search results.

This was via court ruling was it D Mac, I think, the MAC something like that about, you know, monopolizing results on search engines.

So in short, if you are an ecommerce person or you do holidays and comparison, that kind of stuff, all of these things are going to be better for you.

If you’re again, if you’re in Europe.

Oh, it’s the European Economic Area I was right.

Thank you.

That was a good guess So yeah, that’s good.

And it makes things more fair and a bit more democratic on the search, nothing you as the audience will probably need to know nothing you need to change.

Just that if you’re in Europe, it benefits you.

And because of this ruling so thank you judges.

The next update is quite a big one from a techie point of view.

Google have now added support for schema rules around product variants.

In short, if you’ve got a t shirt in different sizes and colors, you can now have better control over the way that structured data is provided to Google.

And that helps you with things like Merchant Center and any other feed that goes with that, and it makes searches much more of a better experience right so you said you were searching for a red dress and it brought up the yellow dresses and even though it’s a small thing.

I’m sure it frustrated you know when just to have that and puts you off the search and you may not go back to my shop as well because you saw that brand that puts you off.

Well it was frustrating and it was actually shoes and I was looking for a specific color a specific variant of a specific type of shoe in my size and I provided all of those things.

And it pulled up a lot of sites where they had my size but they didn’t have that color, or they didn’t have any of the things that I specified except they carried that shoe, and they didn’t even have them in stock, which was also frustrating.

There are, you know, again this all goes back to Google wants to make a satisfying and happy user experience.

And as a user, I am happier when they show me pictures and take me to places that have the thing that I am trying to find.

Yeah, and I think the other thing to think about is that as time moves forward because this is being supported.

If you don’t do it, you won’t be visible in those places.

So if you are selling red shoes and you do not put red, you may not appear in results that are filtered with red, even though the technology can understand that it’s a red shoe from reading the picture and all of that kind of stuff it still may not, because it’s not the structured data you have spoon fed to them, may not be enough.

May not be enough to get you in that search result.

So that’s very important to do.

You didn’t provide that specific information, even though the picture matches, but somebody else did.

So it’s not that you’re not necessarily in the results, but you’re far back because other people did it better.

So, this isn’t a case where you just have to be faster than the slowest gazelle to be eaten by the lion.

Anyway, the point is, you need to do it right, because somebody else is going to do it better and if you want to beat them, you have to at least be as good as they are, if not a little bit better and faster and more what the user wants.

And before we go on to the next one, we did have a user asking a question, what about service variants?

They didn’t say anything about it as very quick answer to that.

But I’m sure when those come out, that will be a wonderful thing to incorporate.

Exactly.

If you do have service variants, my advice is maybe to just adopt the Schema.org stuff now.

And then when they do click on the switch like they have with product variants, you’re already there.

So that answers that question, even though you didn’t ask it in the question, I’ll let you off, because you have a good username.

So, the last one in the SEO news.

Oh, you’re going to want to talk about this, aren’t you?

Oh yeah, this is why I contributed.

So Reddit and Google are expanding their partnership.

Reddit is selling Google access to the entirety of Reddit’s database, all of the user contributed information for $60 million per year.

And Google is going to use this to train their their language models.

So they’re going to train their AI using content from Reddit.

This is frightening because the intellectual average of the content that’s on Reddit is interesting.

We’ll call it interesting.

My concern is that if the AI is learning about humanity from the, I don’t want to say garbage.

I’m sure some of the comments and posts are very intellectually, you know, wonderful, but a lot of them aren’t.

A lot of them are silly memes.

A lot of them are rude.

There are there are entire groups that are dedicated to hating people or companies.

And if the content that you’re getting is all is all that negative vile, what is the AI going to start saying about things?

Okay, so let’s look at celebrities.

There are, there are hate groups about certain royals, let’s say I know I wanted to say, say one off top of my head and I’m trying not to say the name.

Let’s say there is a royal adjacent person that everybody likes to hate.

Everything that people say about that person that’s in Reddit is going to get learned by this AI and then if you ask the AI in the future, you know, why does everyone hate so and so it’s going to tell you as though it is fact.

All of these nasty things that people have said whether they’re true or not, and that can be applied to companies that can be applied to politicians.

If the prevailing political bias on Reddit is goes leans one way or the other, the AI will adopt that political bias.

I just don’t know that this is a great.

I don’t know that I want the robots learning about humanity from Reddit.

It’s, it’s like having the robots learn about humanity from 4chan.

It is.

I don’t know I see the not the flip side because I get what you mean like that I think the term you’re looking for is degen is degenerative language everywhere, and I get it but unless Google is on a challenge to understand the gender behavior and know what not to do and learn from it to provide a more objective view and understand what opinion is.

I don’t know, because we are complex to learn, aren’t we, especially when we’re hidden behind keyboards.

So it’s a very big challenge for them.

Lisa just commented AI is Xyber 9 and the 80s kids have warned us they have and there’s so many times that the politicians now are proposing things that either have to do with AI or controlling the weather that I just think to myself like, I have seen this movie and it went badly for us.

Why are you considering this there.

Somebody said something about we’re gonna, we’re gonna shoot a rocket into the into the sky and we’re going to figure out how to block the UV light to that global warming, get stopped.

That is literally the premise of Snowpiercer, and the world is plunged into an ice age and everyone dies.

So, you can’t even you can’t even live peacefully in a small space.

There’s only how many are worth of them 1000 and everyone gets an argument so it’s massive.

Yeah, it’s gonna be interesting what they do with it but then obviously this has had snowball effects on the fact that Reddit is having huge uptick in visibility.

It’s ranking for anything.

And like people are laughing at one of the comments was like just post something on Reddit if you want to rank, but like away from that joke that’s literally what happened this month, someone was literally telling people that.

Yeah, was it hello, not HelloFresh that’s brand in the UK Hello something they wrote a post about how they don’t like how Reddit is ranking above you know, independent sites and, and then someone posted it on Reddit and then the Reddit higher, it was like they were living their own inception.

It’s, it’s crazy.

Well, and but you’re kind of at the mercy of the mods in those red in those subreddits the moderators can block people that they don’t want in there so it’s not like as a business you can go into a subreddit that is dedicated to hating you and defend yourself because the moderators could very easily block you.

And then they can be DGEMs as well, we discussed it last month didn’t we were taking away half of the SEO content right.

Yeah, we’ll see.

Basically, we’re speeding towards apocalypse and we’re all going to die.

We are, we are we’re talking about speeding I know that we can chat for ages by everything so I’ll go in other news.

Very quickly, schema has launched version 25, and it adds support certification.

Officially retires the cache link which I actually found really really useful.

Just use archive.org instead.

Google search also having issues with recipe sites I don’t know if they’re back they kind of went away.

That’s part of the schema, schema issues in the SERPs a site map book with hyphenated file names got found I think it’s been plugged, and it had nothing to do with WordPress or Yoast XML site maps so don’t worry.

Yandex got sold the 5.2 billion, which sounds like a lot but I think it was a lot less than what it was valued a bit ago or something I don’t know what happened but it was so here that’s the market cap for Google or one of the other search engines that’s really kind of peanuts.

It is I would like to possess but yeah I don’t think anyone needs to care much about Yandex unless you are based in or operating Russia, because I think it got bought by a big Russian player or something.

So if you’re, it’s good if you’re in Russia, operating in Russia is probably the only thing I know.

Google said they’re going to clarify EEAT and quality rated guidelines documentation which will be interesting.

I’m sure a lot of techies will have lots of complaints or interprets one sentence in the 79 page document differently and cause a massive Twitter explosion.

Google confirms a fixed a week long search and indexing that happened at the very beginning of the month it happened for about a week and I think it affected 1% of sites or something, but that was all plugged up.

Machine learning is removing fake reviews.

I would have liked to have talked about this longer, but as there’s not too much to cover really, they’ve been able to get more sophisticated identify fake reviews and been able to deal with stuff on a very big base I think they’ve got rid of 43% of fake reviews in the last year.

Good because a lot of them were fake.

They are, they are and they were good, good riddance.

And lastly, Google will clarify the use of AI to generate content for SEO purposes, which has been basically them thinking since they removed it away from the definition remember from what’s good content make sure it’s human, human produced and they removed it and this is going to be the results of that.

We’ll get through all of that in two minutes.

Crack on to AI news.

Look at this video of three puppies playing in the snow isn’t it lovely, and also not real, which is crazy.

This is Sora that was introduced by open AI.

It’s not available to the normal people yet, but some high end influencers, videographers, designers that kind of stuff to understand everything about it and see where the weaknesses are.

But it’s been interesting to see some of the examples, I don’t know if you’ve seen any of them, like beyond what OpenAI put in that page you know with the woman walking through Japan, or something, were frighteningly good.

They are, and a thing to note here is that this is this is version one, like, this is the worst that you’re going to see it.

Right.

So, if you were there they’re cherry picking what they’re showing us so it could be.

We’re highly dependent on the inputs that receives, but we don’t know that yet but what they are choosing to release is clearly very good.

But remember, Google faked one of their product launches so we don’t know that that opening eyes done that, but we also.

I’ve become a very distrustful person.

But it’s interesting to see what people will do with these videos because you could actually now produce videos that are helpful, right, if you want to go back to Google and how it’s interprets them, you know if you are talking about taking a dog out for a walk in the snow why wouldn’t this video make sense even if it has imperfections from a machine.

I read a post about a video that a videographer just dissects all the videos that they’ve released and if you look at everything closely you can see things that people don’t walk exactly on the floor.

You know some people just have three arms, you know as they’re walking along it’s lots of imperfections but again, this is the worst, and it’s not even open to the puts that are working on that right now.

And remember that ChatGPT only came out just over a year ago.

So what’s this going to be like in a year.

That’s the crazy thing.

The speed of change and speed of developments is just my brain cannot even.

It’s, weird and I’m, I also feel for video producers as well because this will cut a lot of stuff out but hopefully provide an opportunity for them to be so because they know all the terms, they’ll know the perfect, the perfect command to put in whereas I would, I just say put three dogs in the snow, but I know that a videographer will put in a small essay to describe the same scene.

So that might be something to think about as well.

Bard has now re renamed itself to Gemini which should have been done on day one, because I don’t know anyone that thinks that Bard is a good, whoever, I’m sure the person who made the product name is no longer there.

There’s a new name now is part of a new name, and this was announced the same day as Sora getting released.

And they also announced that 1.5 is coming out, and there’s a nice little graph showing off how much more powerful and faster and cheaper, they are than OpenAI.

So, it’s going to be interesting once that all gets released how that’s going to play out, but they’re basically claiming that wipes the floor of ChatGPT for, I feel like this is always going to be a case of, you know, upping each other, which is probably good for development I mean having a competitor does tend to push you to innovate and make your product better so yay, yay for competition.

Yeah, I’m going to be interested to see what they do and how fast they do it as well because obviously they’ve had to become part of the race and talking about becoming part of the race I like how all of these stories are connected it’s quite it’s quite good.

OpenAI are developing an AI web search.

It makes sense I mean if it Google’s going to come after OpenAI.

You know, flagship product.

It makes sense that when you get big enough and strong enough you go after theirs.

And if they believe that their technologies better and that they’ve got a better, you know, a better mouse trap, then they should they should enter the, they should throw their hat in the ring and become a competitor because, let’s be honest Google doesn’t really have.

I know been tries.

You know, bless their hearts, they do try.

Everybody else tries but Google still has like 97% of the of the market so let’s get somebody else in there let’s see if we can disrupt this a little bit and make Google defend their position, rather than just right on their laurels.

They should, because search volume, Barry Schwartz did a survey on Twitter and I think on LinkedIn I think is combined bit of data together that less than 20% of SEO is or people who participated in this, think that nothing’s going to happen with search results, and actually nearly 40% think of search is changing by over 25%, which actually goes back to OpenAI making the web search, making it more interesting they’re probably reading this stuff as well going.

If I was in Google I would be, I’d be my heart would be racing a little bit faster at the moment.

Decide what to do, but that’s the search team right not the AI team they can they can they can do their own stuff but it’s going to be very interesting to see how accurate this is in a year, I mean we’ll be talking about it hopefully in December talking about what actually happened over the year.

So, I don’t think Google is actually going to sweat about this because I think the, I think the way the SERPs are changing is going to make it so that the only way you can appear above the fold in a premium position is PPC, which is only going to drive up revenues.

This is maybe bad for organic marketers I think for from Google’s perspective this is going to be revenue enhancing.

Yeah, I mean, it’s going to be very, very interesting and again, now, I mean, the last AI is again about Google doing something that made something called Gemma.

Oh, I’m just seeing that there’s a play on Gemma, Gemma maybe I don’t know.

This is like a lighter laptop friendly open model AI, I don’t want to define the term open model, as opposed to open source, because there is a kind of, it’s not open source.

It’s at least an open license model, an open license model which has its own meaning, which is, this is what I copied and pasted from their own site.

It allows the free use but restricts it from being used in harmful ways.

Yes, that’s nice kind of open source but don’t you can’t make adult.

Like, I guess with WordPress.org.

That feels subjective like what’s harmful.

I’m not getting into that now.

We’ve got WordPress needs to do.

There’s not too much, except for WordPress 6.5 beta one is ready for testing.

And for anyone who doesn’t do beta testing.

This is probably a sign that you’ve got a few weeks until 6.5 is actually going to be released, maybe a couple of months, depending on what those bug fixes are.

But there are some cool, cool ones to look at such as you can upload your own fonts really easily.

There’s plugin dependencies which I think is very cool.

In short, if you, if you’re using actually we can use it with Yoast if you’re using some of the premium products you do require the core product in there as well like free and premium at the same time, and they use dependencies but some plugins can’t even work without another plugin being there.

So this creates and closes hole on that.

And as well as that we’ve got like cool overlay things for all of their themes and stuff like that making all the blocks, which easier, more intuitive, and much better performing.

Lastly, we’ll end up with Yoast news.

Well Yoast news, we can tell you that there’s a lot of improved AI results in the next version, especially in non English.

There is a release somewhere on our blog on our releases blog that tells you all the specifics of what has been improved.

There’ll be even more in our next release.

And lastly in the Shopify app there’s some minor bug fixes and stuff, but it might be worth noting even though it’s not on a bullet point here that product variants stuff that we did talk about before is coming in both our WooCommerce and our Shopify apps.

I can’t confirm the date, but it will be soon.

And we’ll sure to let you know on X or Twitter or LinkedIn, whoever.

So with that, where can you see us in upcoming events.

So Carolyn you’re at PubCon on the fourth, which is only a few days away you’re speaking aren’t you?

I am I’m speaking on the fifth I’m talking about WordPress.

AI, empowering your SEO through WordPress plugins that are powered by, wait, empowering your SEO with AI powered WordPress plugins I’m pretty sure that’s the title.

That’s the title.

That’s a tongue twister slides I’m sure it’s going to be good it’s going to be good though.

I’m very useful right is that they’re going to be shared publicly or is this an in an in house PubCon thing just in case.

No, I think eventually they do release it but they.

It takes a little while to be released but I will write up a summary of my talk and provide my slides later probably on the Yoast website.

So I’ll make sure I’ll make sure you guys are covered.

Don’t worry.

We’ll both be at WordCamp Asia representing if you’re in the area.

I’m also going to be SMX Munich, just after WordCamp Asia, neither of us will be at CloudFest but I know that Carol will be there and I believe you will this maybe Taco will be there.

And I’ll also be at BrightonSEO in Brighton in April, one that got missed in the middle was Women in Tech SEO.

There’s an event in London, and I know that there’s several of us there representing Women in Tech SEO.

We have one in Chicago that’s also not on the list.

The Tastemakers conference and I want to say it’s the 15th and 16th of March.

It’s in Chicago and it’s for food bloggers, so that should be fine.

Hopefully I’ll get a lot of fun food.

Well let’s chat, about it again next week.

So the next one is the 26th of March at 4pm Central European time.

We’ve got nine minutes, because we always blabber, or do we blabber, or there’s a lot, there’s a lot on right isn’t there, I’m sorry Nynke.

Okay, it’s okay I think we were all distracted a little bit by all the McDonald’s and fries things going on and getting deep into all the AI troubles that are coming our way.

No it’s fine I think it was a great update, and I’m sorry about everyone experiencing issues with the stream.

In the beginning of this update I was celebrating that we had the highest registrations in a few months.

It might be that Crowdcast can handle our popularity on this platform.

I haven’t heard any buffering, so I think the recording will be clean.

The recording is mostly, is usually clean so please watch the recording if you missed a few important bits.

Talking about important bits we have a lot of questions, and we have one question with the most far most upvotes and obviously it’s about AI because that’s what people are worried about.

And the question is, will Google punish ChatGPT generated pages?

No.

Maybe.

Not today.

I don’t think I don’t think they’re going to be able to tell.

Not yet.

I think, I think if you’re good about how you write it, I think, I think no one can tell.

I would also maybe say, as soon as they release that using AI for SEO content thing that Google did mention that they were going to do, read that with a fine tooth comb.

If you are generating pages with ChatGPT and that and you are guilty of using AI content, then read it and then if there’s anything that’s telling you against, just update it a bit and make sure that it’s got enough useful stuff in there to be helpful for them.

So I think this is like using stock photography and photos that you shouldn’t, that, you know, don’t use stock photography.

If you take it and run it through a filter, it changes it a little bit.

So be be smart about how you use AI to write your content.

If you’re generating something that is bad or inaccurate, or has silly mistakes in it.

That is ultimately what’s going to give you away and the fact that it was generated by AI isn’t why you’re being punished.

The fact that it’s not good is why you’re being punished.

And of course there are tools like Yoast SEO if you want to do some checks on readability and SEO and yeah, be helpful.

Make sure you at least check all the other boxes I think I think.

Okay, let’s go to the next question.

We have a bit of time.

This is about cornerstone content, one of the principles behind also the Yoast SEO plugin and how and site structure of course.

The question is how do I choose which web pages should be my cornerstone content?

Go for it.

Yeah, I would say when you’re evaluating articles or pages, look at the content is you’re looking for foundational content.

If a reader knew nothing else about your site or your topic, what is the most important thing that they should read to understand what you’re about.

That is a cornerstone.

The cornerstone is foundation.

So, someone starting from scratch they don’t know anything.

What is the piece of content they need to know.

What is the piece of content they need to know about this particular facet of your, of your topic.

So let’s say you sell candy.

They need to know about your candy making process.

They need to know, let’s say you make jujubes.

They need to know about your core jujube production process and what jujubes are and they need to know maybe what your recipe is or what you include or don’t include, but they need the core stuff.

They don’t need fluffy things there for entertainment purposes.

Foundational knowledge that is cornerstone content.

Well, I have nothing to add to that.

That was pretty good.

That was impressive.

Cool.

Thanks, Caroline.

Let me see, we have one question about the helpful content update.

That’s, a topic that is here for a long time already.

Can we give the top three of things that people should do to recover from the helpful content updates.

The first one’s in the question, which is, which is the content itself.

Like, just try and think about it as, as you’re trying to introduce someone you’ve never met in a restaurant, you’re out with friends and you’re trying to explain everything on your site.

Would you go as far and if you were to read that page that you are even considering may not be helpful if you read that and then said it out loud to that person with that person actually learn something much, but they find it helpful if the answers no then.

It’s not it’s not helpful.

And also, old content may be helpful right as well so it doesn’t mean just getting rid of old content you need to understand what’s what’s actually not actually helpful at all.

And if it isn’t merge it with something else or remove it completely.

The second thing I would say is, don’t put too many ads on your page, so that I know we’ve all been to those sites I’m not going to say any specific brand but you know you can only read like this little part of the screen and because everything else is ads and you don’t care about anything else.

That’s not helpful as well.

But yeah, Carolyn you’re going to add.

I’m just going to add a while ago in Google News so this is for the news algorithm not the general algorithm, they had a metric where they looked at the amount of uninterrupted text that you had.

If we didn’t have a certain amount of text that was not interrupted by ads, they would not include that article at all so I know that they are capable of looking at spans of uninterrupted text, and they like spans of uninterrupted text.

So if you’re writing two sentences and then have big ads and two sentences and have a couple big ads Daily Mail.

You know, that’s not going to rank well.

That’s a, that’s a really practical way of looking at it as well.

Look at the structure and what else is on your pages beside the content you put there on there on the topic.

Cool.

I think we have time for one more question.

I think we have a few questions with seven upvotes and I think it is nice to look into schema for a bit because this is nice topic I think for also the people worried about tech SEO, and all that.

The question is, if writing content about the latest information, which schema would be more suitable blog post or news article.

Well, I know you’re from news Carolyn but I don’t know I’ll go from a more not dumb, but less experienced place.

Is it worthy of being in the news.

Right.

The answer is no, and it’s a blog article.

If there’s your writing about, oh here’s, here’s a new, here’s a new attraction that’s opened up in Paris and I’m writing about travel to me that’s bit of a blog article, and the news article may come from the actual source of the building.

But what would you.

I think the difference between a news article and a blog or blog post comes from the source.

Are you a news outlet, do you regularly write news, does Google see you as a news outlet.

If the answer to that is no, then it’s a blog post and you are a blogger.

If we, if we phrase the criteria in what do you think.

And do you think it’s newsworthy I think we’re going to end up with a lot of things that are mistakenly marked news because, especially public relations people and certain marketers think that everything is newsworthy.

My store is having a sale, it should be in the newspaper notion.

So, look at look at what kind of publication you are if you are universally recognized as being a source of news or a news publication, then by all means make that a news article.

If you just randomly occasionally write about things, or you’re not considered a journalistic news outlet, I would call it a blog posting.

I think that’s clear it’s it’s helpful that people at least can start with themselves instead of the news article but just think of your own role on the web and how you provide that.

Okay article, it will, especially if you install our News SEO plugin, it will create a news site map and that news site map empties out every 48 hours so unless you are making new news articles.

Within that 48 hour span eventually that will empty and it will become blank.

And basically, you will not come and look at it.

Yeah, it’s basically useless to add news article schema, if you’re not actually publishing more news and updating stuff.

Yeah.

Okay.

That’s it we have more questions left but we don’t have any time left so I know I disagree, I want to answer one more, right, is what you can pick one.

I’d like to delete some pages.

Is it okay to use the 410 code for those deleted pages.

Yes.

Cool.

Yes.

Yes.

I just asked for 10 up votes I felt like an obligation to make sure I answered that before the end.

Great.

Thanks for that Alex.

Well, this was the SEO update of February.

You won’t see me in a while, because I will be hopefully delivering a child somewhere in the end of April, but Taco and Florie will be here to take over hosting from me with obviously Alex and Carolyn in the industry.

I hope you all enjoyed today’s update.

You can already sign up for the next one end of March through the button below.

And, yeah, see you later this year I guess.

See you soon.

Thanks for coming everyone.

Bye y’all thanks for being here.

Bye.

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Presented by

<>Carolyn Shelby

Carolyn is our Principal SEO. She leverages more than two decades of hands-on experience optimizing websites for maximum visibility and engagement. She specializes in enterprise and news SEO, and is passionate about demystifying the intricacies of search engine optimization for businesses of all sizes.

<>Alex Moss

Alex is our Principal SEO. With a background in technical SEO, he has been working in Search since its infancy and also has years of knowledge of WordPress, developing several plugins over the years. He is involved within many aspects of Yoast from product roadmap to content strategy.

The post The SEO update by Yoast – February 2024 Edition appeared first on Yoast.

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Webinar: How to start with SEO (February 12, 2024) https://yoast.com/webinar/webinar-how-to-start-with-seo-february-12-2024-2/ Sun, 11 Feb 2024 16:53:25 +0000 https://yoast.com/?post_type=yoast_webinar&p=3662664 Learn the basics and get practical tips Starting with SEO can be overwhelming and sometimes you need help to get started. No worries; our SEO experts are here to help. Watch the webinar replay and get practical tips about all the SEO basics. We’ll cover these 5 topics Webinar level: beginner Join us if you: Hosted […]

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Learn the basics and get practical tips

Starting with SEO can be overwhelming and sometimes you need help to get started. No worries; our SEO experts are here to help. Watch the webinar replay and get practical tips about all the SEO basics.

We’ll cover these 5 topics

  • How to do keyword research?
  • How to optimize content?
  • How to improve the structure of your website?
  • How to make your site visible to search engines?

Webinar level: beginner

Join us if you:

  • Feel that you need help to start with SEO on your website
  • Want to ask our hosts your SEO-related questions in the Q&A

Hosted by

<>Mushrit Shabnam

Mushrit is a support engineer at Yoast. She is also a WordPress enthusiast and invests her time in creating documentation.

<>Wouter Meuleman

Wouter is one of the Yoast support team leads. His focus is on improving the support team’s performance and satisfaction. His work background includes training, teaching and customer support.

The post Webinar: How to start with SEO (February 12, 2024) appeared first on Yoast.

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The SEO update by Yoast – January 2024 Edition https://yoast.com/webinar/the-seo-update-by-yoast-january-2024-edition/ Tue, 30 Jan 2024 13:27:44 +0000 https://yoast.com/?post_type=yoast_webinar&p=3635365 Update transcript Topics & sources 2024: SEO predictions and trends SEO news AI news Presented by

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Update transcript

Hello, everyone.

Thanks for joining another SEO Update by Yoast.

While we’re all joining, I’m going to remove this video out of the screen.

Let us know where you’re joining from, and let us know what you think about our intro tune.

That’s the second time you’ve played this, so I hope you all like it.

My name is Nynke.

I’m the host for today, but our principal SEOs will take you through the news of today.

But before we start, I wanted to do some quick household notices, which gives everybody the time to join this stream as well.

The first question we always get is, will this webinar will be recorded?

Yes, we will record this webinar.

And if you signed up and seeing me talking right now, you will receive that recording automatically.

And we’ll have a big post with all kinds of resources, which I will now put on the screen, there you can find all the resources of this webinar.

It will appear in the green button below, or if you’re on mobile, switch to from the big screen so you can see the green buttons.

After we’ll discuss the news– or Alex and Carolyn will just invite on stage in a bit.

We’ll discuss the news.

We’ll have some time for Q&A. And we’re on Crowdcast, which means you can put your questions in a separate box so they don’t disappear in the chat.

But we actually have a nice overview of all the questions you have about SEO updates from this month.

So click the box with the question mark

or click the question mark if you’re on mobile

to put in your questions and also read the questions of others,

because you can upvote those questions, which helps us

a lot to determine what the most urgent questions are

that you have today.

So what I will do next is invite our principal SEOs on stage.

Let’s see if they’re there.

There’s Carolyn.

Hi, Alex.

Hey, hey.

I can hear you.

Yes.

We can.

So these are our hosts, Alex and Carolyn.

They will take you through the news.

And when preparing this webinar, this update,

they thought January would be a slow month when

it comes to SEO updates.

Well, in the end, this month proved to be different.

And one of the things that I’m excited about to hear,

and I hope you are too, is the latest updates on AI

in the Google search results pages.

So hang on for that.

And then it will come up in our special AI news section.

And I will let Alex and Carolyn now take the stage

and talk you through all the updates of this month.

Good luck and enjoy.

I will see you for Q&A.

Thanks very much, Nynke.

And welcome, everyone.

Thanks for coming.

There’s over 1,100 sign-ups this month.

I think that’s–

Oh, my gosh.

No, one of our highest ever, I think.

Good job, guys.

I know.

Just do it.

Keep on doing it.

Keep on doing it next month as well.

Just keep going.

This is good for our KPIs, right?

Yes, excellent.

So let me start.

Let’s go through some stuff.

Let me make this.

Do you want to move us to stage left?

All these buttons everywhere.

And now we can start.

So who are we?

Very quickly, we’re both principal SEOs at Yoast.

Is that it?

That’s all they need to know.

That’s very good.

Two of us.

Pretty much, yeah.

And what are we going to discuss today?

We’re going to go through 2024 predictions and trends.

We’ll go through some SEO news, which

when I was devising these slides on the 7th,

really thought it was a slow news month.

But we’ll find out it really was not.

Next, we’ll go through AI news, which

has been a bit of a turbulent month for the technology.

And lastly, we’ll do Yoast news, because you might have missed,

there is no WordPress news because it’s really

been a slow news month for WordPress, which should

hopefully mean there’s double news next month, right?

I hope so.

And if we’ve got any time with all of that nonsense,

we’ll answer some questions you have.

So as you know, there’s a Q&A tab at the top

if you want to ask a question.

I don’t know which way I’m pointing, but to your right,

there is a tab where you can ask a question,

and other folks inside the audience can also vote.

So we’ll obviously be answering the most popular first.

If you want to read more about this

and get a few more links from all the citations,

because of course, we like to cite our sources,

you can get that by following this link or bookmarking it,

and you can get that afterwards, as well as being

able to access this replay.

And if this is a bit more advanced for you

and you’re just starting out in SEO,

there is a lot of nice little webinar series

that we have going on where there’s loads

that you can sign up on.

Just visit our website, go to the webinar section,

and you’ll be able to see all of the intro to SEO webinars

that we do.

So with that, predictions and trends for this year.

What do you think?

What did you say, Carolyn?

It’s going to be a different year, this one, isn’t it?

A bit interesting.

Hopefully a bit interesting, but it’s

so hard to make good predictions,

and I hate doing it because I feel a bit like they never

come true, or if I predicted it definitely won’t come true.

Kind of like with watching my favorite baseball teams.

If I don’t watch, they win.

If I do watch, then they don’t.

And it’s not like superstition, right?

It is a little bit superstition, but AI is going to be big.

I think how we end up embracing AI is going to really be,

I think, determined by how this year goes.

This year is really–

it’s big.

Everybody knows it’s here.

Now what are we going to do with it,

and how is it going to be rolled out,

and are we going– is humanity going

to be responsible with it, or are we

going to abuse it like we have a tendency to do with everything

else and ruin it?

So it’ll be interesting to see what happens.

Well, our trends and predictions maybe

watch that we aren’t to be trusted,

so let’s dig into all of this.

So the first thing that you said as part of a trend

or predictions, kind of alluding to this already.

So only in the last couple of weeks have Google announced

that they’ve introduced two new features that use AI technology

to enhance your search experience.

So the first one, as you can see,

is a video of a nice little dog wearing some cool goggles.

And you can use your finger on your phone.

You can just do that around the sunglasses,

and then all that.

I’ve got a Facebook message for some reason.

Very good timing.

And when you do that, you can then search on Google,

and it will show you related products, which you can then

go and buy.

The more interesting thing, in my opinion,

is multi-search, which is the second thing

they’ve introduced, where you can take a picture of something

and then you can ask a question about that picture.

So here they’re using a backgammon set.

And instead of taking a picture, the obvious answer

is, what is it?

But that’s not the question they’re asking.

They want to know what it is, but more importantly, they

want to know how to play it.

So that multi-search option is very interesting

in the way in which people are using the beginning of the search

experience.

I feel like this is going to be a game changer,

because one of the things that has always–

I feel like differentiated people–

and there’s people that can articulate

what they want to know and get good search results.

And these people have always been

able to get good search results.

And there are a lot of people who cannot articulate

what it is they want to find.

They just put in inadequate search queries.

So what this is doing is this is taking those visual people

and helping them find stuff.

Have you ever looked at something

that’s been like, that thing, that thing-a-bob?

And people are like, ha ha ha, what’s a thing-a-bob?

It’s like, that thing, that thing that’s right there

that I don’t know the name for.

This helps you with that, because now you just

take a picture of that thing that you don’t know the name for.

The machine goes, oh, I know exactly what that is,

because I’m smart.

And then you go, yeah, that thing right there

that I don’t know what to call it, how do I do it?

And it will tell you.

And I think that’s going to make–

I don’t know– almost level the playing field for those people

that are far more visual than they are word-oriented.

And so I’m excited about this.

I think it’s going to make search a lot more beneficial

and a better experience for more people

rather than just the people who happen

to be very good at name recall and articulating

what it is they want.

Yeah, kind of like going away from command prompt,

in a way, to do things instead of being very specific,

which I guess is–

this is our prediction, I guess– is

the growth of voice and visual.

And whilst we’ve heard that voice search is on the up,

and we’ve heard it all the time, and when Alexa first came out,

it was, I saw those graphs.

And this time, based on the current data

of the last month, in the next year, everything will be voice.

And no one will be typing again.

And obviously, that isn’t true.

But it’s definitely–

You still have to know what it is you want to ask, though,

even with voice search.

And there are a lot of people who are just so visual

that they know exactly what they want by looking at it,

but they just couldn’t tell you–

they couldn’t articulate the process to get to it.

And this kind of bypasses that.

And if you think about computers,

where were the big leaps in computers?

Prior to Windows coming out, everything

was very command prompt.

And there are tons of people who just do not

want to deal with a command prompt.

And Windows really democratized or leveled

the playing field for those people

that wanted to drag and drop.

This is that next step forward, that next giant leap, I think.

And it’s going to be–

I think this is going to be easily and widely adopted quickly.

Yeah, and I think it’s interesting the way

that people will use this behavior,

because I think they will adopt this way more than voice

search, because it is easy to have the phone on you.

And we’ve all done it.

We’ve all been in a store.

And we’ve tried to find out what something is.

But you have to start with Search or open the Amazon app

or some other app that you’re using.

But now that it’s cool, I use this mug as a good example.

If I took a picture of this, the one would be, what is this?

It’s a mug.

It’s a metal mug by Vodum or however you pronounce it.

But now, with multi-search using that as an example,

I should say, can I get a bigger version of this?

And it will tell me.

It will know what it is.

It doesn’t even need to tell me what it is.

It just needs to find a bigger version of it,

because that is my search intent.

It’s changing that way.

But that makes things in predictions and trends

for this year become more important.

Well, how do you classify content that way?

And the best way I was–

we were describing this as semantic search and intent.

This is just in the same way as the mug.

My intent is to find a bigger version of this mug.

So adopting that in terms of content strategy and entities

and therefore schema is even more important,

because knowledge graph is–

this seems to be more dependent on knowledge graph now,

even more so than it was, say, a year or two years ago.

And having entities and being able to find content structure

around that is going to be really important.

And I mean, I love how I found this Simpsons image from Moz.

I don’t know whoever made it, but they’re amazing.

But it is sourced in Moz.

And this does show the entity of the Simpsons

and how things are related in a really easy to understand way.

So with your products, it’s going

to be really important that you’ve got your product

schema set up correctly and that you’ve got your ecommerce

system set up correctly, because you’re

going to want the search engines to know that this mug comes

in three different sizes.

And it’s all the same mug.

It’s just different sizes.

So that’s going to play into how did you set up

your store in the first place?

Because if you make each one of the sizes a different product

and you don’t tie them together properly,

you’re not helping the search engines deliver that answer

to the user who says, I want this mug,

but I don’t want it in the 24 ounce.

I want it in the 36 ounce.

So it’s very interesting.

But also with that, not only do you

have to have semantics and entities all sorted and more

optimized than ever, but this also goes–

if I want to go back one slide, this

shows that images and video, rich media for those products

or anything you’re describing is even more important.

Because if you were going back again to the dog,

if I was selling those goggles and I didn’t have an image

of them, this search wouldn’t ever find me.

But I may have great content in words around these goggles.

But if I don’t have an image, it may not identify it.

So again, it goes into entities are important,

but getting everything right.

Don’t just force that.

And that’s almost the opposite.

That’s almost the opposite of the way it’s been.

The way it’s been has been–

the way it’s been has been.

Anyway, you’ve had the image and the SEOs have been saying,

but you have to describe it in text.

And now we’re saying that in addition to the text,

you have to make sure that you have the image.

So it really is kind of a coming together of everything

that we’ve been doing before and a more integrated understanding

for the search engines of how things work.

Yeah, which is now goes–

again, entities also go hand in hand to what do you–

why is this important for someone who’s watching now

and listening?

In short, that means you need to get your content structure

really knuckled down, build topical authorities,

and have a proper content strategy around that.

So if I use my mug as an example,

I now should think about everything

to do with mugs that may be helpful to me finding

a large mug or a mug that is very close to the one

that I took a picture of.

Having pictures of them, having videos,

but talking about anything from the product itself to its uses.

All of that kind of stuff will go hand in hand

to building topical authority and building the EEAT

around mugs or trucks.

Useful things about–

anything useful you can think of,

like going back to your mug, what cars

do we know that the mug fits in the cup holder for?

Do we know of any cars that the mug doesn’t fit in?

If I were a consumer, what kind of information

might I be looking for around that mug?

And then make sure you talk about that.

And those are good–

those are topic seeds for building out additional content.

First-person experience.

Those are useful items that are going

to help you with your content, help you with your authority,

help you with your expertise, and help the user ultimately.

Yeah, which brings us to probably our last prediction

and trend, which we’re going to talk about a little bit later,

is SGE and its wider adoption.

So when I was writing this, my thoughts were, well,

SGE is going to be rolling out quite aggressively this quarter,

maybe, at least in the US.

But maybe it’s not.

And we’ll chat about that later.

But one of the reasons that could be why

is due to the fact that SGE is so much different.

But because of that, organic rankings go down.

So you kind of have to pay to be above the fold in any way,

shape, or form.

And it’s not just PPC.

It’s anything.

Even for your own brand terms, it’s

really shocking how far down that SGE is pushing

those organic rankings and how different the SGE results are

from the traditional organic rankings.

So where you would expect to rank number one

for your own brand term, that is no longer the case

because SGE is just functioning differently.

OK.

Well, give the audience a working example,

a hypothetical example of how this may apply to them.

A hypothetical example that I may have heard from a friend,

it’s– so you have to pay for position one now.

You have to pay to be above the fold.

SGE is taking up a ton of room underneath that.

And where you would have expected to be number one

because someone is searching directly for your brand term,

now you’re not.

It’s the commonality I found between the first result

and then the horizontal scrolling results

was that they said the brand name first.

They said it first in the title.

They said it first in the headline.

And they said that word was first in the body copy too.

Whereas if it is your own brand, you

tend not to say your own brand name that prominently

and that much all over the place on your site, which

means all of these people who are sometimes competitors who

are talking about you or wrote an article about you,

that article might outrank you for your own brand term,

which is horrifying if you’re a brand.

The other problem is that because your organic listing

has gotten pushed so far down, you’re

losing 50% of your traffic for that brand term.

And you’re having to make that up by spending

the money on the paid search.

So I mean, that’s great for Google.

It sucks for brands.

And I can’t imagine that big brands that pay Google

a lot of money are going to be particularly

tolerant of that for an extended period of time.

So I feel like there’s some algorithm adjustments that

need to happen.

But because it’s AI, because it’s generative,

it’s not a function of changing the formula.

It’s a function of teaching it to do something else.

And how do you teach it to do that thing

without having unintended consequences?

And everything kind of has unintended consequences.

So it feels like we’re wading into murky waters,

and we don’t exactly know what we’re about to step on.

Which is exactly why–

we’ll chat more about the news– why

they might be pulling search generative experience back

a little bit, or not.

It’s aggressive.

Someone in the comments just said,

how does that work with site authority?

And wouldn’t the brand site have more authority

than a site that wrote an article about them?

You would think, right?

Except that’s not how it’s working, which is the weird.

So it really does seem to be relying a lot more

on the text on the page, rather than the pure authority

of the site, which is what you expect in the organic rankings.

The organic rankings themselves haven’t changed radically.

But these SGE results are almost rarely

coming from the same set of results

that you’re getting from organic, which is why I think

it’s not quite ready for prime time.

And there’s going to either be a delay in rolling it out,

or there’s going to be some kind of pivot,

because this is clearly not–

it’s not good for brands, and brands pay the bills.

Exactly.

And we can talk more about how SGE and AI’s functionality

inside search results affects us when we

go through the AI news later.

So that’s mainly the trends and predictions.

Let’s go through the SEO news, the slow news month that

actually turned out to be really, really busy.

It’s the slow news month, it wasn’t?

It was.

Well, I started generating the sites for this on the 8th of Jan.

Or no, no, the 5th, because I thought

I’d get ahead of the month, see what

was going on over Christmas.

Well, it turns out that no one works over Christmas,

including the people who write the news.

So then on the 8th and 9th of Jan, everything came back.

But let’s go through them.

So on the 4th–

so someone was working in the between days.

There was an article on Search Engine Land about Google

starting to phase out third party cookies.

So in short, third party cookies is a good great example of this,

is retargeting things like Facebook pixels,

any tracking that is not hosted on the server of which

your website is on, or goes to any other source in that matter.

Now, privacy is winning a little bit.

And Google is enforcing inside their browser

first party cookies only.

Now, how does this affect everyone else?

Things with like GA4 are OK for some countries for now.

But that’s Google going through some issues there.

But one thing to note is that if you’re using affiliate tracking

or any other tracking that you may think that gathers data when

that person is browsing on a website that is not yours,

you have to think about what to do next.

Because those platforms will either have a first party cookie update.

So Facebook do have an updated pixel that you can use that

will be more limited and less personalized.

But at least you’ve got something.

Or if you’re an affiliate site and this

is your main way of making income is through third party cookie data,

you’ve got to think of a dramatic change quite fast that doesn’t affect you.

Because that stuff is starting to happen and roll out now.

In short, did I say everything there, Carolyn?

I think you covered everything.

I think the affiliate sites especially are getting hammered

from 12 different directions right now.

And I know that with the helpful content update,

affiliate sites have taken a big hit too.

So I think maybe not necessarily SEO related,

but affiliate businesses are in for a bumpy ride this year.

Yeah.

And we wish them luck though, because whilst they

are there to make money and that’s some of the point of affiliate sites,

I do find them helpful.

Not all of them, but I do find some of them helpful.

And they do make me find out about products.

So I can’t blame them all.

So what else happened?

On the 8th of January, Google–

Oh, go on.

Were you going to say something then, Carolyn?

I was waiting to chime in because I was really surprised to see

that it required clarification.

I interrupted Alex while he was reading the headline.

Google clarifies primary source of snippets.

This was an article in Search Engine Journal.

And apparently, Google felt the need to clarify in their documentation

that even though you’ve defined your meta-description on your site,

they might not always use the meta-description that you’ve provided

and that they wanted you to know that they’re not making up

a new meta-description.

They’re taking it from a place on your page that fits the query better.

And I knew that already.

So I was surprised that they felt the need to clarify that,

to be perfectly honest.

But I guess there are people that didn’t know that.

And Google wanted to make sure that everybody was clear.

Seems a nitpicky thing to do, but–

Unless they were getting a lot of questions, the same questions

somewhere else from a lot of beginners, because it

isn’t obvious to a novice, right?

But it’s so obvious to us that–

It felt obvious to me because I remember the things that I write.

So when I see a meta-description that’s different than what I had on the page,

I will recognize the piece that they took as something else that is on the page.

But usually, if you click through, you can find exactly what they used,

that snippet that they took.

It is a snippet.

It’s a snippet of somewhere else on the page

that they felt made a better meta-description than the meta-description you provided,

which is going to happen a lot if you are very formulaic in how

you generate your meta-description.

So if you have 500 pages and all 500 pages start out kind of the same in terms

of the meta-description, or they’re all really similar,

Google is probably going to say that this isn’t unique enough,

or I bet I can do it better.

And that’s really all they’re doing is they’re trying

to provide a better meta-description.

Yeah.

But good to have clarification, right?

So the next one, Google are getting rid of Google websites.

So some people in the audience may even have Google websites

on the Google business profiles.

They’re going away.

They’ll be shutting down from the 1st of March, which is only a few weeks away.

And–

It’s coming up.

Yeah, it really is.

And I didn’t think that was a lot of time, because my assumption is

that they’re very big novices, people who open these websites,

and that they won’t know how to even deal with a transition

in such a short period of time.

Whereas for us, it’s easier, right?

We know how to get a new website if we needed to.

But not only that, they’re only allowing a redirect for 90 days,

and then they’re just going to remove the redirects.

I’m not sure why they do that.

It’s not like there’s lots of money saving happening,

if you were to have 30–

I don’t know why.

There must be a reason why they’re only giving 90 days.

But it’s interesting.

And then there’ll just be four XX pages after that.

So the only reason you would need a Google redirect to that page

is if you were using the Google sites or Google websites domain

instead of your own domain.

So they’re really kind of pushing people to get their own domains,

which to be perfectly frank, if you have a business,

you should have your own domain.

And I think the reason that they’re getting away

from that is people were spamming that system

because they wanted to piggyback on the authority that came

inherently with that Google domain.

So there was a lot of cheating going on,

and I think they’re trying to get rid of that.

OK.

Well, to answer Cheryl, who’s listening,

a four XX page is either a 404 or a 410,

or can be four and then two other digits,

the reason I specifically said four XX

is because Google haven’t confirmed

whether it’s going to be a 404 or a 410.

My assumption is 404 because they said the term page not

found, whereas a 410 is a different response, a HTT–

HTT–

Yeah, those are–

–if it’s removed.

They’re header status codes.

And the 404 means it’s not here, it’s not found.

410 means I have obliterated it and nuked it from orbit,

and it will never come back.

So we don’t know if they’re nuking it from orbit

or just making it disappear, but either way, it gone.

Exactly.

So yeah, I hope that answers your question, Cheryl.

Way to go with queue skipping Q&A as well, by the way.

Sorry.

No, it’s fine.

No, I did that.

So the next thing was Google Perspectives,

which is quite a new thing, which

is going off the firsthand experience thing

that Google are going on about for more,

getting us more involved in contributing

towards firsthand experience as well as consuming it.

So it’s unsurprising that nearly 75%

are taken by Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit.

That makes sense.

But then we were talking about perspectives.

What is a perspective in terms of SEO?

Why should we care about it?

Should we do anything differently

to maybe get ourselves more exposure on perspectives?

Because if we’re a brand, we’re not a perspective.

We’re our own perspective.

So it might be interesting to– what’s

your point of view on perspectives in this sense?

So in this sense, to make sure that your firsthand experience

and perspective is getting seen, you almost definitely

have to either be putting out full firsthand experience

content on YouTube, helpful firsthand experience on Reddit.

And getting onto Reddit could be an issue,

depending on how tied into your brand you are

and if your account is new or not.

What are perspectives?

Perspectives– when you do a Google query, especially

a news-related query, many times now there

is a new carousel underneath the news called perspectives.

And those would be, instead of traditional news and news

outlets, it’s firsthand experience types of reports.

So in Reddit, you would get a subreddit

from whatever the topic happens to be.

I think last time we talked about super

automatic espresso makers.

So rather than getting product reviews or newspaper paid

reviews, which are kind of biased because you

pay to be in those, it would pop up some forum posts

where real users, in theory, have used that product

and talked about and shared their experiences

with the product.

So we really want to–

Google’s really trying to, I think,

go to places that people trust more.

And what this is is kind of an indictment of the trust

that people have in what news sites, traditional news sites,

are offering.

People don’t necessarily trust the news anymore

because there are so many opportunities for you

to buy your way into the news.

And people know that the big brands are

paying for those reviews.

They’re paying for the reviews to be not bad.

And they’re paying for the links that are in those.

Whereas in Reddit, to a lesser extent, I would say YouTube,

but definitely in Reddit and Quora and some of the forums,

you’re getting, for the most part,

real people with real experiences sharing real useful

information.

And no agenda or no visible agenda,

which is something we were talking about before when

we’re going through this is the problem

news publishers have that you’ve just described in SEO terms.

It’s much harder for them to complete the T out of EEAT

because they’re being less trustworthy because the platform

that they are on may have an agenda and therefore

less of a perspective.

So I hope that explains everything to Eric and others.

But of course, with perspectives,

that can be abused, can’t it?

Because of course, when that happened, all of a sudden,

the subreddit SEO on Reddit got taken over

by new mods who were from new accounts of less than a year

and started deleting half of the community posts in there.

So even though they’re on a perspective-friendly platform,

whoever is behind it– and I don’t think we found out

who it is or what the agenda is yet.

They look like cryptobros.

Yeah, it might be a cryptobro or two.

But again, what’s there?

Why are they in there out of everywhere?

Are they just going to affiliate somewhere

to some central European exchange or something?

Yeah, probably.

So it’s interesting, that part.

But it also shows that these platforms,

even though they may seem more objective,

are still controlled in some way, maybe,

or edited by a subjective person or people.

So everything is subjective.

And I think Reddit especially is really

going to have to jump out and get a handle on what’s

going on with their moderators and make sure

that things aren’t being abused or overtaken,

because they’ve really been given a gift by the Google

gods in terms of this new visibility that they’re getting.

And if they want to maintain that and keep it,

they’re going to have to really get

a grip on the spam and these kinds of shenanigans.

Yeah, and to answer Monique’s question very quickly,

when it comes to geographical regions–

so you may be in a country where Reddit isn’t that popular–

two things.

A, it may provide another perspective platform that

is your version of Reddit in your country.

The other thing is that it may provide more visibility

to places like Reddit, where they weren’t as visible

in the past, where they are right now

or could be in the future.

And if Reddit is showing up in your geographical region,

but it’s not popular yet, this is an opportunity for you

to jump out and get in there first before everyone else gets

in there.

Get on the bandwagon before everyone else is on the bandwagon.

Exactly.

And Susan’s point’s good.

You don’t tend to have less trust for comments made

by people on Quora because they are a true firsthand experience

and therefore a perspective, and you

would think there’s no agenda.

So yeah, the next thing that happened

is Google dropped thousands of search quality

raters in the latest cuts.

So they terminated a contract with Appen,

which I’m sure it was worth $82 million or something silly

like that.

Yeah, that’s what it was.

Yeah, and it’s crazy.

Yeah, 82.8.

Sorry, I was $800,000 off.

Thousands of remote workers to be search quality raters.

Is this AI taking people’s jobs?

From a search engine, funnily enough,

and we’re worried on the other side of things.

It’s an internal thing maybe.

We don’t know the result yet because they do use other vendors

like we mentioned, and there’s uncertainty there.

And no one else has said that their contract

was canceled, I’ve noticed.

But this is the biggest one.

And everything could be done by AI, if not now,

definitely in the future.

But you know more about search quality rater questions,

don’t you?

I’ve seen the search quality rater questions.

And the questions that I have seen,

they’re given a checklist to go through.

And the types of questions that they’re

supposed to answer for Google are questions that

could be answered by a machine.

They’re objective for the most part.

They’re not terribly subjective, which means you could have–

you could program an LLM or a GPT to deal with those

and not have to deal with the possibility

that you’ve got a human who has maybe another agenda,

or they’re taking kickbacks, or they’re having a bad day.

So this type of task does seem like something

that would be a good candidate for AI.

And if it’s going to save money and redirect those funds

into something else, it’s probably a good business

decision, at the very least, on the part of the search

engines.

Yeah.

Next up is there was a study from a German education–

a German university, I think, saying

that Google’s getting worse as a search experience.

But I’m a bit dubious on the data.

It was very product-specific and not so general,

because that’s obviously such a small subset of queries.

But what they did find was that there’s

a lot of web spam out there, which we probably knew

what was harder to identify.

No.

Or a right.

But it does show that over time, the results got better.

But that happened in a time where

they were getting rid of more affiliate knockoff sites,

subdomains, Parasite SEO, all of those kind of things

that where they were actually getting rid of a lot of web

spam last year.

And I would probably say that the last quarter, of course,

is going to be a little better than the first three quarters.

But if a Google spokesperson is telemachable,

it doesn’t reflect the overall quality and helpfulness

of search.

I kind of do agree.

But then again, if I was a Google spokesperson,

that’s the classic reply, right?

There’s nothing else you can say other than we’re improving

stuff, and we always will.

I think it’s a tug of war.

Sometimes they’re going to be better,

and sometimes they’re going to be worse.

And they’re just constantly fighting

against the onslaught of spam.

And every time they close a–

every time you close up a hole in the fence,

the spammers dig another hole or cut some chains

in the chain link.

It’s–

What we do.

It’s the Google fence.

The way it’s always been.

And always will be.

So yeah, there’s just one study.

But I get what it means with all the spam.

But of course, we’re all white hat here, aren’t we?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

So the next one is on the 18th of January,

Google is to change European search results

to show comparison sites, or maybe more comparison sites.

So this mainly affects people in Europe, essentially.

It might affect more territories,

as the law may pass through other territories.

But in Europe, there’s the DMA, the Digital Markets Act.

In short, why should you care?

It’s good for you.

Because now, more third party sites and comparison sites

are going to be in search instead of Google’s own.

So of course, things like Google Flights is a good example.

There’ll be less of that and more Expedia, hotels.com,

airline specific results coming up.

That’s basically so that there’s laws against Google taking

too much monopoly, in short.

But this is good.

This is good for what’s in sites, which is great.

It’s forcing Google almost to go back

to their roots of being a search engine instead

of an everything engine.

And they really want to be an everything engine,

but it is kind of monopolistic the way they’re doing it.

So it’s probably good that they’re

being restrained a little bit.

Yeah.

Now, we’ve got to go into the AI news.

But this is how much other news happened this month.

So I’m just going to say them, and then we’re

going to go onto AI because there’s just too much happening.

So FAQ rich results disappeared again.

Big, big, big bluff.

But they’ll be back.

They’ll be back.

Google said no SEO is perfect.

That’s obvious.

You can never have perfect SEO.

Otherwise, we wouldn’t all be in the job.

The next thing, this is your thing more,

author bylines not a ranking factor.

I know.

OK.

Just because they say it’s not a ranking factor, friends,

does not mean it’s not important.

They use the bylines to help determine where

the content on the page starts.

So is it a true ranking factor?

It’s not truly a ranking factor, but it does affect

how they read your stuff.

Just like HTML structure, it’s not truly a ranking factor.

It’s not specifically a ranking factor.

But it affects how they read and understand your content,

which does affect your rank.

So when Google says stuff, you have

to pay very close attention to how they phrase it.

Is it a ranking factor?

No.

But does it still affect your rank?

Yes.

Definitely.

And always, why wouldn’t you just miss that if it’s not

a factor anyway?

It’s natural.

So yeah, Google sitemaps ping endpoint, officially

no longer working at all.

Why does it matter?

It doesn’t much.

There’s a ping endpoint in Yoast SEO.

That’s going to be removed.

But it being there isn’t a problem.

It just goes to a dead end, and that’s it.

40% of Americans use TikTok as a search engine now,

which is crazy.

But it does show the way in which people

use search, visual search specifically,

to find what they want.

Why should we care?

Maybe we should do more video production.

If you’re a brand that can anyway

connect into an audience that TikTok are on or engage with,

do it, and maybe invest this paid into there

and see what happens.

Google ranking–

Oh, go on.

Does that mean we have to dance to do TikTok?

I’m not dancing.

I see I’m on a train sometimes, and I just

pass and watch fully grown adults all dancing to a wall.

I just am never going to find that normal ever.

The next thing, Google, if you had opening times,

your ranking may have got affected.

So what happened next?

SEOs tried to abuse it.

People were open 24 hours a day, and that is now

a bug that has been shut.

But there was actually a bit of that happening.

And lastly, Google’s SEO starter guides

going to be cut in half, which is interesting.

A bit of content restructuring, a bit of tidying up,

but maybe they won’t rank as well for SEO starter guides.

Let’s wait and see.

I think they had their SEO starter guides spread

across too many pages.

When I was working for the mouse,

we had a situation where Wikipedia and other very deep

single page content sites would frequently

outrank Marvel for their superhero backstories

and things like that.

And the difference was that at the House of Mouse,

we would put every single little section about that superhero

on a different URL, which made for a very broad and thin

content base instead of one single deep page of content.

And Google always prefers the deep content over this.

So I would tell them is we don’t want cookie sheet content.

We want like chili pot content.

You want it deep and full of meat.

I like that.

Always good to make food related comparisons, right?

OK, AI news.

It’s been busy-ish, but I don’t think

it’s been good for the technology that’s

trying to grow up around us.

Let’s talk about this other report

that was made by Authoritas.

Well, we kind of talked about that already, I think.

We did.

We did.

But this has a little bit more detail.

But it’s interesting because Authoritas

say it’s going to be the biggest change.

It’s so dramatic that it may not be

able to be done in the way that they want to yet.

But we did discuss a lot of this, but it is a bit scary

to know that 93.8% of generative links in that data set

came from sources outside top-ranking organic domains,

which makes it interesting because anyone

can play the game now and get there.

But is that the right thing to do?

Well, it depends on who you’re talking to.

It’s horrifying from a brand perspective.

And like I said, I think they’re going

to have to do something to fix this because the brands are

the ones that pay the bills.

The brands are the ones that invest a lot of money

and pay, and they’re not going to tolerate

this kind of incursion into their territory

by these non-players who are just adjusting their keyword

usage to leapfrog into those premium positions

above the fold.

I’d be interested to see how this plays out,

but I have a hard time believing that it’s not

going to get adjusted because in its current state,

I just don’t feel like it’s tenable.

No.

And even the content that it produces

is now a legal issue, right?

We’ve got, again, “New York Times” taking open AI.

And now there’s illegal arguments

on what fair use is on content and transformative

and what that means in terms of what ChatGPT

and other LLMs are doing to output that information

that it’s finding from “New York Times.”

There is an argument to say it is “New York Times” is content,

but the objective person in me is trying to say,

well, you did publish it, right, on the internet?

Well, so they published it, and news is not necessarily

generating brand new information.

News is collecting information that they

got from other sources, other primary sources.

They’re the ones putting it together,

and they’re transforming it and putting it out.

So I feel like on the one hand, their argument is not

the greatest argument.

But on the other hand, if they file the lawsuit in New York,

which they probably did, New York juries

tend to be far more generous to New York plaintiffs

than they are to the Silicon Valley defendants.

And I would expect this to be decided

in favor of the “New York Times” if the case is

being heard in New York.

Does that mean that it’s correct?

No.

I don’t know.

All they’ll do is they’ll–

It’s interesting.

If “New York Times” win, all OpenAI will do

is take the judgment, tell the LLM to read it,

and ensure that they don’t go away from binding by the law,

which it should be able to do with a good LLM.

Here, ChatGPT, read this article and then rewrite it

to make sure that it doesn’t look anything

like the original article, but maintains

all of the same facts.

OK.

And then we’ll spit it out.

Yeah, be 33.7% transformative, and we’re good.

We’re all good to go.

And we’ll give you the result.

So the influence on AI, though.

Look at this graph.

What can you see?

Can you see all the dramatic changes?

Well, hey, Bing gained almost 1% market share.

1%, you know, almost.

1%.

I mean, there was a lot of talk in the last year

about Bing Chat and people going, oh, they’re finally

embracing AI.

I remember us talking a year ago, before even

Yoast, talking about how Bing was surprising that Bing really

made the effort.

And now what’s Google going to do?

And they have to catch him up.

And now here we are.

And it was as though Google kind of sat back and watched Bing

make their faults and learn from them

whilst trying to build their own thing,

but also not figuring out what they’re doing themselves.

It’s crazy.

It’s a big responsibility for a lot of people

who are actually involved in AI.

And they have to be innovative in everything.

They do in a place where it’s central now to the output.

Well, you know, Google’s in a position

where they’re so far ahead of everyone else

that they can kind of sit back and let everybody else shoot

their shot and then do whatever it

is they were going to do anyway after everyone else has

expended their ammo.

But either way, whatever Bing did didn’t do enough.

I mean, I’m sure the stakeholders there

who were quite annoyed with the predictions–

I’d love to see the predicted graph from last year going,

this is what’s stat counters going to show in Jan 2024.

You watch Alex Moss and Carolyn Shelby

will be talking about how, remember Google.

And now look, it didn’t happen, unfortunately.

But that’s another issue is Google.

We’ve been talking about the search generative experience,

the problems, the dramatic shift in results.

And then they produce content that explain

what they’re doing with AI.

But within that, it says, we’ll continue

to offer search generative experience in labs

as a testbed for bold new ideas.

And Ross Hudgens did spot this on X.

And he made the very good point that Google don’t just

write something quickly.

They choose their words and they choose them wisely.

You have to dissect everything they say.

Yeah, and this is one thing.

I mean, even the next sentence, which is,

our goal is to make AI helpful for everyone,

not just early adopters.

That’s interesting, because then that goes back to the circle

for search, highlight for search, multi-searches.

That’s mass adoption stuff, not SGE, in my opinion,

and clearly yours at the moment in its current state.

So maybe it won’t happen.

And if it does, they’ll take one element out

and then they’ll put it into the other core products.

There’s going to be a lot more–

there’s going to be a lot of changes.

I don’t think what we’re seeing now

is what we’re going to be seeing at the end of the year.

So I think there’s going to be a lot of fluctuation

and volatility in all of the result types

and the algorithms this year.

This year, I think, is going to be pivotal.

Yeah, I mean, everyone thought last year was fun.

We did the 2023 stuff a month ago.

That was a busy year.

You thought last year was fun.

Buckle up.

Exactly.

I can’t wait to do it already and see what happens.

But the last piece of AI news is Google using AI,

but not in the search results.

So you can breathe for a second.

They’ve actually put them in the Chrome browser.

Some people will be able to get it now.

I don’t know if it’s available for everyone.

I know I use Brave browser, so I’ve

got to wait a little bit for this.

But they’ve introduced three things.

The first is reorganizing and organizing your tab groups,

which may be good for me and the bump team amount of tabs

I’ve got open at the moment.

The second one, probably good for someone more creative,

but I don’t know.

I don’t think it’s groundbreaking personally.

But you can select a theme inside the browser

based on the search term and a color scheme, which

is cool if you’re into that.

The last one I really like, it helps

you write something, which is great for contact forums

and speaker submissions, things like that.

So any form that requires input and thought,

this is where it can help.

Or even if you just need help writing internal emails

or Slack messages, like I would sometimes

go over to ChatGP–

OK, wait.

Not me, a friend.

A friend would do this and say, ChatGPT,

how do I in HR compliant corporate speak say,

oh my god, are you dumb?

What are you doing?

And then it would spit back something that was much more

appropriate to say.

And I would say, oh good, OK, here, copy and paste.

But it’s great.

It’s helping us.

It is helping us.

And of course, it will collect your tone of voice.

And over a bit of time, it will be

able to master what you’re going to say anyway,

which is great.

So yeah, that’s all the AI news.

Lastly, WordPress news.

There wasn’t on that.

That’s how much it is at the tip of my tongue.

Yoast news, two very quick updates.

So the first one is last month, we

talked about how organization schema has been updated.

Whilst everything in the plugin is all correct and valid,

we’ve been doing a lot of testing.

We can tell you that in the next update of Yoast SEO Premium

and Local SEO, everything else in the organization

schema that was updated in late November

is going to be in this plugin.

And lastly, if your French or your audience is French,

you are in luck because we have improved

the accuracy of word complexity assessments

for the French language.

So instead of saying exclusive azeal,

give some other French thing that I’m not

qualified to tell you about or a human.

So I’m sure what it is is great.

It’s very bon, very, very bon.

And that is everything from Yoast.

Lastly, if you’re around in Taiwan, by any chance,

on the 7th of March, both you and I will be at WorkCamp Asia

along with more than a handful of Yoasters.

So if you are there, come check us out and say hi.

But as well as that, if anyone’s in Munich,

I’ll be attending SMX Munich.

And neither of us will be attending CloudFest,

but I know that there will be Yoasters there definitely.

I know Carol, with her very big purple hat,

will be there helping to organize stuff.

One thing that’s not on there, I will

be at PubCon March 4th–

PubCon is March 4th through 6th in Las Vegas.

So I will be there and then immediately jetting off

to Taipei for WordCamp Asia.

Lovely.

I’m annoyed I’m not going to PubCon myself,

but we can’t make them all.

You’re doing PubCon, I’m doing SMX.

It’s fine.

That’s what the world’s for and our location is, right?

Yep.

And lastly, we’re on again in a few weeks,

on the 27th of February.

So you can join us then.

And I hope you have been informed well

in the last 53 minutes.

So Nynke, we’ve got questions.

I’m sure I’ve seen loads.

We got a lot of questions and a lot of upvotes as well.

So we have two really big upvoted questions,

but I think we should quickly explain one more thing,

because we got a few questions about the Google site update,

and it’s not quite sure which sites are affected.

So let me pop up.

I think we can be really short on that one,

but we had two questions on that one.

And you already answered this in chat,

but I’m not sure if everybody saw this.

So this is the question, Holly sent,

are these Google business sites?

We’re not talking about Google sites, right?

So maybe just a quick answer to which sites are affected.

I believe it is Google site–

websites made with Google business profile is what I see.

So the Google business profile websites

will be shut down is the way the news that I’m reading

describes it.

So a site address ending with business.site or negocio.site–

I’m not sure how to pronounce that–

those will be removed from the website field

on your business profile.

So the recommendation is that you

look for a reliable web hosting company that also allows

you to create a custom domain name for your new site

and then redirect to that new domain name.

Cool.

OK.

We have an article on Bluehost, actually,

that talks about that and provides instructions.

Is it OK if I drop the link in here?

Yeah.

Done it already, Carolyn.

Oh, Alex is fast.

Alex is fast.

OK.

Thanks so much for that.

Let’s pick the most upvoted questions, the 28th upvote.

So this is something that a lot of people are thinking of.

The question is, what is the most important thing

we can do to optimize our images so we can ensure they are found

by voice and visual searches?

This was a topic that was read at the beginning of the update.

OK.

If you’ve got products, my advice is

to get one of those product lightbox things.

I think they only cost about 50 euros or something like that.

And take as many photos as you can.

Overdo it with the photos.

Your photos.

Don’t you stop photos.

Never stop photos.

Do it yourself.

If I had this mug, there’d be–

I like this mug now.

I’m going to use this every month.

You do the rotation.

I want to see every single angle, the underneath.

Open it up.

Look at the inside.

Even if you don’t think it’s helpful,

someone at some point in time will search randomly

for the bottom of that mug.

And they’ll find only you because you’re

the only person who’s done it.

So as many as possible that are, of course,

descriptive, plain background.

So it’s focusing on mainly the product you want to do.

I’m focusing mainly on a product kind of imagery.

But that’s the one thing that I connect to here.

But everything else, just be as descriptive.

Try to answer the question in the picture as much as you can.

I mean, Carolyn was saying a picture’s

worth 1,000 words.

And the task is to find the words inside the picture

and optimize for them.

For certain products, take a picture of the product

with a measuring tape against it with different dimensions

so that people can see how big it is.

You can put it next to a banana for scale.

There’s a lot of different things

you can do to make your pictures better than the stock photos

that are provided by the companies.

So maybe also do a quick search yourself

before you start taking those pictures.

What is available?

What can I add to that?

And what new perspective can I offer?

And then just fill in all of the data

around it that you have available to you to make sure

that you’re mentioning the brand name, the part number,

the color, the size, things like that.

Cool.

Thanks for that.

So the second most up-for-the-question

is about focus in SEO.

So the question is, what should a mid-size business

focus on for SEO?

Is meta title, h1, et cetera,

still important this year?

Or should we focus more on answering the community

questions?

It’s definitely still important.

I mean, that’s table stakes, though.

You should have that done.

That’s not a thing that you have to constantly be tending to

because it’s somewhat set it and forget it.

Once you’ve done that, though, then you

want to go be involved in the communities

and make sure that you’re being helpful and answering questions

and referring people to helpful content

that you’ve got on your website.

And to add to that, maybe if we go back

to what we were talking in the trends earlier,

having good content structure to help with topical authority,

that’s another thing.

And making the chili pot content and not the cookie tray

content be detailed.

Helpful, but not too long at the same time.

As you can see, Google’s starter guide is getting halved.

So being helpful doesn’t mean being too detailed.

OK.

Do it both.

That’s probably also the answer, the short version.

Yeah.

Cool.

I think we can do one more.

There’s one, again, about visualizing your products.

But what if you sell software?

Or what if you don’t have a visual appealing or even

visible product?

Maybe financial technology is one of the examples mentioned.

I don’t think those would spawn results because

of the nature of the product.

But you could still write articles where you’re discussing

top 10 ways to do x with this product,

or how to do alternatives to this particular product.

I think if you look at the questions

that people ask around that type of product

and answer those questions, I think that would

be a good way to do it.

I don’t think the image-based searches are necessarily

going to feature prominently in the results for products

that aren’t physical and aren’t super visual.

Maybe demo content to see when thinking of purchasing maybe

a software platform, like how do I work with it?

I think they’re not maybe allowed to do–

some brands prevent you from doing screenshots.

So I think if you’re prevented from doing screenshots,

everyone’s prevented from doing screenshots.

So I think visual search just won’t

be as big of a feature in the results for those types

of products.

OK, cool.

Let me see if we can do one quick one still.

You’ve got to have an encore question.

Yeah.

I think we had some questions about the cookie update,

the third-party cookie update.

Some people worry what kind of websites

will be affected.

I think we had one, but I wasn’t sure,

about online certification programs, but also one

that refers to leave a review.

Can we say anything about those websites

might be impacted with third-party cookie laws

changing?

I don’t think so, because they’re more of embeds.

They’re not tracking you around the internet.

After you make a review, I would like to think.

So it’s not like TripAdvisor is going to follow you around,

because you made a review about some restaurant.

But they will have other retargeting stuff going on

that they’re not going to be allowed to do,

so they’ve got their own challenges.

But from review sites, I mean, that to me

is kind of a perspective site.

So if anything, I wouldn’t worry about reviews or review sites

getting deranked or penalized in any way,

or just not ranking as well, because they’re still

going to be helpful, in part the firsthand experience.

I think it’s less affecting rankings

and more affecting tracking and advertisements.

So it’s not necessarily an SEO issue.

It’s more of a paid–

Yeah, so if that’s your business model getting revenue

from referrals or whatever, you might be impacted, no matter,

maybe the content of your site.

OK, cool.

We’re at two minutes past time, so I

think we should close off here.

Alex, Caroline, thanks for another great update.

I think we were packed with AI updates and really helpful

Google updates.

So thanks for that.

All the people joining today, thanks for joining.

Thanks for being here.

We’re super excited to see you again in February

and see what that month brings in SEO updates.

So see you then, and happy optimizing for now.

Topics & sources

SEO news

AI news

Presented by

<>Carolyn Shelby

Carolyn is our Principal SEO. She leverages more than two decades of hands-on experience optimizing websites for maximum visibility and engagement. She specializes in enterprise and news SEO, and is passionate about demystifying the intricacies of search engine optimization for businesses of all sizes.

<>Alex Moss

Alex is our Principal SEO. With a background in technical SEO, he has been working in Search since its infancy and also has years of knowledge of WordPress, developing several plugins over the years. He is involved within many aspects of Yoast from product roadmap to content strategy.

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Webinar: How to start with SEO (January 29, 2024) https://yoast.com/webinar/webinar-how-to-start-with-seo-january-29-2024/ Mon, 29 Jan 2024 11:00:16 +0000 https://yoast.com/?post_type=yoast_webinar&p=3585830 Learn the basics and get practical tips Starting with SEO can be overwhelming and sometimes you need help to get started. No worries; our SEO experts are here to help. Watch the webinar replay and get practical tips about all the SEO basics. We’ll cover these 5 topics Webinar level: beginner Join us if you: Hosted by:

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Learn the basics and get practical tips

Starting with SEO can be overwhelming and sometimes you need help to get started. No worries; our SEO experts are here to help. Watch the webinar replay and get practical tips about all the SEO basics.

We’ll cover these 5 topics

  • How to do keyword research?
  • How to optimize content?
  • How to improve the structure of your website?
  • How to make your site visible to search engines?
  • How to get more clicks using “how-to” and “FAQ” blocks”?

Webinar level: beginner

Join us if you:

  • Feel that you need help to start with SEO on your website
  • Want to ask our hosts your SEO-related questions in the Q&A

Hosted by:

<>Marina Koleva

Marina is a linguist and developer who works on Yoast SEO’s content analysis – the well-known checks on a text’s SEO, readability, inclusive language use, and all the rest. Marina is also very proud to be one of the people who developed support for Japanese for our analysis.

<>Taco Verdonschot

Taco is the Head of Relations at Yoast. In that capacity, he’s leading the community and support teams at Yoast. Coming from a support background himself, he’s always ready to be a helping hand and he loves to help all customers succeed!

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Webinar: How to start with SEO (January 16, 2024) https://yoast.com/webinar/webinar-how-to-start-with-seo-january-16-2024/ Mon, 08 Jan 2024 15:28:37 +0000 https://yoast.com/?post_type=yoast_webinar&p=3585817 Learn the basics and get practical tips Starting with SEO can be overwhelming and sometimes you need help to get started. No worries; our SEO experts are here to help. Watch the webinar replay and get practical tips about all the SEO basics. We’ll cover these 5 topics Webinar level: beginner Join us if you: Hosted by

The post Webinar: How to start with SEO (January 16, 2024) appeared first on Yoast.

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Learn the basics and get practical tips

Starting with SEO can be overwhelming and sometimes you need help to get started. No worries; our SEO experts are here to help. Watch the webinar replay and get practical tips about all the SEO basics.

We’ll cover these 5 topics

  • How to do keyword research?
  • How to optimize content?
  • How to improve the structure of your website?
  • How to make your site visible to search engines?
  • How to get more clicks using “how-to” and “FAQ” blocks”?

Webinar level: beginner

Join us if you:

  • Feel that you need help to start with SEO on your website
  • Want to ask our hosts your SEO-related questions in the Q&A

Hosted by

<>Mushrit Shabnam

Mushrit is a support engineer at Yoast. She is also a WordPress enthusiast and invests her time in creating documentation.

<>Michael Quaranta

Michael is one of the Yoast support team leads. His focus is on improving the support team’s performance and satisfaction. His work background includes retail store management, customer support, and sales.

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Webinar: How to start with SEO (January 4, 2024) https://yoast.com/webinar/webinar-how-to-start-with-seo-january-4-2024/ Fri, 05 Jan 2024 10:28:19 +0000 https://yoast.com/?post_type=yoast_webinar&p=3585807 Learn the basics and get practical tips Starting with SEO can be overwhelming and sometimes you need help to get started. No worries; our SEO experts are here to help. Watch the webinar replay and get practical tips about all the SEO basics. We’ll cover these 4 topics Webinar level: beginner Join us if you: Hosted by:

The post Webinar: How to start with SEO (January 4, 2024) appeared first on Yoast.

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Learn the basics and get practical tips

Starting with SEO can be overwhelming and sometimes you need help to get started. No worries; our SEO experts are here to help. Watch the webinar replay and get practical tips about all the SEO basics.

We’ll cover these 4 topics

  • How to do keyword research?
  • How to optimize content?
  • How to improve the structure of your website?
  • How to make your site visible to search engines?

Webinar level: beginner

Join us if you:

  • Feel that you need help to start with SEO on your website
  • Want to ask our hosts your SEO-related questions in the Q&A

Hosted by:

<>Marina Koleva

Marina is a linguist and developer who works on Yoast SEO’s content analysis – the well-known checks on a text’s SEO, readability, inclusive language use, and all the rest. Marina is also very proud to be one of the people who developed support for Japanese for our analysis.

<>Tyler Nguyen

Tyler is a growth marketer at Yoast. His main focus is improving the user experience on the Yoast website by employing a data-driven approach.

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The SEO update by Yoast – December 2023 Edition https://yoast.com/webinar/the-seo-update-by-yoast-december-2023-edition/ Tue, 19 Dec 2023 09:30:59 +0000 https://yoast.com/?post_type=yoast_webinar&p=3608196 Update transcript Topics & sources SEO news AI news WordPress news Presented by

The post The SEO update by Yoast – December 2023 Edition appeared first on Yoast.

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Update transcript

Hello everyone!

Are you all ready for the last SEO update from this year?

Alex and Carolyn, the SEOs at Yoast, will give you all the latest news and reflect a bit on the year of 2023.

One small spoiler, just a small one because I will leave the rest up to you, Alex and Carolyn.

2023 was the year with the most Google core updates ever.

There is a lot in store for you today.

I will leave it up to you to share.

Enjoy everyone.

I will be back when the Q&A starts.

Welcome to the SEO update by Yoast.

My name is Carolyn Shelby.

Alex will be joining us back again in a moment.

I guess I’ll just go ahead and get the housekeeping done while we’re waiting for Alex to fix his issues.

We are going to be discussing today the 2023 SEO news and review, SEO news in general, AI news of which there is a great deal this month, WordPress news, not too much news there, a little Yoast news, and then we’ve got our Q&A time where we’re going to be taking your questions and answering your questions, hopefully providing a ton of information.

I think that is my good friend Alex who has returned and joined us.

Can you hear me?

I can hear you.

How are you doing?

I’m good, thank you, now with all the technical problems gone.

That’s okay.

I went ahead and introduced us and I went through the table of contents.

We’re ready to rock and roll.

Are you ready to go?

Yes, I am.

Again, I just want to remind everyone that if you do have any questions, please feel free to ask.

We’ve got on the side a little button that you can click that asks you to see it.

It’s got a little question mark.

You can click on that.

You can add your questions in and then other audience members can upvote your questions to get them answered faster.

So please feel free to pop anything you have to say in there and we will get to it.

All right.

If you would like to learn more about today’s topics, here is the URL that you can go to afterwards.

The recording will be available and eventually we will also have a transcription for those of you who prefer to read and not listen.

The URL, just in case you’re wondering and or you can’t see, is Yoast.

st/update-dec2023.

And again, that will be available after the show is over.

When you register, we have been asking you if you have questions.

A lot of the questions that we’ve been getting are intro to SEO, SEO 101 questions that we’re not necessarily going to be able to answer in this show.

However, on January 4th, we have a How to Start with SEO webinar that everyone is welcome to join.

We do those every month, and they are great for answering your introductory level questions.

With all of that housekeeping out of the way, let us get into the 2023 SEO News in Review.

All right.

Are you ready, Alex?

I am.

I’m ready.

I can hear you.

You can hear me.

Let’s go.

Let’s do it.

All right.

Like Nynke said, the Google updates in 2023 increased.

We’re not even out of 2023 yet, but they’ve already released four core updates.

March, August, September, October.

It started in September and closed in October and November.

This was the most in a single year.

The previous high was three and that was in 2021.

The other big non core update that happened was the helpful content update, which I think is arguably the most impactful of of the year.

Alex, did you have you have a favorite core update?

Do you have a favorite update for the year?

I mean, call them favorites.

I mean, with these with these five specifically, if we want to talk about helpful content, I mean, that was definitely the biggest impact in my opinion.

From what I’ve seen, there was a lot of sites that got penalized and the core updates were kind of, you know, they’re very broad.

They hit 10 percent of things, but the forecasting wasn’t forecasting.

The turbulence wasn’t as strong as it was in previous years.

So while things have improved, you haven’t heard lots of people complaining that they’ve been hit too much by those core updates.

HCU, however, you’ve had a lot of big hits and helpful content is going to be, I think, a bit of content that we’re going to have to talk about in 2024.

What’s actually helpful and has everything that’s been helpful in the past and now no longer helpful, actually helpful and vice versa, which I think is going to be them mastering that part of the algorithm, which will be interesting because This is the second HCU.

There was one in September, October of 2022.

So this is an annual thing.

And even though it technically wasn’t newsworthy, I mean, we saw that a couple of search liaison Twitter handles deleted a tweet about how they’re not rolling this back, which is quite interesting as well to see that maybe they were quite adamant that they weren’t rolling anything back.

But now they’ve taken that statement away, meaning is there more to do?

Probably, I think it’s going to be an ongoing issue.

Just in the things that I’m doing for work heavily leaning into making sure that we’re writing content that is very helpful and we’re making the content that we have more helpful rather than just writing blog pieces to write blog pieces.

If you know what I mean, and I think there’s a lot of people that have that we just need to write content.

We need to crank out content mentality when I think that what this update has taught us is that it’s far more important to make sure that you’re contributing to the overall knowledge of the universe rather than just putting out puff pieces to fluff up your content.

Yeah, I think it’s made people think a lot more before they not even just hit publish but even go into draft mode you know here’s a page and back before September, you know some may say well here’s a keyword.

Let’s make a landing page for this keyword but now I feel like everyone has to take a step back and go.

What’s the point of that page, if we were to make it.

What are you achieving with this is the user going to get something out of it and if the answers no rethink your idea or don’t do it at all.

We distinctly have memories of people asking me to they would hire me to write press releases and I’d say okay what are we announcing?

Well we want to push fabricated metal buildings like okay but what are you announcing?

Oh we don’t have an announcement like well okay this is a press release so you’re supposed to announce something.

We’ll just make something up it’s like I can’t make up the news my friend.

You need to have something to say if you’re going to say something.

Yeah, at least if you do when you still want to that’s not to say that you can’t be creative about what that page is.

If you just want to get it out just you have to make sure that at least you adhere to those questions.

Right.

Is it actually going to be interpreted as helpful, whether you want it to be helpful or not isn’t part of the thing is whether it should be.

And if it is and it ranks they’re great and then you can manipulate that as you wish, if at all, to get them where they actually where you want them to go.

It’s interesting that they’re focusing more on making sure that all contents legitimate.

Because if it’s not, it’s essentially web spam, which is the old school term for writing content for search engines.

And speaking of spam, Google took out the how to and FAQ structured data results at one point during the year.

Ultimately they did give them back to us, but I think they took them out for a couple reasons.

One of which though was probably due to spam and abuse.

I do think that they needed to clear room to make the test the SGE results, but people were abusing like nobody’s business, the how to and the FAQ structured data results.

They were adding schema to things that absolutely had no business being FAQs, and it was screwing up the results.

Yeah and cannibalizing it too much like what color is the sky.

I mean we all kind of know it’s blue but still it would output and they took it away.

Now that they’ve brought it back, obviously they’ve not done it on a level at which it was before, which again makes you think about the kind of keyword that it should, that the FAQ snippet should be outputting on anyway.

There’s only certain kinds of phrases that you would want.

But again, I mean our advice is not to abuse it, but also not to just throw it away just because of kind of taking it out of the SERPs for maybe 90%.

Keep it in because it is schema, it’s structured data again, so long as it’s helpful.

I remember when this happened, there was a “are you going to take that out of the plugin?

” Why would we take that out of the plugin?

It still exists, it’s still functional.

Well Google says it doesn’t matter anymore.

There’s a difference between Google making it less featured and saying that it’s deprecated and doesn’t exist anymore.

So I think people got their collective undies in a bunch about this being taken off of the SERPs and it didn’t need to be the panic attack that it turned into.

Yeah, and hopefully some more proactive SEOs who knew they were maybe doing wrong or going against what helpful content might be in this sense might have taken that stuff away and then things have reduced and the abuse is less so, so then they bring it back, but obviously in a controlled manner.

Yeah, one of the other things that Google decided to start doing is they’re showing more Reddit, Quora, and TikTok results to showcase first person reviews and experiences with different products.

Just really featuring things from those user generated content platforms in a way that they’ve never done before, which is interesting.

And I do, I find this valuable when I’m looking at, let’s say product reviews or I’m trying to make a decision about one thing versus another.

If I type in, for example, the Phillips 5400 versus the Jura S8, which are super espresso makers, I will invariably get a Reddit post that explains exactly what some random person’s experience was in a coffee lovers group where they’re going to have very relevant users.

So I’m going to be getting relevant, useful, comparative information for me that isn’t sponsored by the company.

So I think this is something that we’re going to be also seeing a lot more of.

Whether or not this gets abused is another story, but I’m sure it will.

I mean, I’m sure I saw read somewhere that people just started adding Reddit to the end of their title tags, so that they could maybe rank the things and they would kind of cannibalize on the term Reddit, because people were just searching for a search term and then Reddit afterwards, which kind of does happen and people do do that.

And they find that instead of going into Reddit and trying to search and use Reddit search engine, they’ll use Google search engines to try and identify what they need to inside Reddit.

But to be fair, to get into these special results, it actually does have to be a result coming out of.

Yeah, coming out of Reddit.

Hopefully it’s less exploitable than simply tricking Google by adding keywords to the end of the title tag.

Yeah, but from its theory is correct.

I mean, Reddit, Quora, and I don’t know, I don’t use TikTok personally to ingest any information, but they are trustworthy, first hand experience, great UGC platforms that should provide the most helpful answer to it.

So theoretically it’s correct.

It’s that anyone can go on Reddit and try to do an SEO strategy on Reddit for keywords that they want to rank for in their own subreddits that’ll probably get abused.

And now you’ve got Google groups that are showing up everywhere.

AOL discussion forums are being dug out of basically archive.

org, aren’t they?

And now they’re all ranking really well.

You know, and I know we’ve got to move on, but I do want this is so reminiscent of early, early web days when, like, I don’t know if you remember use net news or if that’s before your time and I’m a hundred years old.

It would be interesting to me as these things start servicing more in search, because people will talk about some really, really inappropriate and personal things in those groups, because they thought they were relatively private and sheltered and weren’t going to be discovered by people on the general Internet.

And that might be changing.

So it’ll be interesting to see what kind of stuff gets surfaced as the year progresses.

People never remember that stuff doesn’t get deleted from the Internet.

No, if it’s on the Internet, it’s forever.

Yeah, what isn’t forever though?

Google is replacing some of the Core Web Vitals with new Core Web Vitals.

So that’s an interesting thing.

They have taken away FID and they’ve replaced it with INP.

And I’ve heard without getting too technical or or bogging things down.

People, much like with the how to’s and the FAQ schema, just because Google is replacing one of of the tests that they monitor on Core Web Vitals does not mean that Core Web Vitals no longer matters.

It doesn’t mean that speed no longer matters, and it doesn’t mean you can ignore it.

And I’m not sure how people are making that logically from one of the tests is being tweaked and made slightly different to, well, it doesn’t matter anymore.

We can ignore it.

So again, without getting too technical, I just want to say my only comment on this is please don’t make that assumption.

Continue to work on your Core Web Vitals.

Continue to make your user experience fantastic, because that’s what Google is looking for is great user experiences.

Yeah, exactly.

And it’s also just because a report isn’t there doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be doing that stuff anyway.

Right.

I mean, absolutely.

I’ll saying, oh, no, no, don’t make don’t make an efficient, well performing website.

They’re definitely not sending that message.

Absolutely not.

One of the things that Google is doing, though, is they’re continuing to iterate on the SGE and.

They’re continuing to iterate on SGE and AI integration.

So SGE is the Search Generative Experience.

It’s an experimental update to Google search engine that uses artificial intelligence to generate contextual answers to complex questions, which is neat.

But it’s not available to everyone yet because it’s still in beta.

So I know Alex, you don’t have access to it.

No, and I don’t know many people who do.

And the only to be honest with you, the only ways I’m seeing all of this is through someone like you or someone else in America tweeting and embedding an image or a video of what they see.

And, stuff that, roundtable and SEJ kind of pump out.

But other than that, I don’t have direct access and most people I know obviously are in the same geographic area.

Well, I went ahead and I turned it on.

So you do have to kind of log into it to play with it.

So I logged into it to play with it and I ran a test and it is interesting.

So it doesn’t, I don’t know if you can see this, but there’s little arrows next to some of the sentences.

So originally those were kind of collapsed.

And if I want to read more information, I have to click on the little arrow.

I mean, it’s pulling information for that particular paragraph from multiple different sources and kind of assembling them and basically writing a summary of what it found.

So that was interesting.

I didn’t find any immediate information that was horrible or wrong.

It’s not bad.

I’m interested to see what else what else happens.

Well, as an end user.

That’s great.

That’s brilliant.

Yes.

And the information really quickly in context.

It’s generally accurate.

As an SEO,.

if you’re not clicking on a website now, you’re getting the answer again, which is always a position zero issue.

I know some people are most likely going to ask a question, something like, is SGE going to take away and cannibalize visits from a site?

And I think that’s a really good kind of question.

It’d be interesting to see where they are going because they’re going to have to site places.

People are going to still want to delve in for further reading.

And it’s what to do with that information, but I’d still go ahead with saying, if it’s helpful, I still think this HCU and the way in which they talk about firsthand content, the way they describe content is also going to go hand in hand with what they’re about to do with SG and around Gemini.

So, so yeah, it’s really interesting that they’re giving you that answer, but it’s got to come from somewhere.

Right.

Yeah, it’s pulling from the main website and it’s pulling from Wikipedia and other Knowledge Graph articles.

So, I think making sure that you’ve got your entities, you know, if you’ve got a Wikipedia article, if you’ve got the opportunity to fill out entity data and have your organization schema all up to date, I think that’s definitely going to help.

One other thing that happened that was big in 2023 is that people were saying that ChatGPT being integrated into Bing was going to be the Google killer and all these other things that were coming out with AI were going to be the Google killer.

If you look at this graph, all of that blue in that column is Google’s market share.

The teeny weeny little slices of color at the top are the other search engines market shares.

So, have they made inroads?

Yes.

Have they made significant inroads?

No, not at all.

No, and it is interesting because one, the way in which it was portrayed, especially with ChatGPT and also that part we’re going into Bing chat as well.

People are like, well, Microsoft are going to get this monopoly back.

And that did not happen at all.

It didn’t even, it didn’t even make a massive dent and I had to really when we were doing the rehearsal for this before I had to squint really well to see that Yandex has got maybe a pixel more on that graph.

And that’s it.

But no one else has changed whatsoever.

In fact, maybe Bing has got smaller over the year, meaning maybe that people have gone on to it and you know how humans love change, don’t we, of course, so we’ll have tried it out.

It’s not quite right and going back.

It’s kind of like what I do with Apple products.

I don’t buy anything till v3.

I’ll let v1 and v2, the people who are more loyal to loyal to the brand, do what they need to do and experiment.

But to me v1 of any product is an experiment.

You know, it’s beta tests.

So, so next year, this is that’s going to be the year that’s going to be way more interesting.

But again, I don’t think it will do anything to the market share.

Given how much everything’s grown though, just in the last year, because AI just came out, just really started making a big dent in things, I would say about this time last year, right?

And the amount it’s grown in a year, if this rate of growth and rate of improvement keeps pace, I mean, it’s possible the landscape could be entirely different when we meet back here next year.

I’m still skeptical.

I don’t know, maybe my history with NFTs worth looking at.

Unfortunately, it’s that’s a whole other webinar of let’s see what we learned from history of that was more echo bubble.

But it was interesting to see that a lot of techies in this context, a lot of techies who understood the tech, they knew what it can do and they knew that it could be mass adopted and they want it mass adopted.

But the problem in the NFT space is that they wanted it done in their terms, which is not aligned with mass adoption.

Whereas this is actually mass adoption.

It’d be interesting to see what we do.

But it does show that people do FOMO and there’s this peak of finding something out.

They discover it experiments and then they go back to their normal ways, just like voice search.

Yep, those are the big things in SEO this year.

And I think, you know, just real quick to review Google is still the champ.

Google has not been unseated.

So please don’t stop optimizing for Google, because that is still where the most of your traffic is coming from.

On the upside, our new robot overlords have not yet taken over everything.

Skynet is not yet sent sentient, even though I’m pretty sure that this was the year it was supposed to happen.

So AI hasn’t taken over everything and SEO is still not dead.

No, if anything, I think it’s even more important in the next year because you have to.

it’s like what’s happening with the search landscapes, what’s happened to the social landscape.

There was only like two to deal with.

But now and there was usually social media management wasn’t even a job.

It was part of the marketer’s job.

It was a little part.

And now its own skill.

But now it’s growing so much that, like I was saying before, I don’t use TikTok, but there are TikTok specialists as well as Snapchat and Facebook.

And now this is the different way you’re fighting with so many things to maintain it that an SEO’s job is going to be harder, but more creative.

And it will be harder to abuse things in the future, which is something I’m a fan of personally.

Let’s go on now to this month’s news.

This will be SEO news that happened since the last time we talked to you.

I don’t know how many people are going to really be.

Really concerned about this, but on November, 27th.

The crawl rate limiter tool deprecation was announced by Google.

It’s officially going to shut down January 8th.

Google says the tool isn’t useful since the crawler already reacts and adjusts without manual input.

The question a lot of you are going to be asking is what is this tool?

And I’ve never heard of it and I don’t care.

Fact of the matter is most of you don’t care about this because it’s generally only applicable to sites that have, you know, tens of thousands of articles and posts rather than your standard, a couple hundred posts.

Maybe, it gets up to a thousand.

What this does is when the Google crawler, the bot comes through, it will hammer your site.

If you’ve got tens of thousands or more posts, and you’ve got the bot coming through.

Just hitting your site and calling something every millisecond.

It’s going to cripple your server.

So what you do is you go into the crawl rate limiter tool and you say, hey, Google, I’m not going to block you.

You can still come through, but I really need you to slow your roll because you’re crippling my server.

And this request to them will be honored for a month, maybe two months before they resume their normal cadence.

What has happened is Google has built their crawler to adjust to sense when it’s crippling your server.

And in theory, it’s going to ratchet itself back on its own.

In practice, if any bot is hammering your site to the point that it’s crippling your server, you have better options now for limiting that.

Most people are using Cloudflare.

You can go to Cloudflare and you can tell it, oh, hey, these bots are crippling my site.

Can you throttle them?

And Cloudflare will say, get on that right away.

And it does an excellent job.

So the tool is going away.

This really only matters if you’ve got a big site and you’ve had situations where the bots are hammering your site and you need to slow them down.

That’s the gist of that.

Yeah, it may be worth mentioning in Cloudflare in the pro account.

I think you can have more advanced rules and regulations over what can be done.

So if your site is really getting hit and the default out of the box free version isn’t doing it for you, it may be worth just paying for one month and checking out what the other rules that are applicable can do for you, which is quite cool for some users.

You know, in Cloudflare, even if you have to pay for it, there are really reasonably priced options.

So in a situation where you need those tools, I feel like that’s a good investment.

Yeah, yeah.

That’s something that’s deprecating.

But Google have been adding a lot more stuff, haven’t they?

They have added new schema support.

So discussions forum and profile schema support was announced also on November 27th, which, of course, is like a few days, six days after our last show.

So had they announced it a week earlier, we could have talked about it last month.

But they didn’t.

So now we’re talking about it here.

The discussion forum and profile schema has always existed or it’s existed for a long time, at least.

So it’s not like the schema itself is new, but Google’s using it in the search now.

So there’s new support for it.

And then there is also a new report in Search Console.

But I think you had more details about this.

Yeah.

So it’s kind of been split into two in this part.

It’s kind of the same vertical.

So if you think of a forum in general, you would sign up and you can post the forum.

That’s the discussion forum schema in there.

That’s kind of not something that’s covered in Yoast.

But you may want to double check if you’ve got a third party plugin in WordPress, at least things like BBPress and BuddyPress and things like that.

They might have already done the updating.

But in terms of profile schema, profile page, that’s connected to the author of who not I’m going to distinguish from an actual not an actual author, a person who makes a post, but in a forum, someone who’s commenting on a forum post will have a link to their profile.

And that’s where profile schema can come in.

But it also works for being an author of a post that kind of covers both.

So schema will have the author and it will also have profile page.

And that adds to the knowledge graph.

But more importantly to know, even though they’re now being reported in Search Console, that does not mean like Carolyn said, it was a new feature that was invented six weeks ago.

It’s been around for ages.

It’s embedded into Yoast, both free and premium from a profile page point of view anyway, and not the discussion forum because we don’t cover that.

But that’s something that you should be able to see.

If you go into Search Console and you’ve got Yoast installed, you should be able to now see a profile page report that should have an uptick in green bars that tell you that you get in valid pages.

But that is interesting.

But it’s also backing up that first hand experience thing.

This is a dream for places like Reddit, this schema.

This is exactly what Google want to have populated.

And therefore, again, makes me think about where they’re going with this.

Each of us are going to have and then you go into EEAT, it’s all going to be linking together.

Just think of this as one huge database and it is in its own knowledge graph about you and entities and things.

And it’s just all the way that it’s all connecting together.

The fact that they’re reporting on it in Search Console, let alone just validating it, means that I think they’re going to have big plans for this next year.

Yeah.

They’ve also added some interesting things to their organization, organization schema.

They’ve expanded the support a little bit.

I’m not as familiar with this as you are, so why don’t you educate me?

Yeah.

So organization, again, hasn’t been invented recently.

It’s been around for ages.

There’s been some structural conflicts between different schema entities.

And they’ve kind of now given best practice on what the best way of outputting that is.

So, for example, logo and image, which are two different entities.

Logo was embedded in one area of the nest of one part of schema, but is now inside the organization.

It didn’t invalidate anything and we knew about it in-house, but we didn’t want to make this fix because we knew at the time it was going to cause a lot of errors because of this problem.

Google has now closed that error.

So now in that, we’re going to be making adjustments to our plugin as well.

I don’t know the date of release, but we will be doing things to ensure that everything already is valid, by the way.

But we’re going to make the new version even more valid, but we’re going to structure it in the more correct way that Google have now left us with the example.

But it goes with logo and URL.

It also adds contact points as well.

So, for example, if you’re a drop ship kind of site or you’re just a freelancer or any business without a physical address, you can still be contacted by email or telephone number or other methods.

So they’ve added all of that inside organization, which is pretty cool.

It is pretty cool.

One of the things that is not cool is the announcement.

It was a story that Barry Schwartz wrote on search engine roundtable on November 27th.

A lot of things happened on November 27th.

Yeah, he said the SEO value of 404 link rescue is not worth the effort.

He was quoting John Mueller, who is, as you know, from Google.

So, in the story, if you read it, John Mueller says that bringing back a 404 page is not necessary due to good SEO.

He says it’s probably the efforts, probably less value than.

The result is less value than the effort.

What happens is bringing back a 404 page.

You’re looking for pages that are linking into you.

And if they’re linking into a page that doesn’t exist anymore, the 404 link rescue is where you either recreate that page.

You recreate the URL and redirect the URL to similar content or you otherwise restore that connection between the site that’s linking to you and you rather than having it come to a 404.

And the theory is that what you’re doing is you’re recapturing or kind of repatriating link authority.

Right?

I had issues with the way this is presented because people tend to take what Google says in very absolute, you know, absolute interpretations.

And this is by no means an absolute statement.

What he said is that it’s probably less value than the effort.

He didn’t say it is absolutely less value than the effort.

And I can think of several situations where it is valuable.

You don’t need to do this for every single broken link that you encounter.

But if you have thousands of broken links, and you can fix that quickly and easily.

I would say that’s worth the effort.

If you have a backlink from The White House or from Buckingham Palace.

That link is probably worth a ton.

A Wikipedia link is worth a ton.

Those are links that it is worth the effort to rescue those URLs and bring them back from the grave.

It’s not clickbaity and I don’t feel like it’s sensationalism, but it does tend to be interpreted that way.

I think by a lot of people.

So I would say learn to read the nuance in some of these Google proclamations.

It’s not that 404 link rescue is a total waste of time.

You just need to be judicious about which URLs you resurrect and which ones you don’t.

Yeah, maybe I think about it from a business case point of view.

Like, is there actually a reason why that page needs to come back away from SEO purely SEO, because there might actually be a business case where, for example, rankings on that great on it or weren’t before.

Maybe that’s why it went.

But actually it gets a lot of visits and what to do with those visits and what was the page and can it be helpful if you do bring it back?

Is it going to be helpful again if you go back to the HCU questions?

Will it actually serve anyone that’s going to visit from that link if anyone does visit?

So there’s that balance of is it authoritative?

The White House, it might be embedded somewhere in the back of the website that no one is ever going to visit.

But you and I both know that the DA is great on that, and you should do something with it.

Whether it’s redirected like what’s being mentioned or whether you just bring the page back is fine.

But if you get in loads of visits from a site is linking to you, why wouldn’t you want to cater for those visits?

But yeah, I agree.

I agree with one of the people in the chat.

A lot feels like more effort than value.

That’s correct.

But they’ll be examples where it will be worth the effort and worth the value.

And I think this is where expertise and knowledge about SEO comes in.

Understanding how to determine what’s a waste of time backlink and what’s really, hey, I should stop what I’m doing and go make this right.

I spend a lot of time resuscitating and recuperating Wikipedia links because they’re valuable.

Exactly.

Yeah, I don’t waste time with spam links, obviously, but sometimes spam links are worth resuscitating when they exist in the hundreds of thousands because pennies make pounds, right?

Yeah, exactly.

So, yeah, that’s that’s 404.

So what else is what else has happened?

Because there’s still lots that’s happened.

Well, we did have the November.

Well, it started in October.

So that core update that started in October finally finished this month on November 29th.

Google announced that they it took 26 days to roll out.

If that’s weeks longer than average, that’s crazy.

Plus they rolled out this core update overlapping Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

When I was growing up, we didn’t do things over Black Friday because you should have everything done by Black Friday and anything you do over Black Friday screws up the rest of the year.

So Google deciding to do a core update over Black Friday feels.

And vindictive to me, but it doesn’t seem to have caused a lot of problems.

Yeah, which is good to know, right, but it’s still an improvement rather than bashing a load of sites.

There’s a lot that happened in it, but there’s a lot of bullet points that you should actually read afterwards and some good links that will share afterwards.

Yeah, so just real quick the things that happened in the core update, it was updating targets.

The update targets all types of content and is not a penalty, which is good to know.

It was a global update.

So everybody got hit.

Not just not just a specific language.

I have been hearing a lot of things about how discover traffic has been tanking for a lot of news sites and a lot of news sites traffic in general has been tanking, but that does feel more niche.

Niche specific and not something that’s happening to everyone.

So I guess the general advice is if you got hit, if you feel like you got hit, Google says to examine your content to see if you can improve with their core update advice, which is provided at the Google Search Central blog.

Yeah, and a very quick thing to do that’s freely available.

Go into Search Console and check what what rankings you have for certain keywords and what pages you also had indexed and being visited in terms of clicks and impressions and do a quick comparison three months on three months and you’ll very quickly see maybe something glaringly obvious either in a singular page or a pattern of keywords that you’ll be able to maybe do something about.

And just real quick, and I hadn’t planned on mentioning this, but if you should be getting in the habit of annotating your search, I’m having a stroke.

I think your analytics annotate your analytics with big things that you’ve changed.

If you’re not keeping a change log, which is something that a lot of developers keep you as the SEO should be keeping track of any major technical changes that you’ve made to your site, and you can annotate your like your Google Analytics with specific dates.

So you’ll have a little flag on a specific date and if traffic changes and it corresponds to a flag.

Now you can go back and say oh this is what I changed on that day that must have broke something.

And now you know where to start looking to roll that back and repair the damage.

Yeah, which is good to do that can be proactive quite quickly.

Okay, so video mode.

Now only shows on pages where video is the main content.

Very briefly, if you’ve, let’s say you’ve got a piece of content you’ve got 1000 word article, and halfway down you’ve got an embedded video in YouTube.

It used to be the fact that that YouTube video would then get embedded into SERP itself.

But now, what they’ve done is they’ve changed that to say well that isn’t the main element of the page.

Therefore, you shouldn’t have the thumbnail, because it’s actually contextual as part of the content.

Again, I get that they’re doing it to reduce a bit of abuse as the all of us SEOs will have done in the past once we knew it was an opportunity to get more real estate, but also it provides an opportunity for people who actually do have video as the main bits of content to be focused as such.

So, in short, if you want to actually get those videos back you have to ensure put the video at the top of the page.

It has to just whatever the content is which shouldn’t be a lot should describe exactly what that video is to the point that you might want to create your own post types or get video gallery to do such a thing.

But at the moment, if you’ve just, again, put a video in for the search engine.

It now knows, and it’s going to tell you otherwise.

This is now a report you can see inside Search Console.

And you can, you can either decide to leave it there as an error remove the video, or you can decide to move the video into another page and make that the prominent content.

Yeah, and I’m, I’m almost happy to see this to be perfectly honest because people would add completely irrelevant videos to their content just to get that that thumbnail and it was aggravating because you would think that you’re going to watch a video that’s relevant, and then it’s not and then I feel like I’ve wasted my time so it was, it was creating a bad user experience.

And I think that reinforces that Google is making changes to make better user experiences.

So yeah, and there’s only one more bit of SEO news for the month isn’t there.

Yeah, I was gonna say speaking of ranking signals openness so on December 15 which was just a few days ago, there was an interesting conversation about whether or not how, how open your store is makes any difference in looking at SEO.

Yeah, it was from an original tweet by Joy Hawkins.

She was implying that the fact that if a physical location is open, you will rank better at the time that it’s open.

Google have kind of implied that that is a ranking factor.

But before we, before we just stop there you have to remember that doesn’t mean that you should just change your business hours to 24 seven.

Exactly.

So if you’re not open you will get your, you might not get penalized but they’ll, figure this out and again, I feel like this is their testing waters to see how it’s abused because it will be by some people that I’ve seen out in the wild offices that are open 24/7 that should definitely not be open 24/7.

But it is handy for genuine businesses who should be ranking more at certain times of the day that the Baker came to mind to me where at four in the afternoon.

To know the directions to the baker right now maybe not but five in the morning, when you actually want the freshest piece of bread that you can get that actually it might be more relevant to rank the local bakery over bread and, you know, the normal organic position one to 10.

So, I kind of, I kind of agree with this.

But again, let’s see how it’s abused by some black hatters.

Yeah, let’s move into AI news because I, we’ve got a lot here to go through.

Let’s quick fire these because I fire them.

So, like, November 21.

On the Search Engine Journal Kristi Hines wrote open AI announces free ChatGPT voice capabilities in the mobile app.

This is cool.

However, I don’t personally see how much this is going to make a difference to people.

I just said it’s an well ChatGPT says it’s a fresh opportunity for brand marketers and SEO professionals to explore voice optimized strategies.

I don’t see that but if you say so.

I mean, that’s just a prediction.

Let’s see maybe we’ll eat our words.

Okay, let’s see if they can dictate the trend.

Well, in additional news on stuff that sounds cool, but doesn’t actually work.

On November 22nd, Google Bards latest update enhanced the understanding of YouTube videos.

And again, this comes to us from Kristi Hines at SEJ.

So in theory, Bard can read YouTube videos and analyze them for content strategies and all sorts of other fun stuff.

But if you read the article, she demonstrated that there are some gaps in Bards knowledge and analysis which I think is kind of a nice way of saying, yeah, this is cool but maybe not ready for prime time.

Interesting.

I mean, it’s got a lot to learn, hasn’t it.

There is a lot to learn especially in YouTube just seems to be such a cesspool sometimes but that could just be my experience and the fact that my kid watches Mr.

Beast videos all the time.

Yeah, but it will under the AI will understand the different kinds of crap that’s on YouTube.

Or will the AI believe that humanity is a waste of time and just decide to extinct us all.

I mean, you know, those things could happen.

You don’t want YouTube to judge humanity.

Oh, my God.

No, no, we absolutely do not.

Well, in more AI news Bing on December 6 announced that they were introducing Deep Search and other AI Copilot enhancements.

And there are a ton of things that they announced in this probably more than we can get through in the time we have left.

But the some of the interesting things I know there is a new DALL-E 3 model that’s out that’s supposed to make even better pictures, which is probably good and or bad depending on how you look at it.

I mean, these fake pictures are getting really realistic and really difficult to kind of tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not.

But they have also made improvements to the code interpreter improvements to their video understanding and questions and answers when you’re using CoPilot in Edge.

Yeah, so there’s under read there.

Well, what I do like about this is that the day later, Google decides to announce things, don’t they?

So this was the sixth of December.

Google Gemini.

We’re going to talk about Google Gemini.

It’s like they’re all playing this game of press releases with each other, which is interesting for this race to, you know, everyone needs to.

I don’t think you need to be so fast personally I work on what you’ve got perfect it and then, you know, do it.

I guess they were doing that this year with Gemini.

They’ve now split that into three modules if you want to call them that Ultra, which they say is our largest and most capable model Pro, which is scaling across a wide range of tasks.

And Nano is the efficient model for mobile devices, which is where they might might be going with the voice search kind of thing and experience that I know you can have on mobile and say Android also or Apple also.

And they’re probably split into three so that they can have three different pricing tiers because this is all going to be monetized, which is much like what.

Only X announced on December 8th.

They’ve got a GPT rival.

Yes, it was Bing and then Google did it and then Elon Musk went right.

They’ve done it now.

Let’s get our press release out in the next 24 hours.

But the thing with the thing with this zone, and we don’t have to spend a lot of time on it.

So, Grok is supposedly able to in real time incorporate data from X posts into its responses, which is awesome.

But I can’t use it because it’s not it’s not that you have to have.

Premium, you know, the little blue checkmark to use it.

You have to have X premium plus I’m already paying for the checkmark.

I’m not going to give them extra money to use this.

So I would love to test it and tell you how it works, but I can’t because I’m not paying for it.

No, and I don’t think many people will be but, again, I’d rather wait until it’s a massive option.

So, yeah, so that’s all the AI news.

I think let’s take a quick peek at WordPress news.

The only really big thing that happened in the last month is that Matt Mullenweg gave his annual State of the Word keynote address.

Mullenweg, as you know, is the co founder of the WordPress project.

It’s the Rich Tabor has an X series of posts where he goes into all of the all of the demos and he’s got great videos and screenshots.

It’s probably more than we can discuss here, but I would recommend I think we’ll have the link available to you.

Go read his series on on X and you’ll be able to get.

With the information about Mullenweg’s State of the Word.

Yeah, we were going to cover it, but not only are we strapped for time because we’ve had so much talk about, but actually it’s a full hour.

And if you’re interested in WordPress in any way, you should just watch it.

Just watch it.

And also I’ve put in Rich’s X thread in the chat here, which is also a very good short and down version.

See what’s coming up.

But yeah, that’s a whole this that that can be its own webinar or series within itself, which we maybe will do another time.

But we’ll see.

So yeah, that’s the main WordPress news very quickly is is Yoast SEO product news.

We’ve only got one quick one that we’ve put out this month, haven’t we?

Yep, in Yoast SEO Premium.

In the WooCommerce SEO module for the new AI features, you can now do the titles and descriptions within WooCommerce specifically for your products.

So they work a little bit differently than for the regular titles and descriptions, because they are geared specifically to help you sell your products.

Excellent.

Love it.

Of course I do.

Now, aren’t we?

That is pretty much it.

We do have our next SEO update on January 30th.

And instead of a retrospective on 2023, we’re going to be a look forward at predictions for 2024.

And I think we’re going to welcome Nynke back and go over to Q&A.

Definitely, because we have a lot of questions, so I know we’ll not cover all of them, but I think a few of them are really worth discussing quickly.

So let me get one of the actually the most upvoted question on screen right here.

So the question by Mike is, is it better to use personal words like my tips or our experience?

Google knows it’s actually your experience that you’re using in the article.

And maybe also that you’re not using AI.

I’m not sure if that excludes each other, but still, will it help rank higher?

That’s another it depends, isn’t it?

It depends who the author is, because if the author is a brand and there’s no name attached to that author, then you might do the collective we our.

But personally, I mean, it’s always been famous that people like people, not brands, that at any point you can have a human representative to talk or write about something, that it should be that person.

And that person is generally a singular.

What do you think, Carolyn?

I think what he’s asking is, so personal pronouns would include plurals.

And I think that you would almost have to have personal pronouns in your in your writing to differentiate it from.

I mean, it has to it has to be somebody’s experience, though, even if it’s a collective our, it’s still belonging to someone.

So, yeah, I think it would be important.

And I think that might be one of the signals that Google uses to make that determination.

So I would it’s worth a test, but I would say that naturally, if you’re writing naturally, you’re just going to have to use the personal pronouns.

So I think I think it’s a safe bet to say that that’s going to be helpful.

And it’s probably what your visitors like the most as well.

If they feel attached to your brand and they want to know about your personal experience, it is probably the most usual way to go.

Cool.

Okay, let’s go to the next one, because these algorithm updates that cause a lot of changes, of course, and we’ve seen in chat that a few people also said, like, my my website is probably hit or affected by that.

So in this case, it’s about a news websites.

And yeah, didn’t it’s currently not probably showing on the search results page.

So what would you would this person do continue as they did, publishing a lot of helpful content, or maybe find new tactics to try and rank for.

That’s a good question, because I don’t know exactly why these news sites are getting hit.

There are a number of theories going on, and there are a lot of news sites that are being hit with parasite SEO.

And of penalties, or they’re suffering because of it.

And it’s when you’ve got sub domains that have been rented out or URLs that have been rented out to other parties.

All of that.

The depth of that content, the, the quantity and quality of that content is now affecting your scores.

So there are, this is probably a deeper question than we can answer.

So, maybe I will tackle that for one of the upcoming Ask Yoasie columns.

Cool.

And I think in general, we can say writing helpful content is always, it’s never bad.

Right.

Yeah.

Always, if you’re writing content thinking should I be ranking for this don’t write that thing.

It’s just the user.

I would say if you’re really worried maybe improve your editorial guidelines to be a bit stricter.

Maybe don’t, it depends how many posts you’re putting out as well each day if you put it out, maybe chill out a bit and put less on, but maybe longer form them make them more helpful for people.

Especially for news, if it’s not news.

If it’s not news you can use is it really news.

That’s a good one.

Yeah, cool.

Okay, I hope he finds your answers interesting.

Okay, let’s do one more because I think although we have a quick one to use.

So, in also the algorithm updates theme, the helpful content updates will that mark the end of long form content.

Only if your long form content is unhelpful.

Yeah, yeah.

It depends what you’re doing if you’re just talking about, you know, something really simple, and you’re just padding out words and you essentially filibustering in a way, just to get a word count, you’re doing it wrong.

But that’s not to say that some study about the economics of the US, for example, isn’t going to need 50,000 words and therefore, it’s going to be helpful.

That’s the whole point of like, we’ve all opened up 120 page reports on something like all of that content is for something and for someone.

But again, if 100 of those pages are just useless, then maybe not.

I’ve written 100 page reports for school before where I it literally was just garbage text in the middle because I had to hit the 100 page count and that report was useless.

Did I get a good grade on it?

Maybe I don’t remember, but that’s probably because the teacher didn’t read it.

It wasn’t necessary.

I could have written that report in four pages and it would have been every bit as relevant.

So use the amount of words that you need to answer the question.

And also think is that is that report going to be shared by the person who just read it?

Like if I’m that person who just read Carolyn’s report, I’m not going to give that to someone else and go, this is a really helpful report.

I’m just going to.

Exactly.

I’m just going to take it in.

That’s an annoying waste of my life and I’m not going to make anyone else go through that.

And that’s kind of what Google does on their results.

If they find that that page is not worth it to the next person, why would they why would they rank it?

Why would they show it?

Yeah, exactly.

OK, one more on the AI and then we really have to do finish up.

But AI had a lot of news this month as well.

So I think it’s worth answering this question from Francine.

The question is, does AI mean people do not visit the website anymore because the info is already there in the search results on the search results page?

In some cases, yes.

That is the thing that is going to happen.

I think what we’ll have to do is if you find that you’re losing a lot of traffic to SGE, you may need to refine your content to make sure that you’re answering a question that can’t be easily summarized or something that would require them coming to you.

In in lieu of that, if you can’t do that, you want to be the article that is being cited by whatever’s generating it.

And a lot of them aren’t doing citations right now, but I think they’re going to have to start because otherwise it’s kind of plagiarism.

So I see citations coming in the future and you want to be that citation, even if you can’t be the site that they visit.

Which is kind of what we we kind of mentioned this before earlier on.

Naturally, when we’re talking about well SEO not being dead, it’s more important.

This is literally the reason why it is more important because you’re going to have to not feed just user.

Now you’re going to have to feed an LLM and that needs to be satisfied as well to show the human the end result.

But then again, is the answer helpful if I go back to the baker?

What’s the baker’s opening times?

I don’t need to visit the website.

I know the opening times and therefore you’ve got me already.

My footfalls going to be there and that’s my conversion.

But if I need to know something specific about what kind of bread you sell, maybe I do need to visit your site and maybe you can answer that.

That is covered in AI.

But, you know, give it a little bit of everything.

So you can have a full overview as a user, not just what the AI serves you or whatever.

Yeah.

OK, I think that’s it.

And I know there has been a lot of other questions, but due to all the news of this whole year and this month, we couldn’t cover everything.

So as this is the last webinar of 2023, I want to thank everybody who’s been here maybe throughout the whole year or just joined this last edition of this year with us and for everyone celebrating holidays.

Enjoy.

Don’t eat too much.

And for everyone being online all those days, happy optimizing.

And we’re excited to see you in the next edition on January 30th.

Yes, that’s it.

See you next year everyone.

Have a great rest of your day.

Bye bye.

 

Topics & sources

SEO news

AI news

WordPress news

Presented by

<>Carolyn Shelby

Carolyn is our Principal SEO. She leverages more than two decades of hands-on experience optimizing websites for maximum visibility and engagement. She specializes in enterprise and news SEO, and is passionate about demystifying the intricacies of search engine optimization for businesses of all sizes.

<>Alex Moss

Alex is our Principal SEO. With a background in technical SEO, he has been working in Search since its infancy and also has years of knowledge of WordPress, developing several plugins over the years. He is involved within many aspects of Yoast from product roadmap to content strategy.

The post The SEO update by Yoast – December 2023 Edition appeared first on Yoast.

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Webinar: How to start with SEO (December 12, 2023) https://yoast.com/webinar/webinar-how-to-start-with-seo-december-12-2023/ Mon, 11 Dec 2023 09:38:05 +0000 https://yoast.com/?post_type=yoast_webinar&p=3585793 Learn the basics and get practical tips Starting with SEO can be overwhelming and sometimes you need help to get started. No worries; our SEO experts are here to help. Watch the webinar replay during which you can get practical tips about all the SEO basics. We’ll cover these 4 topics Webinar level: beginner Join us […]

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Learn the basics and get practical tips

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We’ll cover these 4 topics

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Join us if you:

  • Feel that you need help to start with SEO on your website
  • Want to ask our hosts your SEO-related questions in the Q&A

Hosted by:

<>Mabel Adekola

Mabel is a Support Engineer at Yoast, devoting her time to ensuring Yoast SEO customers make the most of the plugins. She’s also a WordPress enthusiast helping on the Yoast SEO for WordPress support forum.

<>Michael Quaranta

Mike is one of the Yoast support team leads. His focus is on improving the support team’s performance and satisfaction. His work background includes retail store management, customer support, and sales.

The post Webinar: How to start with SEO (December 12, 2023) appeared first on Yoast.

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Webinar by Bluehost: Building a WONDERful website on WordPress https://yoast.com/webinar/webinar-by-bluehost-building-a-wonderful-website-on-wordpress/ Thu, 30 Nov 2023 13:08:47 +0000 https://yoast.com/?post_type=yoast_webinar&p=3609154 Are you looking to create a website but don’t know where to start? Look no further! Join this upcoming webinar and learn the basics of website design and development using WordPress. In this webinar, the experts of Bluehost will guide you through the process of creating a website from scratch, covering everything from choosing a domain name […]

The post Webinar by Bluehost: Building a WONDERful website on WordPress appeared first on Yoast.

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Are you looking to create a website but don’t know where to start? Look no further! Join this upcoming webinar and learn the basics of website design and development using WordPress.

In this webinar, the experts of Bluehost will guide you through the process of creating a website from scratch, covering everything from choosing a domain name and selecting a hosting provider to customizing your theme, creating engaging content, and optimizing your website for search engines. Meet WonderSuite by Bluehost and learn how it will revolutionize website creation!

By the end of this webinar, you will have the skills and knowledge needed to build your own WordPress website and take your online presence to the next level. Whether you’re a blogger, freelancer, small business owner, or simply someone who wants to create a website, this webinar is perfect for you.

Missed this webinar?

No problem! The replay is available for you to watch here.

Hosted by

<>Bluehost

A leading web hosting solutions company that is recommended by WordPress.org. Since our founding in 2003, Bluehost has continually innovated new ways to deliver on our mission: to empower people to fully harness the web.

The post Webinar by Bluehost: Building a WONDERful website on WordPress appeared first on Yoast.

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