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This is the story of the One as head of maintenance at a concert hall, he knows the show must always go on. That's why he works behind the scenes, ensuring every light is working, the H Vac is humming, and his facility shines with Grainger's supplies and solutions for every challenge he faces. Plus 24. 7 customer support his venue never misses a beat. Call quickgranger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
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This is the story of the One As a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility, he knows keeping the line up and running is a top priority. That's why he chooses Grainger, because when a drive belt gets damaged, Grainger makes it easy to find the exact specs for the replacement product he needs and next day delivery helps ensure he'll have everything in place and running like clockwork. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by grainger for the ones who get it done. Hello and welcome to SEO 101 on WMR FM episode number 509. I am Scott Van Ak, Senior SEO at Stepforth Web Marketing and I am doing the show solo today as Ross is away on holidays. Before I start, I'm going to give you a quick fun fact and life tips. Before you record a podcast or do anything like that, make sure your microphone is turned on because this is now my second time recording the podcast. I did an entire show by myself and recorded none of it. So yeah, here we go again. Hopefully this one will be better than the last one, but you'll never know because the last one didn't get recorded. Okay, we're going to start off with fun little update at Google. We get lots of updates at Google. This is the 2025. Sorry, August 2025 spam update. On August 26th Google announced today we released the August 2025 spam update. It may take a few weeks to complete. This is a normal spam update and it will roll out for all languages and all locations. We will post on the Google Search Status Dashboard when the rollout is done. So this update will be rolling out over the next few weeks. So that's, you know, the tail end of August into early September. As we've seen in recent times, these updates tend to take longer than Google says they will take. So Google saying within a couple weeks. I wouldn't be surprised if it runs closer till the end of September. Anyways, it's happening now. Their last spam update was back in December of last year. So if that update hurt you because you had spam or suspected spam on your site. Hopefully this update is your time to redeem yourself and get some of those rankings back. I guess that really depends on if you fixed whatever you did wrong. So hopefully you did and hopefully you are being recovered for that. You are being recovered. Doesn't make a lot of sense. Hopefully you're recovering from that and I guess time will tell. So keep your eyes peeled to find out what happens there. And at this time there's really no more details about this update. It is a spam update, but we don't know if there is a specific type of spam that's being targeted, if it's more of like a general update. But hopefully in time for episode 510, which is our next one, we will have some details on what this update actually covered and how many people it affected, that sort of thing. So it's very early stages, it's just starting right now. So there's not a lot of info, but it's very good news if you were hit by the last spam update. So good to know. There next is a tracker that has been launched. So Ahrefs has launched a Tracker that compares ChatGPT with Google referral traffic. But that headline I just read is a little bit wrong because this has actually changed. I started writing this up last week and then found today when I was prepping to do this recording that they've expanded it. It's actually significantly better now. So last week all it did. Well, let's talk about it here. So what does this tracker do? It compares mostly growth between major search engines and LLMs. So you can see that growth from month to month. Last week when I first looked at it, it had data for May, June and July. As of today, I'm not sure when they expanded it. It goes back to December 2024. So we have about nine months or so of data, which is great. Last week it only compared Google with ChatGPT. That was it. But now you can select which search engines you want to compare against. It's got all the major engines, Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo. It's got all the major LLMs, ChatGPT Perplexity and others. And so you can really start to compare how one is doing to the other. You can select traffic share based on regions such as countries or continents. You can select specific industries. So if you're in finance or health or gaming or whatever, you can see how that traffic is generally broken up amongst these search engines. And LLMs based on those industries, which is great. You might be wondering where is Ahrefs getting this data from? So currently the data is based on 44,000 plus websites that are using the Ahrefs web analytics tool. So it's anonymized data from people that are using that tool, which is nice because we're not just guessing based on what the market share might be. We're actually looking at actual raw data. So, you know, it's a pretty good interpretation, a pretty good example of how these sites are seeing their traffic, where their traffic is coming from. And it's growing. Like chat GPT is growing. The LLMs are growing. They're still very small, but they're growing. And you can kind of see it trending over this tool, which is quite handy. And of course this tracker does appear to be evolving very quickly because it's completely different than it was last week. Last week it was very basic and I was going to include it in the show just because I thought it was a little bit interesting. Now it's way more interesting. There's more data in there and I expect they'll continue to grow in terms of what they're sharing and how they break out the data and how you can sort through it. But it's definitely very interesting if you care. If you want to see how things are trending, definitely check it out. You can find the URL at chat GPT-vs-google.com and check out our show notes. If you're not already subscribed to our show notes, you should do that because you will get these links in those show notes. So be a lot easier. Pretty easy link to remember, but chatgpt- versus-google.com Next up, Google is fixing a reduced crawling issue that has impacted some websites. This one's kind of interesting because I didn't realize this was even an issue. I hadn't seen it happening for any of our clients, which is great, but it was a real issue. So on August 8th, this problem surfaced with some sites seeing reduced or fluctuating crawling by Googlebot. Glenn Gabe had posted both to X and LinkedIn that there are several posts in the Search Central forum about this and I just saw the issue pop up for a client. Google's crawl stats reporting drop heavily around August 8th. There's no impact to rankings and traffic, but all the sites posting this see it happen on 8. 8, my client is not blocking crawling of googlebot and Bing seems totally fine crawling wise. So there's really no word on how many sites this has affected or if there was much disruption in terms of ranking impacts across the board doesn't really appear to be at this time. John Mueller did post a Blue Sky. He said it was reduced fluctuating crawling from our side for some sites. Google has actually now resolved the issue saying that crawling should be back up in the near future. On August 28, John added, this was an issue on our side and is now sorted. I'll catch back up automatically in the near future. It will catch up. Rate had dropped for your site in August. It should start to bounce back if it hasn't already. If you'd like to check that out in Search Console on the left hand side column in Search Console you can go to Settings and you can find your crawl rate data within there. So check it out, see if you were affected and if you were, has it bounced back yet? Leave a comment on our Facebook I'd like to hear what people have to say and and if you see any correlations to reduce crawl and ranking results, we'd love to know. All right, so now I am going to take a quick break. When we get back we will discuss some AI overviews. There's a survey that talked about satisfaction with AI overviews. We have a quick Google Search Console tip about duplicate I can't speak apparently about duplicate content, so we'll take a quick break and we'll be right back.
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This is the story of the One As a custodial supervisor at a high school, he knows that during cold and flu season, germs spread fast. It's why he partners with Grainger to stay fully stocked on the products and supplies he needs, from tissues to disinfectants to floor scrubbers. All so that he can help students, staff and teachers stay healthy and focused. Call 1-800-granger. Click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done. You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed. Stop struggling to get your job posts seen on other job sites. With Indeed sponsored Jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. Don't wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit. To get your jobs more visibility@ Indeed.com podkatz13 just go to Indeed.com podkatz13 right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need.
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All right. Welcome back to SEO 101 on WMR FM, hosted by myself, Scott Vanak, Senior SEO at Stepforth Web Marketing. Again, Ross is away, so this week you're just stuck with me. Sorry about that. Or you're welcome, I guess. Depends what you think about me. Remember, we do have a Show Notes newsletter you can sign up for@seo101radio.com do not miss a single link. Refresh your memory of past show at any time. In addition, we do invite listeners to connect with Ross on LinkedIn. You can find him@LinkedIn.com in websitemarketer or you know, search for him on LinkedIn there. Great way to connect. If you have questions about the show, things you want to talk about, reach out to him. For sure. He, he would love it. He would be ecstatic. So next up here we have a little SEO tip, more of a Google Search Console tip How to deal with or fix duplicate without user selected canonical issues so Anna Crowe actually wrote a really great article. It's over at Search Engine Land and it dives into a lot more detail than what I'm going to cover here. Like a lot more detail. So if you have a lot of duplicate without user selected canonical issues in your Google Search console, go check out our article. It's at Search Engine Land. The complete link. I'm not going to try to say it, it's too long. Complete link will be in the show notes or again you can find it select. But I'll just summarize it because I thought it was worthwhile for our listeners. It's kind of a one on one SEO topic. It's perfect. So essentially the duplicate without user selected canonical error happens when you have a lot of duplicate content on your site. So if you're finding this error appearing, they're good news. There's good news. There's ways to address and fix this. So I'll go over some of these steps and things and give you some hints on what you can do. So one thing to note though, duplicate content can affect your indexing and rankings, but it's not a penalty. Some people think of it as a penalty, but it isn't. But essentially you are penalizing yourself if you have a lot of duplicate content. You can miss out on rankings and traffic and things. So you're essentially penalizing yourself really is what it comes down to. So you definitely want to pay attention if this is a big issue. On your site. So the first cause is obviously duplicate content. Eliminating any of the duplicate content you find on your site will be a big step forward in getting those pages to be properly indexed. The best way is to also have the canonical tag in place. If you do have duplicate content and maybe Google's indexing the wrong version of the page, make sure the canonical tag points to the correct version that you want Google to index. The next step, the next issue that can cause this are just straight up missing canonical tags. So similar but not exactly the same. Make sure that every page on your site has a canonical tag and make sure that you also have self referencing canonical tags. So a point will point, a page will point back to itself to say that, hey, this is a version of the page you want to index. Really important, especially if you have that across all variations like secure or insecure. So that's the next one. HTTP versus HTTPs. If your site is available at insecure URL, so just HTTP, you're going to want to change that as soon as you can make your site secure. I don't know how sites can still exist in this world that are not secure, because there's really no big barrier to making a site secure now. It can be largely free or very inexpensive. So do it. Make your site secure and make sure that your 301 redirects are in place to direct the insecure versions to the secure versions of the page. If both versions are still available and you can access the site securely or not, that's a complete duplicate of one another. So those will cause problems with indexing. Google will only index one version in that instance. They'll probably choose to not index the insecure version. They should anyways. But you definitely want to make sure your redirects are set up and make sure your site is secure. The next is a similar kind of issue, and that's regarding use of the WWW or not and use of a trailing forward slash at the end of all your URLs. So if you have the www being used and your site loads correctly without the www, make sure you have a redirect pointing from the one you use, or sorry, from the one you don't use to the one you use, make sure that's in place. The same goes for a trailing forward slash. If your URLs have a trailing forward slash at the end, make sure all of them do be consistent. When you combine the HTTPs, the WWW and the trailing slashes, you could effectively have six complete versions of your website. If nothing's being Redirected and everything's loading correctly or I guess incorrectly. If that's a problem, like that's a big problem. Google's not going to index all that. It's going to be massive duplicate content. That's something you need to deal with immediately. So make sure you're very consistent about all of this stuff. The security, triple W's and trailing slashes. Make sure you only have one version of each and make sure everything's 301 redirected to that version. Very important. And then finally session IDs and tracking parameters. I don't see a lot of session ID use anymore. Every now and then we'll come across it. Tracking parameters are quite common though. People will use tracking parameters in, you know, your Google Ads, your Bing ads in Google. Sometimes in Google business profiles they'll use them so that that traffic that you're getting from local can be identified as such and separate it from regular organic rankings. So these tracking parameters, these are what you've probably seen the UTM equals question UTM equals and it could be source, medium, keywords. However you decide to set it up, there are different ways to do it. But those tracking parameters, when your page loads the URL, includes those tracking parameters in the URL and effectively that's a duplicate version of your site because now you've got the version without the tracking parameters and the version with with all the tracking parameters. So what you want to make sure you do is 301 redirect or sorry, not 301 redirect canonical tags in place so that the version with the tracking parameters or possibly session IDs, the canonical tag points to the version of the URL without it. So it's very easy to eliminate these duplicate content issues. If you want to remove the duplicate without user selected canonical, make sure your canonical tags are in check. If you do that, you should be able to wipe out most of those errors. If not, you might have to do a little bit more investigating to try to figure out why one page is really not showing up. But this is a good starting point. And again, be sure to check out Anna Crow's article on Search Engine Land for far more detail about each of these, more explanations on how to do it, screenshots on where to go and what to look at. And it's really quite in depth, so check it out. Next up we have a little bit of AI news. This is a survey that says 4% of searchers don't click from Google AI overviews. So that's referring to like zero click searches. I'll explain that a bit more in a second here. The survey was done by NP Digital. They surveyed a thousand people to get a sense of how they interact with AI overviews. So the first question was do you click on website links in the search results after reading an AI overview? 13% said always, 31% said often, 42% said sometimes, 10% said rarely and surprisingly, 4% said never. So what that would mean, those 4% nevers would be the zero click searches. Those are the people 4% of this survey sample results in a zero click search. The zero click search is effectively someone who does a search and doesn't click on anything and then they click back. Or maybe they do a different search but they're not clicking on any of the search results or anything that Google's showing them. I feel like that seems low to me especially because there's so much talk, we talk about it here as well on the show. So much talk about zero click searches and how AI overviews are resulting in those zero click searches. Because you see what you need and you click back, you don't have to go any further. So that that was very surprising to see that that number be so low. Again, this is only a thousand people that were surveyed here. I mean if you surveyed a million people, I bet that number would go up a lot. The next was how much do you trust AI overviews compared to regular search snippets or links? Much more was 11%, slightly more, 20% about the same, 41%. Much less and slightly less were 10 and 18% respectively. I probably put myself as, you know, less like I don't particularly trust AI overviews. I've seen enough that were incorrect. I feel every day I do at least a few searches where I see an AI overview that is either completely unhelpful or flat out inaccurate. Now that said, I do see a lot that are great and a lot that are super helpful and accurate and, and all of that. But it really shows that you need to fact check what you see from AI overviews. If you're doing a search for anything that's really important, fact check it, make sure that it's correct. Don't take AI overviews at its word, at least not yet. There are just too many that are incorrect and there's too much misinformation on the web that AI is pulling from that it might take to be the truth. So you've got to be careful there. Another question asked people, if you could turn AI overviews off, would You. And I won't. I won't go into all the numbers here, but it was, it was split fairly evenly. 50. Well, more like 40, 60, 45. 55, something like that. 55% of people saying they would turn it off and about 45% of people saying they would leave it on. That kind of surprises me a lot based on the other data. So you've got more than half of people, well over, more than half who trust AI overviews, but yet about half the people say they would turn it off. So they trust it, but they turn it off. Something just doesn't make total sense there. I don't know what to say about that. And then finally, how satisfied Are you with AI overviews? About 25% are neutral people who are either very or somewhat dissatisfied. Eight and a half percent. And then people who are either very or somewhat satisfied. 66%. So you've got 66.4% of people who are somewhat or very satisfied with AI overviews. Again, that number doesn't really jive with. Would you turn it off? You would think that 66%. If you're happy and satisfied, why would you ever turn it off? But the numbers don't quite align, which is funny. And Barry Schwartz actually posted about this survey at SC Roundtable, and his sort of final thought that he had in the article was, I wonder if these respondents actually know what an AI overview is. I mean, I suspect they do if they filled out the survey. And yeah, I kind of wonder the same. You know, lots of people are satisfied with it. The numbers don't seem to make sense to me in some regards. Did they know? I'm sure they did, but I do question it a little bit. And again, I think part of it might be that NP Digital, their target audience is a lot of tech people, SEOs, website marketers, that sort of thing. So that would skew these results a little bit as well, I'm sure. I mean, if you asked, you know, every random person, just go out and ask a thousand random people. I think you'd get quite a different scope of answers. I feel like you'd probably get more people that say things like, what is an A overview? Like, that should almost be a question. Do you know what AIO reviews are? Start with that. But anyways, it's interesting to see a little bit of insight from a different perspective. Yeah, so I. Interesting stuff. And then finally, we have a little Mueller file. So an SEO consultant had posted on LinkedIn that one of his websites saw a 50% decline in traffic over a two week period. Their post over on LinkedIn read our website just suffered a massive traffic drop from 2000 plus daily visits to around 1100. Almost 50% wiped out in just two weeks and it's still going down as I write this post. The source a hack that injected 210,000 fake product pages, all indexed by Google and interlinked across several other compromised websites. He did also add that he had cleaned up this hack, removed all of the bad files, but was very disappointed that traffic continued to decline. And after two weeks there was still no recovery in sight. So my first thought is this takes more than two weeks. You're going to have to wait longer than that for your site to recover. It should bounce back. John actually replied to him as well. John Mueller and John had said these kinds of attacks or hacks can take a bit of time to settle back down, which is one reason you should always be on top of things in terms of updates and security. I couldn't agree more with that. And so I wanted to also include here a couple more things. So first of all, if you are hacked and you fix your hack, it's going to take more than a couple weeks for things to recover. I'm sorry, it just is. You're going to have to wait it out. Make sure everything's cleaned up and be patient. It will return unless something horribly, horribly wrong has happened or unless you haven't fully fixed the hack. So a bit of advice on how to help avoid these hacks. First of all, ensure your site is secure. We just talked about it a few minutes ago. Make sure your site is secure. That's the first and most important thing you need to do. Next, make sure you're using strong passwords and two factor authentication. I basically hate two factor authentication. I find incredibly annoying and disruptive sometimes. And as an SEO, when you're working with multiple client websites, it can be a real nightmare when you need to get access to a client's website to because you need to coordinate with them, texting them, phoning them, whatever their 2fa is that they've got set up to gain that access. But I will use it for everything because it does help a lot. So make sure you've got two FA set up. Even if you hate it as much as I do, make sure you're using a reputable hosting provider. There's a lot of hosting out there that is dirt cheap, $99, 99 cents a month, things like that. If your website is important. So meaning if it's a business website and not Just a small hobby that doesn't really matter if it brings you money, if it's important to your business or your life, pay a little extra and get something reputable and good. Get some. Get. Get your hosting at a place where they offer better security, things like that. So shop around, ask questions. When you're getting a host set up, make sure you've got something good. Regular backups. Make sure you're doing regular backups. We've talked about this a million times on the show and go back many months, maybe even a year. I had a personal website that was just a hobby, didn't really matter, but I had was hacked. And then when I noticed the hack I used my latest backup that didn't work. The hack was still there. So I used my oldest backup, which I think was about six months old. The hack was still there. So they had hacked my site and then did nothing for some amount of time. By the time they rolled out the hack and injected, in my case it was similar to this one, a bunch of pages. They injected a bunch of pages into my site and by the time I noticed that I had no backups that were functional, all my backups are compromised. So make sure you've got some old backups. Hopefully you don't have to use them, but you might back up often. It could be a real nightmare in that case. That site of mine was just a little hobby site. It didn't matter, I just deleted it. I literally just got rid of it, didn't even try to fix it. But that's not always an option. If you've got a business website, you can't just delete your site and creating a new one. Unless you've got a two or three page website for a small, you know, brick and mortar shop or something. Building a new and launching a new website is very expensive and very time consuming. So for anyone listening, I'm sure everybody knows that. Next, make sure all your plugins and software versions are up to date. So important. We talk about that a lot too on the show with some of our non SEO news will be about WordPress vulnerabilities or plugins for WordPress that are vulnerable with major security problems. So make sure that everything is updated regularly. Keep it up to date. Also, get rid of unused plugins. If you have a lot of old plugins and themes that are sitting on your WordPress installation that you're not really using, get rid of them. If you have plugins that you're using but you really don't need to use for example, I don't know, you might be using Google Tag Manager for some stuff on your site, but then you're also using Monster Insights to put your Google Tag tracking code on the site. Well, those are things that you could do in other ways. You could inject it directly into your theme files, or sometimes there are things that you can merge. There might be two plugins you're using that kind of do the same thing and you're might be able to just merge them. The fewer the plugins, the more secure your site generally is. Sometimes you need a lot of them, though, it just really depends. So keep all that stuff up to date. Consider using a security plugin. Wordfence for WordPress is just one example, but there are many different examples of security plugins that work on all platforms or different platforms. So make sure you've got something there. And also ensure that your staff is educated on cybersecurity best practices and they know how to recognize a phishing attempt. Like if your boss is emailing you for a password by email, it's probably fake. Don't. Don't give it to him by email. Unless your boss is like speaking to you in the room or phones you and talks to voice, or you're really confident that it's legit. So passwords by email can be a bit fishy. Watch out for those not always wrong, but not necessarily best practice. Okay, well that was my second recording of episode number 509. I think it was better than my first attempt. We'll find out. We won't find out. No we won't. We'll never hear 509 again. The first one. Anyways, on behalf of myself, I'll stop Mark rambling here. Scott van Ak, senior SEO at Step 4th Web Marketing I need a coffee. Thank you for joining me today. Remember, we have a show notes newsletter you can sign up for@seo101radio.com do not miss a single link and refresh your memory of a past show at any time. If you have any questions if you would like to share anything with us, please feel free to post it to Facebook. You can easily find our group by searching SEO101podcast on Facebook. If you enjoyed the show, we would love any feedback on Apple Podcasts Stitcher any of your favorite podcast streams. Have a great week. Remember to tune into future episodes which air every week on WMR fm. And finally, thank you for listening everybody.
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Buying a car in Carvana was so easy. I was able to finance it through them. I just. Whoa, wait, you mean finance yeah. Finance got pre qualified for a Carvana auto loan, entered my terms and shot from thousands of great car options all within my budget. That's cool, but financing through Carvana was so easy. Financed, done and I get to pick up my car from their Carvana vending machine tomorrow. Financed, right? That's what they said. You can spend time trying to pronounce financing or you can actually finance and buy your car today on car finance financing subject to credit approval. Additional terms and conditions may apply.
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This is the story of the One as head of maintenance at a concert hall, he knows the show must always go on. That's why he works behind the scenes, ensuring every light is working, the H Vac is humming and his facility shines with Grainger's supplies and solutions for every challenge he faces. Plus 24. 7 customer support. His venue never misses a beat. Call quickgranger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.