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- [00:01]
Marketing Rep
Are you tired of juggling contacts manually following up and deals falling through the cracks? We can fix it so you never lose another lead enabling 24. 7 sales and support via an AI that learns your business Ready to close more deals with less hassle? Get a free trial of our marketing automation@thebuzzcrm.com Are you tired of juggling contacts manually following up and deals falling through the cracks? We can fix it so you never lose another lead. 24. 7 Sales and support via an AI that learns your business Ready to close more deals with less hassle? Get a free trial of our marketing automation@thebuzzcrm.com.
- [00:55]
Ross Dunn
Hello and welcome to SEO101 on WMR FM episode number 479. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing, and my co host is my company Senior SEO Scott Van Eck. Well, we're going to jump right into SEO news today. We've got a bit of a timeline crunch, but lots to share. This particular one is, well, dovetails into something we talked about before. It's fairly of interest here. Google Search is going to label images as AI generated and edited or taken with camera. Well, you wrote about this, so fill us in.
- [01:31]
Scott Van Eck
Yeah, so as Ross mentioned, yeah, we'll get those labels starting to appear soon in Google Search. When you search for anything and you see an image and you click on that image for the about this image information that Google will show or it does show now they will start adding those labels. Interesting thing about this is that so they'll be using the Coalition for Content provenance and authenticity C2PA technology for this. So that's a mouthful. I I barely got through it myself. So currently C2PA is backed by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Adobe. But according to TechCrunch, the Coalition Standards are not really widespread at the moment. And it's also important to note that C2PA metadata, which is what they're basing some of this on, can be removed or scrubbed. So people creating AI images don't have to say that it's AI in the metadata and then Google won't be able to use this to identify that. Likewise, many of the generative AI tools like Flux and grok and why are AI tools named so stupid? Let's just throw some random continents in there and see what consonants in there and see what happens. Anyways, so some of the tools don't even add that metadata to them. So how effective this will be, I mean initially I don't think it's going to be Great. I think it's better than nothing. I think it's a good start and hopefully long term it will expand into having everything labeled as AI and be able to actually detect that it's all AI. But don't expect, you know, if you're fact checking something and you want to make sure it's not AI, that oh, Google doesn't say it is, so it must not be because that it's going to be wrong. Google did also state though that they are exploring ways to use this at YouTube as well. So maybe we'll start seeing YouTube labels or labels in YouTube telling us what's AI and what isn't. But good start.
- [03:26]
Ross Dunn
But I can see that coming for sure. But computationally intensive, I'd say, to put it mildly. So it'll be a rollout that's going to take a long time.
- [03:37]
Scott Van Eck
Totally.
- [03:38]
Ross Dunn
Now we discussed this, I don't know which quite a few shows ago and how this can cause problems because even if photographer edits out a blemish on a page, if they use any AI to make it cleaner, the blemish, you know, and speed up, frankly, it speeds things up. It's automatically noted as being AI, AI generated, which is bad news. That's not cool. So there's going to be lots of problems that way. And the way to scrub it right now is simply to if you. And I say this as a photographer who doesn't want this to be. Don't want to be labeled in this, in this regard is you can save it as a bitmap. So export as bitmap and then in another program then save it as open it up again and then save it as a different file format and it'll be removed at this stage. That's one way to do it.
- [04:33]
Scott Van Eck
I would say. If resolution isn't a super critical part, you could screenshot it and clip the screenshot. There's so many ways to get around it, really.
- [04:42]
Ross Dunn
Yeah.
- [04:42]
Scott Van Eck
But it keeps the honest people honest though.
- [04:45]
Ross Dunn
Yeah. And then, you know, in the social networks that should be pretty good. They don't need to be huge sizes. Right. But if you're going to post it anywhere that's massive, then man, those bitmaps will be.
- [04:56]
Scott Van Eck
Would you imagine switching everything to a bitmap? Like the least compressed image format.
- [05:01]
Ross Dunn
I've got like 40 megabyte TIFF images. If I had to save that as a bitmap, It'd be like 200 megs probably. I can't even imagine.
- [05:11]
Scott Van Eck
You should have that as your hero image on the homepage then.
- [05:16]
Ross Dunn
Oh dear. Okay. Google's Martin Split says we do not use EXIF data data for ranking. This is something I've looked into before. Yes, talk about this. Yeah.
- [05:29]
Indeed Rep
Okay.
- [05:30]
Scott Van Eck
So yeah, Google apparently has been a bit wishy washy on whether or not they use it. And back in 2014 Matt Cutts had said that that Google can parse EXIF data and it reserves the right to use it, but no one's ever confirmed that they do. And now Martin Split as of not sure what date but like this month 2020 in 2024, 24 September says it is not used for ranking. So if you were wondering about it, there you go. It's kind of a non issue. Don't worry about it. If you don't know what EXIF data is in the show notes, I'll include a link to Wikipedia. You can do it yourself as well. But it's essentially metadata that's sort of behind the scenes of an image. Wikipedia actually has a good little chart where they show the tags and the types of values. So like for cameras it might be the manufacturer, the model, the orientation, the exposures, all the photo data. It's not like it has big textual written descriptions that you could really spam.
- [06:24]
Ross Dunn
So the good news about EXIF data though, and I do wish they would use this aspect, is copyrights put in there if it's properly done. I do that for all mine. Now you of course have sometimes you have geolocation data for where the photo was taken, which would be very helpful for Google. Lots of really interesting things actually and I'd be surprised if they don't use it in some regards for certain things. But for rankings I don't see why it would. Yeah. But I would definitely say it's not being ignored. For other.
- [07:00]
Scott Van Eck
You would think that they would definitely use the geodata like for Google Maps and there's a million ways they could use that without being sneaky or evil.
- [07:10]
Ross Dunn
Yeah. And if using image recognition they could generally tell from other ones and from taking from that area whether or not that photo is from there. Yeah, I guess the question is how would that be worth your while? And I guess if it's increasing the amount of images they have for a particular really important event, then I guess it would be helpful. But otherwise it might be, well, their data, their power could be used better elsewhere, proper. All right, Google Search Console, the product snippets are reporting a bug. Fill us in on this. I'm about to talk about a whole bunch of stuff on AI So I'm letting Mike. Gosh, I can't speak today.
- [07:53]
Scott Van Eck
Mike.
- [07:54]
Ross Dunn
Talk about this.
- [07:55]
Scott Van Eck
Oh, my God. I've known you 20 years and now you've forgotten my name. I'm gonna cry. Yes. So another bug in Google Search Console. And so what we're seeing right now is this was actually reported to Barry by Chloe Smith on X and she had said, has anyone else seen a weird increase in product snippet search appearance clicks and impressions in Google Search Console? I can see this for several clients on pages where products are not present and where no schema is implemented. And I'm baffled. So first I want to say something that's really exciting for me right now. We report on a lot of bugs and things and we can never see them. I can see this bug. I confirmed it with my own eyes on our own client search consoles. I've never been able to do that because the bugs were impervious to bugs until now. So what I'm seeing is, and this is for client sites who don't even have products. I think they're just like, there are no products on the sites. But yet if you look in Google Search Console under performance and you select product snippets under advanced, we're seeing for the last two or three weeks, impressions and clicks for products, but there are none. So that doesn't make any sense. So it sounds like it's definitely a bug. If it's not a bug, I'm even more confused. And I guess we'll find out about that soon if it isn't. But I expect it'll be fixed soon. But the whole point is for the. For data for the last three weeks, you can, you know, look at it with a grain of salt. If you start seeing these weird product snippet things, if you have products, you might be seeing more than you're actually getting. Who knows? But the data is corrupt in some fashion. So.
- [09:33]
Ross Dunn
All right, good to know and nice that we can actually see it. I guess so.
- [09:37]
Scott Van Eck
So exciting.
- [09:40]
Ross Dunn
All right, before I jump into my discussion on AI, I wanted to take a quick break. So we'll be right back. SEO101 will be back right after rece. Welcome back to SEO 101 on WMR FM, hosted by myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing, and my company, Senior SEO, Scott Vanak. All right, so my friend Kevin Indig has posted another awesome article in this case on Search Engine Journal. He has his other product called Growth Memo, where he gets even into even greater detail on some of the stuff but this is a really interesting and well, share worthy document here. So it's about AI overviews. He's using Surfer SEO, he's managed to analyze 546,000 AI overviews. And this has revealed that optimizing for AI overviews heavily relies on understanding user intent rather than matching exact search queries. That's kind of key takeaway here. Now let's dig into some of this. First of all, what is the significance of AI overviews? AI overviews are recognized as one of the most transformative changes in SEO, at least since the introduction of mobile. The data set they looked at had 546,000 rows and 44.4 gigs of data, which covers over 12 million domains. Not bad. So we're looking at some pretty hefty information here that seems valid. It's not like they did a small segment of 20,000 pages. This is some significance.
- [11:22]
Scott Van Eck
It's so much better. A lot of these studies we look at are a thousand searches or a thousand keywords. This is big.
- [11:28]
Ross Dunn
This, this actually provides some value and I really appreciate Kevin doing this and sharing it. So in terms of finding visibility, about 85% of queries were in English, with many results being in Google's Search Generative Experience section. Now anything in SGE is in the sandbox of testing. There's sge, the Search Generative Generative Experience, which is a place you go to to see what Google's testing in the AI realm. And then there's the general search results we see every day. That is separate from that. And that is also where we're seeing AI overviews, but a more stabilized version. Technically we're going to call them AIOS for now, AI overviews. But AIOS can significantly reduce website traffic by as much as 10% he found, depending on design and user intent. That's significant. So if these are taking up space on the, on the page, the first thing people are seeing and that information doesn't have a citation pointing to your website, there's a significant drop there in terms of business. And he can tell that through looking at different, I assume from looking at different clients he's worked with and seeing how much things have dropped since AIO reviews has appeared in some of their top ranking phrases. Citation patterns. The most cited domains within aios have shifted. YouTube and Wikipedia remain prominent, while social sites like Reddit and Quora show low citation visibility. This was really surprising to me. Reddit, Quora, they were up in the top there because, well, frankly they're very, they're kind of satisfying I admit I. I find the results satisfying. I look at them and go to them and I see people answering and you can tell from that what their authority is.
- [13:22]
Carvana Rep
What is Dax, are you tracking all our cars on Carvana Value Tracker on all our devices? Yes, Kristen, yes I am.
- [13:30]
Ross Dunn
While I've been looking for my phone.
- [13:31]
Carvana Rep
For In Dax's domain, we see all. So we always know what our cars are worth.
- [13:36]
Ross Dunn
All of them.
- [13:37]
Carvana Rep
All of them. Value surge trucks up 3.9% that's a great offer. I know. Sell sell. Track your car's value with Carvana Value Tracker.
- [13:49]
Indeed Rep
Today, people are driven by the search for better. But when it comes to hiring, the best way to search for a candidate isn't to search at all. Don't search Match with Indeed. The hiring process can be slow and overwhelming. Simplify hiring with Indeed. Indeed is your matching and hiring platform with over 350 million global monthly visitors, according to Indeed Data, and a matching engine that helps you find quality candidates fast. Ditch the busywork. Use Indeed for scheduling, screening and messaging so you can connect with candidates faster. Join more than 3.5 million businesses worldwide that use Indeed to hire great talent fast. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility@ Indeed.com podk a t z 12 that's Indeed.com p o d k a t z 12 terms and conditions apply.
- [14:51]
Ross Dunn
Generally, you can look at their past chats, you can look at their their profile. You get a sense of whether or not they're talking at their ass or they know what they're talking about and, and it's fairly useful. And you can also see people's responses who will call them out if they're not doing, you know, saying something correctly anyways. The fact that those aren't showing up as much is interesting. Citation necessity not all AIOs include citations. Approximately 0.85% of queries show no citations. This is particularly the case for simple queries. So if you have something like what is, what is the capital of Saskatchewan? Well, that's pretty simple. There's no reason really to have citations there. That's likely. If it's even showing an AIO review, it's likely not to have any citations. It might have one pointing to the Saskatoon's homepage or something, but the capital Organic position, influence and this is interesting. This is one of the main questions he had. He says there's a high overlap between citations in aios and pages that rank well in traditional search results. But rankings do not solely dictate AIO visibility. So he's clearly noted that if you're ranking below that AIO AI that advanced see I start to get screwed up AI overview. That doesn't mean you're going to be in there necessarily. In fact they seem to be mixing things up a bit. Only 6% of AIOS explicitly contain the search query, meaning that user needs is critical for content optimization and we're going to get back into that in a bit. That's intent search generative experience variability. So how does this differ from there AI I'm going to screw this up. It seems a lot. I'm just AI overviews content can differ significantly between live results and search generative experience indicating potential future changes. So he's seen pretty vast and looking at the data I'm not going to get into all that. This is a long article but it showed pretty significant percentage changes. I believe it was 60% or so different on SGE. So there's some fundamental stuff they're doing right now. Nothing of what we're seeing. I think this sort of translates into nothing. What we're seeing right now is how things are going to be in the future. It's just the now. In terms of challenges ahead, landscape suggests an increased emphasis on user intent and adaptations in content strategy alongside potential imbalances in search visibility. This is a sort of consolidation of his notes at the end there now a bit more on user intent. A lot of people don't understand it and it's. It's a bit airy fairy but it is very important. So first of all, user intent or search intent is the goal behind users searches. On platforms like Google, addressing user intent is essential for ranking well becoming more significant than backlinks and content quality. Now Google's algorithms including Hummingbird and Rankbrain have evolved to interpret semantic meaning of queries. This is what brings together the knowledge graph, the underpinning of Google. So understanding how different content relates to other content is the key for Google to understand how the the world is put together, how everything interconnects and they use that to not necessarily need keyword phrase recognition for searches. I mean they understand it but exact phrase match in results isn't going to be as high. And and that's what's happening here in AI overviews. They generally genuinely understand what's trying to be said. So they don't need phrase match within the result. It's them actually explaining the answer and providing citations from where it's from. User intent categories include informational, navigational and transactional Types. I believe we touched on this a bit in our training, the six part series. Do you remember, Scott, whether or not we did? I think we did.
- [19:18]
Scott Van Eck
I think we did. I'm pretty sure we did, yes.
- [19:22]
Ross Dunn
So you can check that out. Anyway, those are three different types of searches in terms of intent. If you want to see that in action, try Semrush. It's got a cool tool that will show you or estimate anyways what type of intent is in different searches. It's quite helpful. The challenge here though is that user intent changes over time. There's keyword ambiguity and there's a volume of keywords too. I mean, is it really worth targeting something that's fairly poorly searched, even though it is relevant and it might actually devalue over time as people lose interest in it? Anyways, optimizing for user intent involves analyzing the search engine result pages and adjusting your content to meet user expectations. Okay, so watch things, be on the pulse. Get an idea of what's happening on a regular basis and just bend to it. Make sure that your, your content is on the pulse. I don't know how else to put it. I actually have a really bad, bad case of lacking words today. So anyways, there we go. Which is perfect for explaining something like this.
- [20:43]
Scott Van Eck
I love it. Yeah.
- [20:44]
Ross Dunn
Oh dear God. Okay, well anyways, I hope that was helpful. It's always interesting to see what kind of research is being done on AI and it just helps inform our expectations of what's to come. And I loved probably one of my biggest takeaways, but two of them was the intent part, which isn't at all a surprise because we know that that's going to be the future of everything. Google intent is everything. The more they understand everything, they're not going to need to. They're going to try to get around optimization optimizers by ensuring that they just really understand everything and they can't be faked out by these bad actors who are using black hat SEO. That doesn't mean we can't optimize. Still, we definitely can. It's just that they're going to do a better job of just destroying the ones getting past the people who are doing the bad stuff.
- [21:37]
Scott Van Eck
Essentially it's just making quality content more and more and more important.
- [21:42]
Ross Dunn
Yeah, and the other takeaway for me was I loved seeing that there was such a huge variability between SGE and what we see today on regular search results. Again, not a bright no brain. It's a no brainer. I mean, you're looking at this and Knowing that there's a lot of things happening. AI is being tested galore. There's tons of changes coming, but the fact that they were so different shows that we really have a lot of interesting things to come our way. All right, so let's jump into the Mueller files. What have you got here, Scott?
- [22:11]
Scott Van Eck
Yeah, so Google is saying some simple factors aren't ranking signals. So this is actually kind of interesting because. Well, I'll tell you when I get to them, I guess so. John Mueller has affirmed in a LinkedIn post about two specific site characteristics that are not ranking typos and valid HTML. So his post was inspired by an analysis of 200 homepages of the most popular websites. I don't know which sites they were, but they were the most popular clearly. And found out that only 0.5% or one one single homepage had valid HTML on it. He said, this is, in my opinion, a pretty low bar. It's a bit like saying professional writers produce content free of typos. That seems reasonable, right? Google also doesn't use typos as a ranking factor. But imagine you ship multiple typos on your homepage. Ew. His words, not mine. That you. And he says it's also trivial to validate your HTML and to monitor the validity of important pages like your homepage. So essentially, you know what, you know, any spammer that's trying to spam and rank, it would be a really easy thing to try to play with. And you know, even in our case when we do audits, we used to check, you know, W3C's tool and check to make sure a page had valid HTML and if it didn't, that would be something to correct. I almost never check that now it's.
- [23:37]
Ross Dunn
Not worth it anymore.
- [23:38]
Scott Van Eck
No, there are some situations, like if a site, if we're trying to troubleshoot something or, I don't know, various circumstances come up where I'll check it and see if it's like blatantly bad because there's valid HTML or, sorry, there's invalid HTML and then there's full on broken HTML. So sometimes you can find signals of what might be broken when you do those tests. But I, I don't care if a site is valid anymore. Typos I care about, but not so much for SEO, just you don't want typos on your page. It turns off your customers, right? So you definitely want those fixed. I'm not surprised that Google ignores the typos, but I would have thought, and maybe, maybe this is true. I don't know that. If you have a site that's riddled with typos and just tons of them, I think it should affect your quality scores and it should bring you down a little bit if it's that bad. But I don't know that that's the case. So all that said, just a couple quick notes on valid HTML. Even though it's not necessarily going to impact your SEO, you might still want it to be valid maybe because you know it can help your site to load a bit faster. In some situations your site may use a little bit less bandwidth and it may help you with cross browser compatibility. So if your site is not working on edge, well, one person won't see it. But if it's not working from one browser or the next, you know, check your, your HTML and see if it's invalid because that could be an indicator as to why that might be happening. Place to fix.
- [25:02]
Ross Dunn
So yeah, I 100 agree and I, I think that, you know, if you're using an established platform like say WordPress, Squarespace or anything like this, you know, they have systems in place that provide a certain level of quality. Now I know a couple people in the industry who absolutely rail lose their minds over how bad the actual code is in these systems and they will not stop until there's they're 100 valid HTML on every site they work on. I don't have the energy for that.
- [25:42]
Scott Van Eck
No.
- [25:43]
Ross Dunn
And maybe they see an impact on something, maybe rankings, but I can't imagine it's even close to worth all the effort. Just make things, make sure things do work compatibly across different browsers and devices and you're set. It comes down to really your message, your quality of content, all the things we've covered before. So yeah, again, another great one. A great answer from John Mueller. I always appreciate his stuff and it's a good way to tie up a little bit shorter show than usual. But we appreciate your time. So on behalf of myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing, and my company senior SEO Scott Van Eyck, thank you for joining us today. Remember, we do have a show notes newsletter you can sign up for@seo101radio.com where we have all the links to what we've been discussing and some more concise notes than my lack of word day garbage. I don't know, I can't speak. It's like I need sleep or something. Anyway, have a great week and remember to tune into future episodes which air every week on WMR fm.
- [26:51]
Scott Van Eck
Great thank you for listening everybody.
- [27:01]
Ross Dunn
Sa.
- [27:28]
Marketing Rep
Are you tired of juggling contacts manually following up and deals falling through the cracks? We can fix it so you never lose another lead. Enabling 24. 7 sales and support via an AI that learns your business. Ready to close more deals with less hassle? Get a free trial of our marketing automation@thebuzz CRM.com.
- [27:51]
Carvana Rep
What is DAX? Are you tracking all our cars on Carvana Value Tracker on all our devices? Yes Kristen, yes I am.
- [27:58]
Ross Dunn
Well, I've been looking for my phone.
- [28:00]
Carvana Rep
For in dax's domain we see all so we always know what our cars are worth.
- [28:04]
Ross Dunn
All of them.
- [28:05]
Carvana Rep
All of them. Value surge trucks up 3.9% that's a great offer. I know. Sell sell. Track your car's value with Carvana Value Tracker.
- [28:17]
Indeed Rep
Today, people are driven by the search for better. But when it comes to hiring, the best way to search for a candidate isn't to search at all. Don't search Match with Indeed. The hiring process can be slow and overwhelming. Simplify hiring with Indeed. Indeed is your matching and hiring platform with over 350 million global monthly visitors, according to Indeed Data, and a matching engine that helps you find quality candidates fast. Ditch the busy work. Use Indeed for scheduling, screening and messaging so you can connect with candidates faster. Join more than 3.5 million businesses worldwide that use Indeed to hire great talent fast. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility@ Indeed.com podkatz12 that's Indeed.com podkatz12 terms and conditions apply.