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Google Ruled a Monopoly, Yelp vs Google, the Rise of SearchGPT, and more | #SEOUpdateByYoast
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- [00:02]
A
Hey everyone. Welcome to an all new SEO Update by Yoast. My name is Ninke, I'm the Associate Director of Partnerships at Yoast and I'm your Host for this September 2024 edition of the SEO Update. Since we had a break over Summer, our principal SEOs, Alex and Carolyn will make sure to cover all SEO highlights you might have missed over the past weeks. So this edition is packed with SEO news, some AI highlights, and a very exciting Yoast product update as well. Enjoy listening to this month's update and happy optimizing.
- [00:38]
B
Hello all, how we all doing? I hope we've all had a good summer break and ready for lots of SEO news. I know that in the past we usually have to go through them quickly and we've got two months worth of news this month. Well, not this month, this edition. So let's not do too much small talk here, Carolyn, unless you want to tell everyone how your summer went.
- [01:00]
C
No, no, I think it's relevant.
- [01:04]
B
Exactly. Exactly. So let's get the slides up and let's get going.
- [01:08]
C
So, kicking off as per usual, what we're going to discuss, we're going to talk about SEO news, AI news, WordPress news, and then we'll do some Q and A. The questions Just in case you've forgotten, if you look on the right hand side of your screen, there is a place to ask questions rather than just in the chat. If you ask the question in the Q and A area, others have the opportunity to upvote it. We try to answer the most upvoted questions first though. If there are duplicates, we will consolidate them. But please make sure that if you want to get an answer, put it in the Q and A section because we might miss it in the chat. As you can see, the chat goes really quickly. The only other thing and Ninka already covered this. Here's the URL to go learn more about today's topics and get links to all the tools that we talk about. And then don't forget, if you need a just an intro session, we do our how to Start with SEO Bi Weekly webinars. So every other week. The next one is October 7th. It's at 9pm Central European Standard Time and at 3pm Eastern Daylight Savings Time in the US. So 3pm New York time. 9pm would be Amsterdam time. Yes, because that's not. That's not your time, is it? You're behind that, right?
- [02:25]
B
No, I'm one hour behind the rest of Europe.
- [02:28]
C
So it's 9pm like Amsterdam time and I guess we will get started with some SEO news, so why don't you kick it off for us, Alex?
- [02:39]
B
Yeah. So Reddit, the CEO, is telling Microsoft and others that they need to pay to search the site. This may be more of an API call, and I'm definitely thinking it's out of the back of the $60 million deal they had with Google. That's working very, very well for them right now. So obviously they may want to be paid by other search engines too. Whether or not that's fair or ethical, I don't really have much comment on. I mean, it's a good source of information. Sorry, should I change my words there? It's good source of perspective by people and it seems to be working, they claim it seems to be working on Google for the most relevant results, even though I know that a lot of people have said otherwise. But now they're demanding. And even though this is 31st of July, I don't believe that anyone, they've done a deal with anyone else. I haven't heard that. I haven't read anything about it.
- [03:35]
C
Have you?
- [03:35]
B
I don't think so.
- [03:37]
C
I have not heard about them doing other deals with people. But I do know that there are some court cases that are kind of circulating right now that many industry insiders are waiting on decisions, because the decisions in those court cases is really going to determine if you are able to use otherwise publicly available information to train your LLM. And I believe the relevant case is silverman et al vs OpenAI and meta. So if you're at all interested in that, you can look up that case study. Or I'd be, maybe I'll write something about it. But the gist of it is it permissible for these big companies to train their LLMs or ingest information into their LLMs that is publicly available? And to be honest, why would you not want your publicly available information adjusted? But there's some questions as to whether or not, you know, you're going to have to license that data. So I think Reddit's kind of on the side of the authors in the, in this, on this, on this matter. That being said, Reddit's not the author of the like.
- [04:50]
B
Exactly.
- [04:52]
C
They're selling publicly contributed information. So I have, I don't, I'm not sure where my, my moral compass falls on this one, because I understand they want to make money, but I also understand that they're not actually generating the product, they're just monetizing everybody else's thoughts, basically.
- [05:11]
B
Yeah. And it'd be very interesting to See how this all plays out in the, in the growth of AI overviews and other AI related information retrieval for, you know, people searching and discovery. But maybe this is a good thing or a bad thing when yet to find out and see how the real ramifications of paid for perspectives go. But it's funny how you also said that they're authors. I was thinking in my head that they're contributors. It's.
- [05:39]
C
Well, the court case is involving authors. So like Sarah Silverman wrote a book and her complaint is about her book. And there's a similar case file filed in New York. Silverman's case is filed in California Circuit Court. The case in New York is involving George R.R. martin, who I'm sure everyone knows wrote Game of Thrones. So these are, these are print publications. And that would be the closest analogy or analogous example to what Reddit is, which would be print rather than audio or video.
- [06:15]
B
It's very interesting.
- [06:16]
C
It is interesting. It's interesting how much is going through the courts right now and how much these recent decisions or coming decisions are going to be affecting things. For example, Google was just ruled a monopoly. What's that going to mean forever everybody? I don't know. I had a lot of thoughts about this. I actually wrote an article on Yoast.com, so if anyone cares to read my Googles of monopoly on Yoast.com, please go ahead. I cut it down a lot because I was getting really into the weeds. I'm old enough to remember when AT&T got broken up. So it was, that was, that was, that was a big deal when I was a kid and it took forever. IBM had a similar case, also took forever. These cases are lengthy and long, but they have long lasting implications for the companies that are affected. After the AT&T breakup, there was the Microsoft Monopoly suit. And my question is, is Google going to get the ATT treatment where they get broken up into a bunch of little companies, or are they going to get the Microsoft treatment where they're allowed to stay a single company but they're basically hamstrung. So the, the restrictions that the judge put on Microsoft are effectively what allowed Google and Facebook and these other giant companies that were upstarts at the time or not even conceived at the time to really run roughshod over Microsoft because Microsoft was so afraid of doing anything that might get them in trouble again with the antitrust people. And I know the fear of being labeled a monopoly is so pervasive. When I worked at a company that has giant Rodent ears for a logo. One of the things that was constantly reinforced was we don't use language that might imply that we're trying to take over the space. So if I would propose an idea for improving SEO and say we could totally dominate page one, the lawyers would be very quick to say thou shalt not say dominate. Thou shalt not box out the competition. We must not command the entire first page because it will give the impression of a monopoly and anything that would give the whiff of anti competitive practices was squashed. So these, it's a big deal and it's going to affect how business gets done. My big concern for, for the search industry is if let's say they're successful in taking Google out of the dominant position in paid ads and paid traffic, people are going to have to change their optimization strategies. We're going to have to start optimizing for more than just Google. It's going to affect PPC prices. PPC prices are probably going to go down. If Google's revenue goes down, then are they going to start charging more for the, for less traffic? I mean there's a lot of, there's a lot of pricing implications. There's, there's a lot of moving parts here. But it is pretty clear that Google has a stranglehold on everything and the United States has determined that that is, they're leveraging that in a manner that is anti competitive. So we have to see if this, if the verdict holds up and if the verdict holds up, then we have to see what the judge, what remedy the judge applies to the situation.
- [10:04]
B
I also hope, okay, I just hope that it doesn't change the way in which we have to do things from an organic point. I would like to hope that everything's as, just as consistent as it is now in the way that if you optimize for one search engine it should be good for the others. Right. I know that there's different variables and different things that people look at, but in general our best practice is not just for Google rights for any search engine. And I'm just hoping that this, if the monopoly rule, if it's ruled that it is a monopoly and we have to do. I don't want to do things, I don't want all of us to have to do one thing for one platform, one thing for another like we always social platforms. Right. It's annoying. Even just getting pixel perfect images for people in paid is such a nightmare that I don't, I don't want it to have this snowball Effect where every month we're going to have to tell you, well, somewhat what Search Engine X has done something different to annoy Search Engine Y. So now they're doing this. And that's why I don't want it to get into the message because we're the ones who get affected. Not just SEOs, but the website owners will get really confused as well and none of us can predict what's going to happen, which is even more annoying.
- [11:12]
C
Well, and maybe, maybe it's not going to matter because maybe AI is going to kind of step into the breach in such a big way that it's going to be far less important. The traditional organic ranking factors are going to be far less important than maybe the expertise and the visibility and convincing the AI that you're the most authoritative on a given subject so that you get cited. So it's, there's, there's just so much flux right now. I think it's, it's difficult to make accurate predictions, but it is very fascinating to watch. So, yeah, yeah, if you're interested, go read the article.
- [11:52]
B
It's a big conversation, but there's no conclusion yet. But of interest, definitely something to read into. Something that Google have been doing, have been adding recommendations in Search Console. Now they announced this on the 5th of August. There's four different recommendations which hope you can see in the slides. They include events, videos that aren't indexed, queries that get less or more of a peak or a trough of visits, and search console showing 35% of your performance data. Those recommendations going in, I've seen them on one profile and today even or yesterday I forgot his name. Is it Weisberg someone? Weisberg, who's the project manager, he said that it's still not completed rolling out and it's still something to be done. So some of you may see that, some of you may not, but if you don't, there's a Search Console insights area which kind of has a basic version of what these recommendations are. Because obviously in here you can review issues and reports and go into that more granular data, but using insights in the meantime does give you kind of some good stats for that. So something to look out on on that front.
- [13:08]
C
Yeah, I don't think I've seen it yet, but I'm definitely interested in seeing it. The. There was another new thing that kind of came out that you, you cited the accept our cookies or pay us. Yeah. Notices on the UK papers. It's. I have issues with this personally if I'm, if I have to I shouldn't have to surrender all of my, all of my cookie rights in order to access the content. And if, if you're going to expect me to pay for things, I do not want to see ads. Yeah, that's my personal opinion by.
- [13:45]
B
Yeah. So for the audience here, these pop ups have been, they were first noticed or pointed out by Dan Barker, who's quite well known SEO over the years on Twitter, sorry X, I don't know what to call it this month. And it shows us here that you can either pay to reject personalized cookies or you can accept personalized cookies. Now, something for the audience may be of interest. Carolyn didn't see any of these notices and she's based in the usa. I'm in the UK and I do see these notices. I accept it because I'm not paying to still have adverts served to me. This is the thing that annoyed Carolyn, most likely here was if you want to pay, you should be paying for no ads, not depersonalized ads. Like it's, it's a very weird thing. But what they're obviously doing is they're paying for more data by us accepting everything, more personalized data, so then targets us in the future. But I believe this is just the uk, maybe just Europe thing, but it may trickle into other countries. Thomas here saying they've been in Germany for quite some time. I only saw them pretty much around the 5th of August, the day in which Dan tweeted it. I didn't see it, but then two days later I did see it.
- [15:06]
C
Yeah, I, I've seen, I've seen the accept all cookies things for a long time. But the accept all cookies, otherwise you have to pay us is a new one. Because that, I don't know, it sounds like extortion, honestly. But I know it's a legal term and we don't throw legal terms out lightly. I just, I don't like it. I find it distasteful.
- [15:29]
B
That's crazy. It is crazy. But you know, that's. Look, if some people will want to pay for that lack of personalized data and giving that data away and those people can choose to do that. I personally don't care enough about having personalized ads to pay to not have them. I actually like it.
- [15:47]
C
It would be less of an issue for me if the UK newspapers weren't. They are basically the NASCAR of websites. There is not a single pixel that does not have an ad on it and it's difficult to follow the story. You have to scroll 10 miles between paragraphs. It's literally offensive to my eyes.
- [16:10]
B
To answer about the GDPR thing, Thomas, I'm going to assume, because this is News Corp and I believe that all of these four publications are owned by the same corporation. I believe I may not be right about that, that I would assume that News Corp has a really, really, really good lawyer on retainer to ensure that this is going to be gdpr. Yeah, they've got, they've got lawyers bigger than all, like, bigger than this audience right now. So. So I would say they've got it in hand and if you want to copy it, maybe, if you want, if there's anyone who wants to copy this model, then they probably could take that. This is very legally sound, but yeah, sure, it's.
- [16:50]
C
But it's.
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B
It will be.
- [16:52]
C
Yeah, let's get off because it's giving me angst.
- [16:59]
B
So. Oh, it doesn't own all the titles. Thanks, Andy. So Google Search Console, they've been updating lots of documentation. So at the 15th of August, they've done a bit more of quite a few updates. But even more recently they've revamped the crawler documentation. I think that was just in the last week or so. I'll put the URL in the slide. I'm also going to shove it in the chat here because there are quite a few that have happened in the last two months and we don't really need to go through each and every one that isn't very clearly described in that link in short form as well. So that link isn't going to send you to three hours worth of reading. Don't worry about it. You can. It's very nicely laid out to say what was the update, where was it and why did that happen? But yeah, there's quite a bit. So if you like reading updated documentation, this is definitely something to check up on.
- [17:52]
C
So, yeah, little bedtime reading. Yeah, the. The next bit of news we have is still from August because we're working our way forward from the. From the vacation. Google doesn't technically follow links, it extracts, collects and checks later. I would like to file this under this is not news. And I don't know who thought this. Why did this need to be explained? I don't know, but apparently people were asking and Gary felt that it was necessary to explain that googlebot doesn't follow links in real time. Exactly what he says in that last bullet. The term follow is just a, a simple way to describe the way Google processes the links that they encounter. It's. I don't know, I Don't know how else to explain this. I don't think that they're. I don't think it would be reasonable to believe that Google is in real time going to your website and then jumping out from the page that it's on to follow links. That's just not how it works. It's describing it as. Following links is the most simplified way I can think of to describe what it's doing, because in my head I know. I can see how it's going and crawling and collecting the data and it's collecting the links and it's doing all this stuff. And it is true that it does get full if you have too many links on the page. Or it will just stop looking at the links if you have too many links on a page. But it's not because it runs out of time during that particular session. It's because it's only got. Think of it as taking all of the data that it's finding on your website and putting. Putting them like little bricks on a wagon. The wagon's only got so much room. And when it puts all the bricks it can carry into the wagon, it takes its wagon and it goes back to the warehouse. It's not like it's actively following things and running along these little paths. That's. That's not how it works. So I don't know who asked that question to Gary, but his answer is correct. And I don't think it really changes anything because when I read this, I went a little duh. So. And filed also under duh. John Mueller had a. Had some commentary on removing unwanted content from search. I found this perplexing, and I think Alex did too. One of the things he recommends for removing something from search is in addition to adding a noindex tag to it, replacing important names with John Doe. That weirded me out because that seems odd. My opinion is if you don't want. If something is so desperately not needed in search, the page should not exist in the first place, period. Otherwise, if it shows up in search, despite your best efforts, deal with it, because this should not be. I don't think it should be that big of an issue. But did you. Are we on the same page with that, Alex? Or did you.
- [20:53]
B
Yeah, yeah. Now I know that people know index things and then it shows up in search console. I mean, if my personal opinion is, if you want to get rid of a page, remove it and remove it with a 410 so that it's very understandable that that page is no longer there. It isn't coming back. We were even discussing, like, why would you just noindex a page and keep it there? Right. Like, unless there's a very big business reason for it. We would say, well, if you don't want it indexed or discovered, why are you serving it at all? Like, why would that happen? On the point of John Doe, I was saying to Carolyn, there's some poor schmuck out there called John Doe who's obviously feeling the brunt of his content getting de indexed because Google thinks so. But as well as that, in Europe, John Doe isn't a thing. We don't have a placeholder name called John Doe in the uk at least Joe blogs, which I also know is a clothing brand as well. So that must annoy them on a UK level. But does that mean that if I do Joe blogs that it is indexed because they're only considering the Americanized John Doe as the anonymous lorem Ipsum name? There may be those things to think about. But again, why would you replace it with another with a deprecated name? Just deprecate the entire content or reassign it to someone who matters if you do want to indexed.
- [22:17]
C
Yeah, I mean, from, from a news background, I would never change an important name in a news story to not the right name because that's not the news. If it's. If it's so important that I have to get that removed from the index, then I have to find a better way to remove that from the index. That's just changing the name seems like a really weird piece of advice. And I might follow up with them on that and challenge it and say, hey, did you mean this? And why. Why would you tell people this? So maybe there's a logical explanation. If there is, I just don't know what it is. Yeah, moving on. Looks like Google Search is now using the Open Graph title tag.
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B
Yes. So to the audience who may or may not know, Open graph is Facebook's way of understanding data metadata, if you want to call it that. So we have the title tag and the meta description. They have their version of it, the Open graph title, the open graph description. And they also have a few other things including an image to represent that. And that works in social structured data. So if you were to share a link like this one, it would use certain open graph data. It's quite interesting because this is the first time they've used a title tag outside of the official title tag to generate a title tag inside a search result. And it's only the title so to note, they've not mentioned description, they've not mentioned the image. But the fact that they're going there may mean that they may look at description and image later on to provide other sets of rich results. But if you've been using Open Graph titles to change meta titles into something more clickbaity, that may be something you want to review over the years, I don't think it's done as much. I remember, you know, the buzzfeed clickbait titles. You know, these two people met and you'll never guess what happened next. Or here are 10 things exactly. They are still doing it and it still works, right? It is gross. But look, we're partly responsible for that as well because we're there to optimize it. And it is something in Yoast Premium that you can have a unique OG title description and image as well. So something to think about. Don't make them obviously you can make them duplicated. If there's nothing set, it just falls back to the title tag. But something to note because they're also using it. So if you've been using it to spam on social or something, which you know, maybe isn't the whitest of hats, maybe something to clean up over the coming months and that's maybe also why you may be seeing some titles change to something you thought would have only been brought up by the title tag and not the OG one.
- [25:10]
C
Well, you know, I think in related news though, Google was issuing manual actions over discovery violations and the discovery violations targeted misleading content that uses catchy headlines that are not reflected in the actual content. So if you are in the practice of writing headlines that are clickbaity but not necessarily 100% reflective of what the people are going to find in that story, you might find that you're missing out on Google discovery traffic, which can be pretty significant depending on your on your site. Because nobody likes it when they're misled. Nobody likes getting tricked into clicking on something only to find out that this really wasn't what they thought it was going to say. Like an example I saw recently was the headline was regarding Meghan Markle's baby scandal. The truth is coming to light. Okay, well that makes me think that this is related to something else. And it turned out it was speculation that they're having some sort of marital problems and that there's going to be suddenly be a phantom pregnancy to try to fix the marriage. But that wasn't what I thought it was going to be. So I clicked on it and then I Read it. And I was like, oh, oh, well, now I wish I hadn't wasted that five minutes. Compounded with the fact that there were 8 million ads on that page. So it was like. It was like a ball of things that were just tasteful.
- [26:40]
B
Seems to be more around publishers, right? The way that we're talking, it seems more of a. The publishers are the ones not at fault, but seems to be doing it more right. I think if you're just a local business, you're most likely not going to have done anything that's an issue. And even then, you might have still chosen an open graph title that actually is the most relevant to then get pulled up instead of the title tag. So, again, if you're doing it honestly, nothing to worry about.
- [27:06]
C
Well, I don't understand how you're. And maybe this is just me, but I feel like if you're writing the best title tag possible, that title tag would be applicable and useful for your social media and open graph tags as well. I don't. I don't. I can't think of many cases where you would need to have them be separate personally, but.
- [27:29]
B
No, yeah, that's me.
- [27:32]
C
All righty. Yelp is suing Google for unfair advantage in local. So Google just getting sued left and right these days.
- [27:42]
B
I mean, I'm sure Google's legal team kind of are liking the challenge because their retainer's gone up, I assume.
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C
I think they're all on staff, actually, and I don't think the retainer goes up because I think this is just job security for them, which is with, you know, job security. Yay. We all like that.
- [28:02]
B
But in the long term, this may give more clarity in the future on how things should operate in the search world, which might be a good thing.
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C
And I think that's what everybody's hoping for. There's some other cases that have been filed that are unrelated to this, where the defendant. So the person that was being sued actually went out of business two years ago. They closed up shop, and there was a motion to dismiss filed because there's no longer. That business doesn't exist anymore. So why. Why are we proceeding with this lawsuit? And the judge said, I am not going to allow you to dismiss this case. You are both presenting to the jury. And I think they were supposed to be presenting to the jury in August. So I need to see if there's an update to that. But the reason was because they want a ruling, because this ruling is going to set the precedent for how many businesses interact with AI and the LLMs or with Google and with Search. So yeah, this is going to be probably another one of those cases where, you know, this is going to set a precedent and this is going to dictate how people are, how Google is working with things. I think part of Google's problem is that once you get declared a monopoly now everybody's like, oh hey Monopoly, I'm going to sue you too. The other people I'm waiting for a class action lawsuit to emerge is think about how many businesses were annihilated because of the helpful content update and the way that rolled out and how many legitimate businesses completely had to shut down because their traffic went to zero for a year. Like no business can survive that right now that Google's been declared a monopoly, when are they going to get together and say, hey, we've got an action here, let's go after them because of their monopolistic, anti competitive practices. They wiped us out because they didn't roll out their rules correctly. Some lawyers are going to make their bones on that one. Yeah. Expecting that to come soon.
- [30:08]
B
And I agree with some site owners must be getting frustrated that some people say, well you shouldn't have made your business Google centric. And you're like, well it's, it's not, we've been forced for it to be Google, we want it to be search centric. But it's not the publisher's fault that Google takes this monopoly. Right. That they, they take the lion's share and more of the traffic. So of course if you're an online publisher, you're going to focus your efforts around the largest way that those people will discover your publication. That's natural, right, that you're not going, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's one of those things. But I do hope that some of these people who haven't recovered do get some sort of justice, if you want to think about it.
- [30:54]
C
Yeah, and I hope they do too because I having owned businesses and it's, it's your baby and somebody comes in and just arbitrarily takes it away from you for no reason while simultaneously rewarding someone else that maybe isn't as deserving as you are. And of course you think you're deserving, but it's devastating. It's. People lost their livelihoods and, and they're going to, they're rightly entitled to, to pursue some kind of restitution or, or compensation for those damages. Let's keep rolling because I know that we have so much to cover here's another one that I kind of looked at and went, so duh. And I don't mean that in a dismissive way, but I didn't think this was really a question. Google says we don't count words or links on your blog posts. And this is based on someone on LinkedIn saying it's common practice among SEOs to believe that a total of 2 to 5 internal links and 1 to 3 external links in a 1000 word blog post is beneficial. They think that adding more links could be harmful to their site, while adding fewer links might not provide as much value. Does the quantity of links matter? Well, so there's a couple things here before I get to John Mueller's response. The reason you don't add too many links is because of the thing that we talked about before, where there's a finite amount of bricks pieces that Google can collect and analyze from your website. And if you throw too many links in there, first of all, what kind of user experience is that? Do you expect the user really to follow all of those links? They're probably not going to. Is every one of those links useful to the user? Probably not. You should focus on links that are useful to the user. Focus on links that are adding to the information, adding to the narrative, making the user experience better. Too many is too much. Not enough is subjective. But there's no hard and fast rule. The reason these hard and fast rules come about is because people go bonkers. And if you don't provide, as the person editing or making the rules for the content producers, I have to give them guardrails that they cannot possibly misinterpret and screw up. So it's not necessarily that Google says this is going to be rewarded in the serps, because that's not true. This is more a. I'm giving you these guardrails as the editor so that you don't screw up everything and make the pages unusable because you put too many links in or you've got too many links that go to unrelated pages. You don't have to have any external links in a 1000 word blog post. Do you really need a 1000 word blog post? Does a post have to be that long? This arbitrary? I must write at least 500 words. I must write at least 1,000 words. No, answer the question. Whatever the information is that you're trying to convey, convey the information. It does not have to be. It doesn't have to be exactly 1000 words. You do not have to have one to three external links. Those are not rules. So John Mueller's response was, nobody at Google counts the links or the words on your blog post. And even if they did, I'd still recommend writing for your audience. That's what they said. I don't know your audience, but I've yet to run across anyone who counts the words before reading a piece of content. Okay, the important thing here to note is that he didn't say Google doesn't count the links or the words on your blog posts. He said, nobody, meaning no person. This is like, you guys see Lord of the Rings when, like, Sauron or whoever it was couldn't be killed by like, no man can kill Sauron. And then the lady stabs him in the heart and says, I am no man. That's. That's what's happening here, friends. So while that's what's happening here, the point stands. Those are guardrails so that you don't go bonkers. They're not hard and fast rules. These are not. This is not the ten commandments that you must have. Thou shalt have one to three external links. No, that is not a thing. Write for your user. Make it a good user experience. Answer the question, and don't feel like you need to fluff up your essay to meet some arbitrary rules. It's just. That's not a thing. So don't.
- [35:21]
B
Okay, well, whilst we're saying don't count things, we can count the number of core updates that have been on this year, haven't we? This is yet another one that rolled out all the way to. It took nearly three weeks, didn't it? 19 days to roll out through August. Telling people it was kind of implied that maybe this was the update that people were waiting for to see recoveries in hcu, though there wasn't. In short, and I've seen a couple of graphs that go up, I think I've only seen one that went up to 80 something percent that was shown in a conference last week. But I can't. I wasn't told which site it was. Any upticks we've seen, or I've seen at least, have been around the 10% mark. And it's also worthy to note that those upticks also had a downturn as well a couple of weeks later. So you can't confirm that any things in actual recovery. And I don't actually even want to say the word recovery anymore because it's not about recovering something that's gone bad. It's about rectifying other issues that Google may interpret is helpful or not helpful, which again is very facetious and mysterious. Right.
- [36:33]
C
Yeah, the, and these updates are just going to come so fast now that it's, it's going to be, this is just going to be an ongoing, we should maybe just have a core update update in the next. Because there's always going to be several.
- [36:50]
B
There are, I would say. Yeah, good, good. One, one every quarter. I would say maybe in next year may happen. But yeah, no, so the next point, Lily, Lily Ray made a very, very good observation. So she noticed in an interview with Barry Schwartz and Danny Sullivan, which is one of two interviews that Danny's had in the last few weeks. This week he had another one with Elada Solis, which we aren't covering in this update. We just want to tell you to go out and watch them or read the summaries if you want to know more about it. Because I believe it's very much a Google mouthpiece of what's been happening in the last year. So all you're going to do is get real Google opinions. Very wishy washy. Hey, write content for the audience, don't spam, all of that kind of stuff, that nice fluffy PR stuff. But Lilly saw something where they actually didn't go through with updates on Discover the manual penalties, didn't they? It wasn't algorithmic, it was bit manual. And the reason they didn't go algorithmic is that they didn't want to go gung ho and make a load of sites all of a sudden fall without it being looked at more precisely. Now that of course annoyed Lily and me personally and I'm sure a lot of other people going, wait a minute, so you, you didn't push the button on an algo update on discovery because you want to be careful about it. Nine months after HCU2 came out where you literally did what you're now saying that you don't want to do.
- [38:22]
C
Yeah, but what's happened between now and then, since, since then and now they've been found guilty of monopolistic practices. So now they, they're, you know how, you know, they, New York was going after Trump so that they could call him a felon. Google's a monopoly now. Google is effectively, you know, they've got, they've got to wear the scarlet, the scarlet M on their forehead and that means people can be a little bit more aggressive about going after them legally and they need to be a lot more careful about what they do so that they're not inviting more lawsuits.
- [39:00]
B
Very weird. It's Weird how these lawsuits are really affecting the way that they even deliver messages or even make algorithm updates, which is now crazy and maybe a good thing right in the future. That, like, if it was, if it was up to me and I was working in Google and I was part of that HCU team last year, I would like to think that, I would like to give people notice. Like, you've got, you're, you're gonna get hit in 90 days, but in 90 days maybe there's a, B, C, X, Y, Z that you could do. But Even then those 90 days are going to be interpreted. There's going to be nothing you can do about it.
- [39:36]
C
I don't, I don't think they knew, I don't think they had that, that granular of a level of insight into who was going to get hit and who wasn't before they pushed the button. And I think maybe they pushed the button on it a little. I don't, I don't know if it's prematurely. But without fully understanding the unintended consequences and now that they are considered a monopoly, you know, who's to say that they, that they're not targeting people who needed that traffic in order to force them into a situation where they have to compensate by buying ads to make up the traffic, which it's leveraging. It's leveraging your power to increase your revenue and you can't do that when you own the market.
- [40:24]
B
Yeah, well, let's wrap up the SEO part because that was a lot and I know we've even only got five minutes really going to roll through this. So more recently, this is stuff that has just happened in the last week or so because both Carolyn and I have been away on many conferences. So we just wanted to make you note that Danny Sullivan, as I just mentioned two minutes ago, has been interviewed by two different people, Barry Schwartz, which was not recorded, but was a very, very long form piece of content. And as well as that, a Lada Solis interviewed him on video, which was just released in the last 48 hours, I believe so. Good. It's interesting if you want to see Google's points of view and the questions that are raised towards them. As well as that, as I mentioned before, Google has been revamping quite a lot of their documentation. Only in the last 10 days did they revamp the entire crawler documentation. So if that's something more of interest to you, you should read into what's been changed. As well as that Google's added support for sale pricing and price type property we'll be adding that into our products, our WooCommerce products and the Shopify products, if and when. And we'll of course announce stuff on that when it happens. And lastly, which is quite an interesting one, is when we were talking about sites getting hit once. One network of sites that weren't hit was Forbes, or more so a company called Forbes Advisor that dealt with coupons and other what you and I can only describe as clearly parasite SEO tactics. And sites that were really dominating SERPs. After the March core and spam update, they still grew, even though by all definitions they shouldn't have. It's a very, very long piece. I forgot who it's by, Lars. I think it's a.
- [42:16]
C
That's a long conversation and I could spend 30 minutes talking about that. So maybe we'll have to. Maybe I'll write a blog post about it. But it's. Yeah, I'd love to get into it, but if I get into that, that's all we're going to talk about for the rest of the time. And we should probably not do that. So let's try to buzz through the remainder because I know we went a little long. So let's do AI News. Why don't you do this one?
- [42:40]
B
Yeah. So Perplexity, I don't know if you remember on our last update, Perplexity was found out to be crawling content. Even if you told the robots Txt not to crawl it, that agent, that crawler that got them in a bit of hot water. And then lo and behold, a couple of weeks later, Aravind, he announced that there's a publisher's program. So there'll be a way of having some kind of cooperation between the publisher and the content that they're publishing, that. That then gets put into Perplexity itself. But that's part of Anthropic as a whole, which I know has more than just perplexity. So it's very interesting to see the relationship with new AI platforms and the publishers who they're scraping the content from. And it's better to be friends than enemies, right?
- [43:31]
C
Absolutely. And then we've got. Google's Gemini is going to gain a Deep Research feature. The Deep Research is supposed to help users compile and synthesize information into detailed reports. So this is. I mean, this is all good stuff. You want to be able to pull from multiple expert sources and read it quickly, understand all the main points, which is understanding the main points of anything you read is something that a lot of people struggle with. So if the AI can help you with that. I think that this is great. It's sort of like automatically generating a Cliff Notes version of something which is I think going to be useful to a lot of people. So I'm, I'm interested to play with this. I think this is going to be great. Along the lines of Gemini, there's an AI overviews change.
- [44:21]
B
Yeah, it's been jumping quite a bit. So I think three months ago we said it was on 40% and it went down to 7, 8% and now it's back up to 99%. So I can tell you I'm seeing it a lot more now and it's mainly focused around informational search intent for me at the moment. Even though I know that they're doing more commercial intent, they're showing more E commerce related things, which is a whole other discussion of getting your product structured data and content sorted. But it is interesting to see that it really is coming back up and I believe that any of those bad serps have now been tested, double tested, triple tested, and now they're now a lot more confident to show that much to that amount of people.
- [45:04]
C
Yeah, this change, I literally had to rewrite three of my talks that are coming up between now and the end of the year because my research and data was all based on when it was overlapping 5% of the time. And now that it's 99.5% of the time, everything I was saying is kind of out the window. But I'm glad they're getting their act together because I think that the information they're pulling is more logical and useful than it was before. There's some news that came out about the potential of Search GPT. I still don't have access to Search GPT directly, but I do have long, fascinating conversations with ChatGPT about how search GPT works. So assuming I'm not being lied to, it's interesting what it says about how it's retrieving the data, how it's making decisions about what sources to cite and what direct recommend it's Search GPT is designed for in depth research and they said they're going to be using authoritative sources and integrated into ChatGPT and they're not going to be a competitor to Google. So their goal is not to search the web and just recommend things to you. Their goal is to provide search the web in kind of like a meta with meta searches to make additional analyses and then answer your questions rather than just provide SERPs. So that's in that way they feel that they are not a competitor to Google Search. GPT says that it excels in using authoritative sources, offering detailed answers and expanding on queries, providing practical advice, and is especially useful for e commerce and specialized topics. So in the, in the questions I was asking it, I would say like how do you decide who's an authoritative source and who is an authoritative source is as well. You know, if I see that this particular, you know, there was an article written about this topic by Bob Smith and there was another article over here written by Bob Smith and four other articles written by four other people. You know, I go, maybe Bob Smith knows what he's talking about because I've seen him multiple times. And then I do a metasearch to see what publications Bob Smith writes for. And if they're good publications, then that adds to his favor. But if they're all like websites that he spun up in his mom's basement, then that kind of detracts from it a little. So it's due doing an advanced analysis on what's going on. But all good information, good stuff. I know we have to keep going.
- [47:23]
B
Yeah, let's keep going. Let's do this quick because I know that those aren't in, these aren't in depth ones now. So Google stance on AI translations. In short, make sure your content's good and it's not spamming. I mean the normal stuff, that stuff is gone on a product level and a taxonomy level going to be used more and more in AI overview. So it's, it is important to make sure that thin content isn't about too much. That's what I would say is the takeaway from that. Definitely.
- [47:54]
C
Great. And OpenAI is claiming the new O1 model can reason like a human. I use the O1 model. I have not found it to be wanting. I'm digging it. And if you've got OpenAI or you like to use ChatGPT, then I encourage you to give it a shot because I personally, I approve.
- [48:14]
B
Good. And last up next is oh, Google rolling out voice powered AI search. That's not really news. It's just a new feature that's been put out. Hey, you can talk to it now instead of type. Isn't that great?
- [48:31]
C
All right, let's blow through the WordPress news really fast.
- [48:35]
B
Yes. So WordPress news, WordPress 6.6 has come out. Well technically 6.6.2 is out now doing of course a couple of security bug fixes that have happened and it's done a lot of performance updates, a lot of template loading. Times just performance is so much better. And I know that 2025 is coming out later. I just don't know which version it's going to be in. That's something to look out for.
- [49:02]
C
If you have an updated update, you're going to hit this one too. Alex.
- [49:06]
B
I may as well. So this is one of two plugins over the last month that have been updated, had some vulnerabilities. So one of them is Lightspeed and the other one is wordfence, which is quite ironic that security related vulnerability, I don't know but I would say if you have either of those plugins, just make sure that you've got the latest version because all of those bugs have now been solved.
- [49:36]
C
WordPress just locked down security for all plugins and themes. They're introducing two layers of security, two factor authentication, authentication and SVN passwords. Beginning October 1st, which is today, WordPress is going to impose two factor authentication on all authors of themes and plugins. SVN passwords are going to ensure that only authorized users can make changes to the code of the plugins or the themes. And this is to help eliminate the possibility or risk of people embedding Trojan horses into things. So we're going to go through the Yoast news real quick. Basically just the AI generate is live.
- [50:15]
B
Yeah, that came live. It's been live a little bit in WordPress but Shopify got released today. So do update your Shopify app. If not. And now you can use AI Generate, which is great. And there's been lots of work on that.
- [50:30]
C
All right. And then upcoming events. These are the places that you can see me and or Alex depending. And then we're going to talk to you about the discount you can get on WordPress plugins if you use this code. It expires October 10th and let's see. And I'm supposed to leave this slide up during Q and A. So let's do Q and A.
- [50:54]
A
Okay. I think we have at least one question to cover, which has 15 upvotes. It was already quickly appearing on screen, but I'm. I can't let it appear again. But I will give you the digest. So this is a question from Francis and the question is they've seen a big massive traffic drop in organic traffic around March 2024 and that might be related to a Google Update and it even went down by 50% which is usually. It's pretty big obviously. And although they have been updating and trying to make it better, the metrics of organic traffic and the amount of keywords went flat and didn't really improve.
- [51:38]
C
Okay, I can answer this quickly because it's impossible to answer with the amount of information that we have. You really need to have someone do an audit to make sure that nothing was accidentally technically changed in a way that breaks Google's ability to crawl and index your site. And it's. There's so many things it could be that we could not answer this if we wanted to in the amount of time that we have with the information we have. So maybe, maybe we can help refer you to somebody that can. That can help you out with more than that. I wish we could give you more information.
- [52:15]
B
Yeah. It may also be worth noting that there was a spam update in March and the first half of March. And as well as that, concurrently to that, there was a core Update that lasted 45 days. So it went all through March and into April. So that may be so, annoyingly, because they were both happening at the same time. There's no way to isolate whether it was technically a spam update or a core update that you've got. I don't want to say penalized on, but you got affected by. And it may be worth looking at the data in February compared to March and see what changes there are and see if there's a pattern in pages or keywords.
- [52:54]
C
If you have backlinks that come in from sites that were affected by a spam update, all that juice that was coming from all of those sites has suddenly gone away, which lowers your authority level, which could affect things. So, I mean, there's. There's a lot of variables to investigate.
- [53:08]
A
Also the indirect effect. So to take into account. Cool. Let's move to this question about unwanted content. You've covered a little bit of that in the general SEO update.
- [53:23]
C
Where's the question?
- [53:27]
A
It was about getting advice on how to handle internal content. So, for example, content for employees only should you like.
- [53:35]
C
Your internal content should not be on the public Internet. Like you should have taken steps to prevent that from being from being accessed by Google. So there are a lot of different ways that you can do that. But now that it's in Google, your best bet is to have it on a subdomain that you can completely block from the public Internet. You control access. You're only allowing people with certain IP addresses in to see that content, only allowing people from certain domains in to see that content and then return a 410 to everyone else. That would be my advice.
- [54:11]
B
Yeah, I would say either. Either make it so you have to log if it's a WordPress site. You can either have a username and password and then you can see things behind a login, or you can make things private with a password. They're probably your quickest things to get stuff, at least not publicly available anymore. That would be my advice. But yeah, again, what Carolyn said there should be a separate site that you can't even access at all from the outside world.
- [54:40]
C
Access control.
- [54:42]
A
Let's do one more. It's time, but I think we can pop this one in. Is disavowing backlinks worth it? I've read conflicting things arguing both sides, but it seems doing so doesn't help your site health rankings too much.
- [55:00]
C
I think at this point it probably isn't necessary, but it's not going to hurt if you do it. So if it's something that you haven't tried and you're flustered and you're running out of ideas, do it anyway. Just to tick it off the list. It's one of those things where I'm not. I'm not sure if taking the vitamins helps, but I'm going to take them anyway, because why not? But I wouldn't hang my hat on it making a difference.
- [55:28]
A
Okay, and with that, I think we should end this edition of the SEO Update. Thanks everyone for being so active in chat and popping in all your questions. I think we have one more slide on the next update, which takes place end of November, if I recall correctly. Yes, here it is. So we'll be on your screen around the end of November again. And Alex and Carolyn, thanks for blasting through all that news. I hope everyone enjoyed and got some key takeaways from all of the updates shared. And see you in November.
- [56:06]
B
Yes, see you then on a busiest week ever. Isn't it just a couple of days before Black Friday starting to whet everyone's appetite? Yeah, thanks. Thanks everyone for turning up. It's been a good one.
- [56:19]
C
Bye everybody.
- [56:20]
B
Bye.