Richard Karn (0:01)

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Ali Jackson (1:00)

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Richard Karn (1:40)

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Scott Vanek (2:01)

Hello and welcome to SEO 101 on WMR FM episode number 504. My name is Scott Vanak. I'm the senior SEO at Step Worth Web Marketing. Ross is away today so you're stuck with only me. I apologize. Or I don't know, maybe you prefer only me. If you do, I want to hear about that because I need an EcoBoost, I suppose. So we're just gonna dive right in. It'll probably be a bit of a shorter show than normal just because I'm solo and without a bit of that back and forth banter, you know, I tend to get through stuff pretty quick, I think. So let's see how it goes. We will start with some non SEO news. The first piece is a little bit more local related, but I put it as non SEO and it's related to Google review scams. So this is something that's been happening for a while but seems to be resurfacing. So I thought I'd bring it up. Bill Hartzer actually recently noted this as well, that he found that this is actually a quote from Bill. Scammers are now texting businesses about how they're posting negative reviews on their business. So essentially what they're doing is the scammers are sending a business a text. They're saying, hey, I just left a bad negative review. Maybe, maybe I had an. Or maybe they'll say they had an order from somebody for, you know, multiple bad reviews on your site. But they post one, they contact you and then they demand payment. They blackmail looking for usually gift cards. I mean it couldn't be more of a red flag about a scam when someone's demanding payment in gift cards. Right, but that's what they do. They demand gift cards and if you don't pay them, they'll proceed to bombard your, your Google business profile with negative reviews. So this is nothing new. And, and I know everybody that listens to SEO 101 is incredibly intelligent or you wouldn't be listening. So you likely wouldn't fall for these scams anyways. But anybody can fall for them, you know, especially if you're really concerned, if you're worried. But don't, do not send payment to these guys. Just, just don't ignore them. Do not interact with them simply like what Google suggests is flag their negative reviews. If they do end up posting any and submit a report via Google's help center, we will have a link to the help center in the show notes. So be sure to subscribe to that. And you know, it's about all you can do. If you do decide, hey, I'm going to pay them and then they'll go away. Well, they don't go away. They just demand more money and more money and they'll just keep trying to take as much as they can from you because they know you're going to pay. So it seems obvious, I know, but there's so many scams out there and I hear more and more often people getting caught up in these scams even though they, you know, they know better. I've had a few close calls myself where I almost fell for them. So far I've been good. But sometimes these scammers, they get really tricky and you can't always tell, but this one's pretty clear. So hopefully you don't fall for it. Hopefully it doesn't affect you. Hopefully you don't start getting destroyed with negative reviews from scammers. But report it to Google and hopefully they'll do something about it. Although Google, I don't know. Google doesn't have the best track record for replying and fixing issues that people report. So. But you can try. So that's that. The next is about a Yoast SEO plugin that was inserting hidden AI HTML code. So just this week Yoast released an emergency fix after it discovered the premium version. So this does not affect the free version, only those with the premium paid version installed. It was leaking AI related code into actual WordPress content. So the bug was causing AI created HTML attributes to be injected into the site content. So a tiny bit of background last week we actually talked about this when we discussed AI fingerprints. So these are indications that copy may have come from an AI source. One of those fingerprints was a class called Data Start, which may appear in a paragraph tag or it might appear in other tags, in other attributes in the content you get. You don't see this data when you copy the content from AI and paste it onto your site. It's all behind the scenes HTML, so you may not even notice it, but it's there. And it's kind of a red flag to to Google that hey, this content was created by AI. It couldn't be more obvious. So if you're using Yoast Premium, which does have an AI powered feature to generate content, those fingerprints were being injected automatically into the content. So they fixed this bug. So that's not going to happen anymore. But if you had anything posted within the, you know, let's say the first half of June, you might want to go back and look at anything that you Yoast has created and remove those extra little codes that might be there. So again, this is only in the paid premium version. The free version is not affected. And I do want to note that if you are copying content from AI to your site, those fingerprints will most likely still be there whether you're copying it from chat, GPT or wherever Whatever AI you're using, you'll probably get those fingerprints. So it's something to watch out for. Again, we talked about it in our last episode, so I won't go too far down that rabbit hole, but something to watch out for. Yeah. So keep an eye out. Currently though, like, don't panic. If Google sees that your content is AI generated or suspects it is right now, that is okay. As long as the content again serves its purpose. It's relevant, it's factual, it's helpful to your users. It's not just a fluff garbage piece. It's fine. Google doesn't care currently. In the future, that may change. Other search engines might change and decide that they don't like AI content and they don't want to rank people that create it. So because of that potential future risk, make sure that these fingerprints aren't present, make sure your content is vetted, you've gone through manually and made sure that your expertise is reflected within that content and you should be fine. Just a little proactivity. Proactivity? I'm not sure that's even a word. Being proactive to prevent future problems from AI content is worth your time while you're creating it. Next, we don't have a lot of very specific SEO news. There is some turbulence right now in the rankings. It is suspected that there is a core update possibly about to happen. I'm not going to go deep into that because as you know, there's always updates at Google. Google's always going crazy. And this is not a confirmed update by any means. It's just people noticing some bad weather in the serp, so to speak. So I'm not going to go into it. If you care, you can find more information, but there's really not a lot of information. If it does turn out to be a core update, and we have some details, we will go into that in more, in more detail in the next episode, of course. So, so right now though, what I did find is there was an article written by Olga Czar over at Search Engine Land and had a ton of 101 level tips for, in this case, using the URL inspection tool over at Google Search Console. And I saw this and I thought, you know, this is great. We don't always go into these little tips and, and things. And I, I wanted to do this because I feel like if you're just learning SEO, if you're trying to figure out how to benefit from Google Search Console, what to use Google Search Console for, this is just a nice little rundown of the one tool that they provide. And this is a URL inspection tool. So here we've got, I think there's about seven or eight tips from Olga. Check out her article at Search Engine Land if you want to really dive into this. She does a fantastic job. The article is very thorough. I'm not going to be anywhere near as thorough. I'm just going to kind of touch base on the points, give you a quick summary of what they do, what's important about it, and then you can go back and really find more info from her article if you'd like. And the link will be in the Show Notes newsletter. So that's always good. So the first and most common use for the tool is checking a page if it's indexed. Very simply, you log into search Console, you enter the URL in the tool, Google will tell you if it's indexed or not. If it is, awesome. If it's not, well, the next tip is you can use it to get the pages indexed. So once you check the URL, you can click Request Indexing if it's not indexed. And Google will most likely index it if unless it sees reason not to. From my experience, pages submitted for indexing usually end up in the index within 24 hours. I've seen cases when they're in the index within minutes. I wouldn't bank on that happening every time, but I have seen it happen. It's usually pretty quick. I do recommend if you have a site that doesn't see a lot of content updates, is fairly static, that when you do post new content, go into search console, submit the URL for indexing and you'll get it in there a lot quicker. Pages Websites that are very active and publishing a lot of new content, they're very big, lots of inbound links and authority. Google tends to find that content very quickly. So for example, we had a client who did a new website launch just this week actually and within 12 hours, within 12 hours or so, the new pages they created were indexed on their own just because the site has a lot of authority already. So keep that in mind. If your site is strong, you might not need to do that. If your site is a smaller site that has less action, you will probably want to. The next is you can use this tool to see what Google sees. Entering your URL in. Google can show you how they render your page, which can often be pretty beneficial. So it will show your sites source code after any JavaScript has been rendered on the site. So this can be fantastic if you're trying to troubleshoot various issues and things and you just want to get an idea of if Google can see the code or see the content that you're injecting via JavaScript or whatever. So it can be helpful for troubleshooting. You can run a live test to check real time page status. So this is kind of nice. You can see how googlebot interacts with your page right now. It will highlight indexing and other concerns. Some of these concerns I'll still be going over in a moment and just gives you a better idea of what's going on at Google right now. You can compare declared and selected canonical URLs so you can view what canonical tag your site is declaring on the page itself. And if Google is seeing something else, they'll display that. So if Google shows the canonical for your declared and what Google is selecting as being the same, great, that's what you want to see. If Google is showing you a different URL that they're using, then you might want to figure out why is Google ignoring my canonical tag and using this other page on my site. It could be a reason of authority content, it could be duplication, who knows, There could be a lot of reasons why Google may do that. But if you see a discrepancy there that gives you an indication that something is off and you may want to make an adjustment to how you're doing things. Another common thing you might want to use this tool for is reviewing structured data and rich result eligibility. This will show you exactly what structured data Google has detected on a given page. It will display errors and warnings of that structured data. So that can be really helpful. That said, I tend to use Google's rich result test or even the schema markup validator. I'll have links in the show notes. They tend to be a little more helpful. They elaborate a little bit more in the details and you can also use the tool to inspect HTTP headers. So if you've got a page that is acting weird, maybe it's not showing up for somebody, maybe you've got an error or weird redirect. It will show if that page is serving a 200, okay, a 301 redirect, a 404 not found. Whatever the case may be, I actually don't use it for that. I have a Chrome extension link redirect trace that does it in real time in the browser bar in Chrome. I find that way more useful for myself. But the URL inspection tool is a great quick way to do it. If you don't need to do it very often you're just checking the odd page. You might not want a an extension installed. So yeah, so that's just a few Kind of a high level overview of what the URL inspection tool is useful for. Check out that article by Olga Czar at Search Engine Land. You'll get way more detail than I just went over and it should be helpful if you want to learn a bit more about that. So all right, we are going to take a quick break and when we come back we will touch on some local and AI news and we'll be right back.