The SEO update by Yoast – April 2024 Edition

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.