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Google's AI overviews, Google Leak, Schema Markup, and more | #SEOUpdateByYoast
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- [00:01]
Tako Verdanskott
Welcome and thanks for listening to the June 2024 SEO update by Yoast. My name is Tako Verdanskott. I'm the head of relations at Yoast and today I'll be your local host. In this month's update, our SEO experts Carolyn Shelby and Alex Moss will take you through the latest news in SEO. This month they talk about the Google Leak. We also have a lot of news related to AI again from various different angles. And they also touch on structured data and schema.org quite a bit. Oh, and did you know that Yoast SEO is a finalist in the Global Search Awards? After all of that, I'll be back for the Q and A where Alex and Carolyn answer our audience's questions about SEO. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this episode of the ASIO Update by Yoast.
- [00:54]
Alex Moss
We're going to discuss the usual You've heard this before, but It's SEO News, AI News, WordPress News, Yoast News, and then we'll have time for Q and A if we can get this done fast enough. As always, there will be a recording available afterwards. If you have questions on the right, there is a section for Q and A. Please put your questions there. And friends, if you see questions you like, upvote them so that we answer them. If you need to learn more about today's topics, we will have a list of all of the links we use to generate this this deck at Yoast update June 2024. And that's where you will also be able to find the recording afterwards if for some reason you do not receive the link via email. If you find that you need some basics or some fundamentals, feel free to join our how to start with SEO BI weekly webinars. The next one is July 1, starts at 4pm Central European Time or 10am Eastern American Time. Now let's get going. All right, after our last presentation, let's see, Search Engine Roundtable released a collection of embarrassing Google AI overviews. If you recall from last time, we talked about how the AI overview rollout was not going well. AI was telling people to do unhealthy things, put glue on their pizza, drink urine to get rid of kidney stones, all kinds of weird things. So much so that there was backlash and everyone was mocking Google and Google was on an apology tour to sort of reassure investors that, you know, the world wasn't ending. But then the leaks happened. So let's chronologically visit what's happened since we last spoke directory of Embarrassing Google AI Overviews. Have you looked at these?
- [02:37]
Carolyn Shelby
I have Looked at some of them, they were laughable. But on a, that was me on a maybe more skilled, professional level, like, how are these results even coming out? But then I think about, you know, my mum, who knows nothing about technology and may ask Google a question and take the answer as gospel. Right. And you know, when you want to drink your own, when it says drink your own urine, to do X, Y or Z, or, you know, all of these health hazards can actually become a problem. Right.
- [03:07]
Alex Moss
I think for the, for the medical things, I sincerely hope that most people would look at the drink the urine thing and go, you know, I feel like that's maybe not accurate. What is more concerning though is that it's getting, it's getting sentiment and information from all over the place, including from places like Reddit. And it will repeat narratives. If it doesn't have a counter narrative to, to add into its calculations, it will repeat the narrative that it finds as though it is fact. And those things for brands in particular, I would be concerned about. That being said, I know that we're going to mention some other slides where there's news reports about Google scaling back how much the AI is showing up and making improvements to it. So I don't know that we need to spend a ton of time on this in particular, but if the audience would be interested in perusing the directory of hilarious mistakes, we will provide a link for you later so that you can go find that. And I'm sorry, Alex, I'm not trying to rush you, but we got to rush.
- [04:13]
Carolyn Shelby
No, we got to rush. I mean, it's. There's a lot happening in AI, isn't there?
- [04:17]
Alex Moss
Well, yeah. So on the 27th then, because there was this backlash, Google updated their documents with how you can show web only results. If you do not want to see the AI overviews. The, the thing I find strange about this is if you don't want to look at that AI overview, you can just scroll past it. But apparently we needed to add some buttons because that's what Google does. So if you go all the way over to the more option, you can select web and it will just show you the regular web results and you can filter those out. And then if you have problems with the AI overviews, like, you know, it just advised me to do something dangerous or I completely disagree with the narrative that you're presenting as fact. How dare you. You can go click on that, learn more and it will let you give the appropriate feedback that they or may not take into consideration. But at least you've Done your due diligence and you've complained, look how easy.
- [05:14]
Carolyn Shelby
It is to navigate there. It's like saying, if you read, if you read clause 27B, subsection 1, appendix 78, you will find this really, really important, life changing term that's really important. But we've put it in the back end of some notebook that's in an archive in Minneapolis somewhere and you can only access it by pigeon. And it's just that it's going to go even worse. Right?
- [05:40]
Alex Moss
Yeah. I still think that if you're, if you don't want to see the AI overviews, you can just scroll past them. Just like if you don't want to, if you don't want someone to listen to someone on YouTube, like don't listen to them on YouTube. It's. If you don't like somebody on the radio, turn the radio off.
- [05:55]
Carolyn Shelby
Exactly.
- [05:57]
Alex Moss
But here we have it. There was a programmer who needed something to do and now we have this wonderful new feature to skip that. So after that, like immediately after that happened, Also on the 27th, coincidentally, the Google search internal engineering documentation was leaked. And this is, this was a very big deal for a few weeks and now it's kind of not a big deal anymore I think because people have sort of figured out that it's not, it's not the recipe, it's the ingredients for the recipe, but it is not the recipe exactly. There's nothing in this document that is telling you exactly what proportions or which ingredients are included. So it's just kind of an inventory of everything that's in Google's pantry. It's things that they're keeping on hand in case they want to add that into the recipe, but it doesn't actually give you the recipe. So we don't know how much of the click data they're using. We don't know how much, we don't know how many, how much of what they add into the recipe. But that doesn't mean that at some point they're not going to use this thing over here or this thing over here. So it's interesting, especially from someone who analyzes the algorithm to see what kinds of things they're tracking. The, the thing that I found the most interesting is they are absolutely, definitely keeping track of things associated with your domain forever. So there is really a permanent record. If you're American and you went to grade school here, then you would, you'd be familiar with the, the permanent school record. So if you, if you eat Clue in kindergarten, it may haunt you in Fifth grade kind of thing.
- [07:46]
Carolyn Shelby
But that again, that also implies that maybe there's a, there was a law back then that got you something on your permanent record that isn't important today. Like it was 20 years ago, do you know what I mean? Like, and vice versa.
- [08:01]
Alex Moss
Well, like bad links, remember it was a thing where people would go and you, you'd spam comment forums or comment spam in the forums and things like that and you would build all of these really gross links and then all of a sudden those links were bad, even though for a long time those links were fine. So they know that you did that in the past. Whether or not it haunts you in the future, I guess is an entirely different story.
- [08:28]
Carolyn Shelby
Yeah, felt like it was like smoking in the 60s, you know what I mean? Like you knew it was bad for you, but people still did it. Some people ignored the fact that it was unhealthy because they were addicted to it, you know, and didn't think it was bad practice. But, but there was a point in.
- [08:44]
Alex Moss
Time when they got small. Smoking was healthy though, and those people still got sick. So even if something was healthy at one point, it could become bad for you later. And conversely, just because something was considered bad for you in the beginning doesn't mean it's going to become good for you later. It's interesting to see, I think if you're interested in reading all of this, what bits of data they're collecting and then just keep that in mind, it don't cut corners because if you cut corners, you might accidentally be not optimizing something that does turn out to be important later, I guess, is the gist of it. So Google first, immediately after that, sorry, said that they weren't going to comment on the potentially damaging leak of this massive probe of information. However, Google then two days later said they are going to validate the leak and they're going to answer questions about it. So this was a, a quickly evolving situation.
- [09:47]
Carolyn Shelby
Yeah. And it was very interesting to see what was what people, how people, different SEOs reacted to the leak itself. There were some people who went straight on the, well, I'm now going to concentrate on this because leak implies X, Y and Z and other people have gone, well, it doesn't change anything really. Kind of A has validated some venue, it's B, kind of validated conspiracy theories that that may have been there, that that were denied or even ref rebuked by Google, I think. And that's what concerned other people, right, Is that Google said one thing and actually Something else happened. But if you go back to your pantry and you're. And your, I don't know, let's call it Big Mac sauce or something, you don't know if vinegar's in there. You know that vinegar's in the pantry, but you don't know if vinegar is actually being used in the sauce. Right. It doesn't mean that it is, means that it's there and whether they want to use it. Like you say, with the permanent record, maybe in 10 years time, vinegar all of a sudden becomes a more important part of the recipe because different, the different palette that people have on their search experience changes.
- [10:57]
Alex Moss
And I think when people got upset and said, oh, this confirms Google's been lying to us because they are using QLIK data and they said that they weren't using QLIK data in the ranking algorithm. We don't know, like vinegar, vinegar is used to make mayonnaise. Right. Maybe the recipe calls for mayonnaise. Answering the question, is vinegar in the recipe with no is not inaccurate because they didn't ask you, do you use vinegar to make any of the ingredients that are used in the recipe? So I don't think technically Google ever lied to us. I think they've always been very careful about how they answer questions and naturally they don't want to tell you exactly what the algorithm is because people will game it and this is why we can't have nice things. But it's, Yeah, I don't, I don't think this was the, the terraforming Earth reforming thing that people all thought it was going to be. There we go. Shortly after that, Google announced that the AI overviews that everyone was very upset about prior to the leak are in fact here to stay. But there were going to be some improvements and they even named it after an SEO named Lily Ray who's been doing a lot of work researching the overviews, tracking sites that were abusing it or being, or being wronged by the AI overviews and then referring those things to Google so Google could investigate. So it's really, it's kind of cool to see that they are in fact listening to people and taking outside feedback and information and using that to make decisions.
- [12:43]
Carolyn Shelby
Yeah, yeah. I found the next slide was quite cool observation from Mark Williams Cook fellow SEO, who actually noticed inside the documentation itself, which was created by Dixon Jones. He made it. So to answer the question, Laurie, I don't have the link on me, but I'll make sure it's in the replay thing in the email of, of Dixon Jones's searchable documentation. But in here anyway, there's actually an attribute called tweeted by Lily Ray. So she's named in here, which I think very says a lot about her in terms of influence where it actually indicates if she's pulled something out as abusive or incorrect to actually forward it to spam brain for further scoring and analysis. Now I thought that was good because Lily Ray is, she does remind me of a good Samaritan. And I know that she's been getting a lot of heat from some, some followers and SEO fellow fellows out there, but I agree with what she's doing. You know, she's just pulling out abuse and closing the gap. I think the only heat that she may be getting off people is they realizing that that job of, let's face it, black hat SEO and bad results, they're doing it on purpose. They know they're doing it and they're actively doing it and she's calling them out.
- [14:05]
Alex Moss
Yeah, it's kind of hard to be like, how dare you expose me for beating my wife? You know? Yeah. Do you think that's gonna happen?
- [14:15]
Carolyn Shelby
But yeah, no, she's, she's a good egg and it's proven in the stuff that she does to the point that it's something to consider by the platform itself.
- [14:25]
Alex Moss
Yeah. So congratulations to Lily. This is awesome bragging rights for her. Moving on. News that is not AI related and Google leak related, thankfully on June 3rd, which was my birthday by the way, Mobile First Indexing transition was announced that it would be fully complete as of July 5th. So starting on July 5th, all websites are only going to be crawled with the googlebot smartphone crawler, which completes their transition to the Mobile first index. Realistically, your takeaway from this is, oh gee, that's interesting because honestly, when was the last time you encountered a website that didn't work on mobile?
- [15:05]
Carolyn Shelby
I don't know. I'm sure there's maybe a handful out there. I mean, I also think on a global level there are like countries that aren't as technologically developed, things like that, that may find it harder. But then again that'll be in a country origin where it may not be as much of a, a ranking issue, for example, or a visibility issue in, in a local form. But you know, we were trying to find a good mobile tester. They, they deprecate, Google deprecated the mobile validator and it's, I would say now if you want to check, you know, pick up your phone and go on the website and see if it's Mobile friendly. Also make sure that it's crawled by Google Mobile Bot which you can do through search console. You can check through Page Speed Insights as well, usual performance performance thing and looking in the bigger details there and of course looking your core web vital reports and your stuff in the in search console. That will show you a poor mobile experience, but that's more on performance based rather than friendliness and crawlability.
- [16:08]
Alex Moss
I think from a WordPress point of view the biggest risk you're going to run with mobile indexing is that for some reason your theme has a bunch of different templates for menus that work either on desktop or just on mobile. And maybe you forgot to fill in a menu that shows up on mobile. So if you go to your website on your phone and the menu doesn't contain all the links that you expect it to contain, or it doesn't contain any links at all, God forbid, then you do have a problem and that is going to impact Google's ability to crawl your site because if those links don't exist on the mobile version of your site, then they do not exist, period. So maybe, you know, maybe it is a good idea just, just for the sake of peace of mind, open up your phone, go to the website, just make sure you can crawl around it as you expect you would be able to. And that should pretty much reassure you that you're going to be okay when this fully closes up on July 5th.
- [17:15]
Carolyn Shelby
Yeah, plus another point to the audience, if you haven't got a mobile friendly site now, get one. You know, it's not a huge cost, unless of course you're some massive legacy enterprise company. But at that point I would suggest that you have moved to a mobile friendly site by now and if not, and the boss doesn't want it, leave that team.
- [17:39]
Alex Moss
Moving on. Google's issued a statement about click through rate, which is what CTR is, and the helpful content update, which is hcu. They clarified that rankings aren't based solely on clicks or user reactions, which I think is kind of a a tie in to the Google leak where everyone was all of a sudden, oh, they're tracking this, it must all be related ranking. And again, just because they track it doesn't mean that rankings are based just on that or even largely on that. It just means that they're tracking it. I thought the the users voting with their feet comment related to AI overviews though was interesting. Users voting with their feet means that if you don't like it, you'll just leave and use a different product. And I find that intellectually dishonest. I, I find it, I find it intellectually dishonest to be, to be perfectly frank that they would say that because Google, Google knows their products are so enmeshed with everything we do. We can't just stop using Google. Most users, the vast majority of users are not just going to uninstall Google from their phone. They're not going to change the default brow or the default search engine from their client. They're not going to stop using Chrome. You can't just turn it off. It's not that easy. And I think to rely on users leaving as an indication that it's not good is willful blindness.
- [19:13]
Carolyn Shelby
Yeah, that is true. We were also discussing about CTR even as any part of a signal and the meta description which, which is famously not a ranking factor. But if, but if it's there to improve ctr, if you're on the SERP and CTR can be a consideration, then one could say that indirectly meta descriptions are something that would go into a ranking consideration. Right. I'm going to use the word consideration widely because of the signal system thing, but it's still interesting to know that, that they do think about a lot. It's just how much they think, how much they weigh, how much they take weight on each of these variables, which we don't know from the leaks. So it's still interesting to see. But I guess the message for everyone here would be make sure that you're not just automating things too much and make sure that even though meta descriptions aren't a ranking factor, kind of act like they are for the user. They're your shop window. That's your opportunity to get to win.
- [20:17]
Alex Moss
That click it's a little free advertisement, make it enticing and write for the user. Be helpful. Generating content for SEO is not why. No, you don't just generate content to attract the search engines. You generate helpful content that's going to benefit someone. Because if it doesn't benefit anyone, what is the point of it existing?
- [20:42]
Carolyn Shelby
Exactly. Yeah. What else has happened the next day. Yes, I'll take this. Google Structured data update may boost merchant sales. So from a technical point of view what Google have done is they've said that a shop owner can have an organization wide return policy. So let's say all of your products have a 28 day return policy. Now what they've done is they've said, well you don't need to say that on the page of every single product inside the structured data. What we're going to do is we're going to let you only mention it once on the homepage and that will, that will take effect for your whole website and that means that it will save space on source code. Essentially. It's good for the environment, I would say, in saving bytes, which may not seem like a lot, but when you add that to every single product that's being sold at every given time, that's a lot of bytes that are being generated. Furthermore, there was a conversation between me and a few other structured data nerds on Twitter, including Yano and Ryan from Shopify and someone else I forget, oh, the guy who runs Cossy Schema. And we were asking questions about, well, actually, what if you're a shop that's got 28 day returns policy, but actually these three products have a 60 day return policy and Google actually about 10 days later reaffirmed some of the text around that. So ensure if those three products do have 60 day returns policies, that you can override it on the product level. So that's interesting to know that they're doing that. As far as Yoast is concerned. One thing to know is that even though they've only just added the support now, and it's not in our products yet, it will be. But also know that the fact that it's not in today doesn't mean that nothing is working. It just means that the version one is running and this is version two, which is more optimized and will be in wherever it needs to be soon.
- [22:48]
Alex Moss
Well, I think it's great that they're taking that feedback and I also think it's great that they're trying to be sustainable and environmentally friendly because I, I think we all appreciate that.
- [22:58]
Carolyn Shelby
Yeah.
- [23:00]
Alex Moss
The other thing Google's done that's attempting to be helpful to everyone is they're saying now that you can recover from that helpful content update damage, which, to be fair, there were some websites that were severely damaged by that, hopefully with the next core update. The important thing to know here though is they said if the sites that were damaged make sufficient improvements. So if you're just sitting on your hands waiting for Google to magically come back and restore your traffic, I don't think you're going to find much satisfaction with the next core update. But if you've been doing the work, you may be rewarded, but there's no guarantees.
- [23:41]
Carolyn Shelby
Maybe I feel like it's that 10 loose variations of a word we may be able to think about possibly considering potentially giving you a little bit of authority back, like it's. It's like a promise within a promise within a promise. It's like a Chinese whisper promise. Right.
- [24:01]
Alex Moss
I actually went to training once where they told us that if you stack your qualifiers, the only qualifier that the people remember is the one immediately preceding the promise. But for legal reasons, all the other qualifiers get you off the hook. So you can say 30% of the time this works 100% of the time, and they'll remember 100% of the time. But you've told them that it only works 30% of the time.
- [24:30]
Carolyn Shelby
I love that. I love it. But it's the first time they've used the term HCU and recovery in the same sentence.
- [24:37]
Alex Moss
And that's promising. I mean, they're addressing it and they know that. They know that there were some sites that were just devastated by this. So hopefully, hopefully those sites that suffered the problems have been addressing the situation and will be restored soon.
- [24:52]
Carolyn Shelby
Yeah, I see a couple of people in the audience are like their sites have been decimated. I'm going to assume it may be HCU related. Hopefully that might be a little bit of solace for you guys and less of a headache for Barry Adams. I can see his sanity is being lost by the updates as well.
- [25:11]
Alex Moss
Google's also answered some this seems to me to be kind of a low level question, but they felt compelled to make a comment on it. On June 14, Google announced that the H1s and title tags don't need to necessarily match, but you should do whatever makes sense from a user's perspective, which I totally agree with. Avoid boilerplate text in your title elements. I think that's fair too. And those new AI features that we have in our product can help you avoid the repeaty everything looks the same except this one particular keyword is different kind of situation. So that's helpful. I would personally note that on new sites you are supposed to have the H1 and the title tag match, but the vast majority of people don't have to worry about that. So it is interesting that they felt compelled to talk about it.
- [26:09]
Carolyn Shelby
All right, a week later.
- [26:12]
Alex Moss
This is something you might want to cover.
- [26:15]
Carolyn Shelby
Yeah. So structured data can be output in various different ways. JavaScript is one way. However, Google's now telling you not to in an ideal world and just give out JSON, LD and encode in the HTML source itself, the flat code. That's something that I would have always said is best practice. Regardless of what Google would have said and regardless of whether I was working Yoast. One thing to know is that There is no JavaScript in any of Yoast schema output at all. So already best practice there. So thumbs up additional work to do for the same result.
- [27:05]
Alex Moss
Yeah, I would say the takeaway here is if. If you know you're using a plugin on your site that injects JavaScript or injects schema anytime the word injected is used, I'm going to go with they're doing it with JavaScript on the client side rather than on the server side. If you know, if any of those words mean things to you, you. You probably want to go check on that. But if those words mean nothing to you, I would wager you don't have anything like that installed and this probably isn't a concern for you.
- [27:39]
Carolyn Shelby
Yeah.
- [27:41]
Alex Moss
In other news, do you want to do the rundown?
- [27:45]
Carolyn Shelby
Yeah, sure. So, Kevin Indig, he wrote a David versus Goliath Part two How algorithm updates have become the biggest risk in SEO. Well, every update, I would say, is a risk to some SEO that's not doing the best of jobs. So I kind of agree with that. Product variant markup now generates rich results. That's good to know. Yarno, who's one of the schema structured data nerds, who I mentioned earlier, is like king nerd, I would say. Not what I wouldn't even describe as nerd. He's king in schema, he just knows all. So do read that if product variants are of interest to you. And then there's a bunch of stuff. Another couple of things about schema and why it's more important to use those things, but we're already doing best practice in the product. And lastly, five days ago, Google started doing an updated spam update in their algorithm. It says it rolls out up to a week, but it hasn't finished yet. And we're five days in, so there's still a couple of days for that to complete. There hasn't been too many reports on.
- [28:47]
Alex Moss
The changes about them though I haven't heard anything. So hopefully this wasn't too big of a. Too big of a disruption in the force.
- [28:56]
Carolyn Shelby
Yeah.
- [28:57]
Alex Moss
Let's go ahead and move on to AI news because I know we want to still have time for questions and we're getting low on time. Aleta Solis offered up a method for tracking AI overviews and how and the traffic impact. There's some tools available. I looked at the tools. They're a little. They're a little manual in manual in terms of there's a lot of manual labor involved in doing this. None of this is really automatic yet. But also AI overviews haven't rolled out everywhere. So I think if you're in the us, you like spreadsheets and you're interested in tracking AI overviews because you're worried about them, this would be something reasonable for you to go read. If you're only interested in AI overviews for the lulz and the popcorn right now, then just stay tuned. Once this is fully baked and fully deployed, there will be tools to track it. I don't. I don't see how. I don't see how the Internet could function if we don't have a means of tracking this. I just don't think we're there yet. So if you're interested in this, then please go ahead and check the topics and sources. There's a link to it. And if you're not interested, then stay tuned and we'll move on to other things that do interest you. Have you been seeing AI overviews in England yet?
- [30:27]
Carolyn Shelby
No, not me personally. I do know that Gemini as an app can now be downloaded on my Android phone. That happened while I was on holiday, which was around your birthday, because my birthday was about three days before that. So I remember being out of the country and I couldn't download it on my phone when I was out the country. But then as soon as I came back in the country I could. I've used it a little bit, but it's nothing like AI overviews on SERPs that I've not been getting at all on desktop.
- [30:58]
Alex Moss
So in the US at least, Google AI overviews are now only showing for about 15% of the queries instead of 84. We think this is a result of the fact that they were saying some strange things. So it seems like they're ratcheting it back to safer categories, safer terms. We do know that they are showing for a lot of healthcare queries, though. So if you say, you know, I have. I have the sniffles and I have a fever and my throat itches, what's wrong with me? It will attempt to answer it. Whether or not it advises you to drink urine, I can't promise. But we do know that Google is clearly making adjustments and, you know, continuing to refine the process as it's moving, as the train's in motion. And I don't think they're going to completely roll it back.
- [31:51]
Carolyn Shelby
No.
- [31:52]
Alex Moss
They've also issued a stance on AI translations and content drafting tools, and I think this is actually useful for our customers in particular. Have you read this article?
- [32:03]
Carolyn Shelby
Not in full, no. However, I Looked at these bullet points and I thought, well, this is not obvious stuff, but this is stuff that I would want to do as an SEO anyway. Right. I mean, I would assume without even clicking into it, I could tell the crux of the story would be don't copy, paste and then publish. Do something about it. Make sure you're moderating and approving it. Which I would have done. AI or non AI. Right. I would have. Unless I was speaking to. Unless I was using a human translator whose native tongue is that language and is also fluent in English, that I can completely trust that person's work. I think there would be a scenario where I would just copy and paste anything. Unless, of course, I was thinking about the search engine, which you're not supposed to do. So again, hence why this should be common practice anyway or best practice.
- [32:59]
Alex Moss
Yeah, I mean, AI is good, but AI might miss nuances or colloquialisms. There's always going to be. I think it's going to be difficult for AI to catch all of the nuances that native speakers would have when they say things. Even between American and British. I know that there's phrases that you guys use that sound wrong to my ear, like up and down the country. When you're describing something that's happening all over the country, you'll say up and down the country. We don't say up and down the country in the US because we're wider than we are tall. So we say, you know, coast to coast or all across the country. Yeah, we never, we never speak vertically because mostly we don't care about Canada. I'm kidding. Canadians. I'm kidding. It was a joke.
- [33:49]
Carolyn Shelby
I was, in my head, I was wondering what a country that's like a 45 degree line angle would say up and up and down to the right.
- [34:01]
Alex Moss
Yeah, that's a weird one. I don't, I don't know how they'd handle that. But. But the point is there's. There's little, there's little things like that that I don't know that a translator would catch because it would translate it. Those are words. Those are words. And it's logical to use those words in that order. It's just not logical to use those words in that order if you're speaking to an American audience. Yeah. So good stuff there. This one is fun because it has a bad word in it. I don't know if we're supposed to say bad words.
- [34:30]
Carolyn Shelby
I don't know if we are allowed to say perplexity is a machine, but you just did. So it's okay if I can say the title, why not? But this, this kind of article would say. So let's, let's explain why.
- [34:47]
Alex Moss
So Perplexity is an AI and it is according to Wired, crawling and including sites that explicitly have said that they do not want to be crawled and included in AI LLMs or used to train your AI. And Wired has evidence, and I think it's fairly strong evidence that they have in fact been crawled and it is being used and they're mad about it. So this is interesting for a number of reasons. Reason number one is if I were a lawyer, I think I could make the argument that you can't really prove that we crawled your content and we're just, we're just spinning your article or rephrasing your article to answer the question because there's only so many ways you could answer a question. So think about any question. There's only so many ways you can answer it succinctly and accurately. And there's only so many different words that you can use to assemble that sentence. And there's a specific order in which that sentence needs to be assembled. So that narrows down the likelihood that it's going to be written in the same way that you've written yours to. You know, odds are pretty high. That being said, Wired is saying not only did you answer the question the way we answered the question, but you used two of these same words that we used, just not next to each other. And they were specific words, disingenuous. And I think I forget what the deceptive. Disingenuous and deceptive were the two words that they used. There were other words they could have, that AI could have used besides disingenuous and deceptive, because those words have synonyms and those are not the only slash best words to describe that situation. Wired has a point. I think lawyers could make an argument, maybe not successfully, that perplexity did or did not violate these rules. But a lot of this goes down to it's not actually illegal to disregard a robots txt. Robots txt is not enshrined in law. It is a recommendation. It is request. It is not. It's not a law, and it's not illegal. So does that mean that everything that we write is available to the AIs? I think it does. And I don't know that there's anything we can do about that.
- [37:20]
Carolyn Shelby
Not a law yet.
- [37:23]
Alex Moss
Maybe there should be a law. But then who gets to decide that law and it in what country and.
- [37:31]
Carolyn Shelby
All of that and. I don't know, I mean, you just look at things like consent and the consent parts and stuff, and opting out of analytics is just still crazy now, years on, right? Yeah, but that's for another day. Hey, we are, we're at 10, two and we only have a couple of slides left before Q and A, which I think we, we did well on time, didn't we?
- [37:50]
Alex Moss
Yeah. So let's go through this one kind of quick. This is WordPress News. So there was a test. Core web vitals were checked. The TLDR is that everybody declined in performance except for Duda. And of the decliners, WordPress declined the least. So of the losers. I don't. Losers is a bad word. WordPress was the winner of the losers. The winner of the losers bracket. Is that a soccer thing?
- [38:20]
Carolyn Shelby
Yeah, I mean, I can.
- [38:22]
Alex Moss
The point is things are getting. Things are, things are declining. As things get more complex, they perform slower. But Duda as a CMS seems to be doing better than the others. So take that however you like it. I don't think this means everyone's going to be abandoning WordPress in droves. And actually, where would you go? Because everyone else did worse. So hooray for WordPress. The next big announcement was Automattic, which is the company that, that owns WordPress, effectively created. WordPress has a new agency program which is going to help People monetize, especially WordPress development agencies or people that specialize in developing websites. It's going to help them monetize WordPress better, which should hopefully help the gospel of WordPress spread throughout the land.
- [39:18]
Carolyn Shelby
Cool. And as well as automatic. I mean, within the same time we had. Yeah, we have Bluehost offering same thing, don't we?
- [39:28]
Alex Moss
And Bluehost is offering a new agency program also for WordPress agencies. So if you're interested in, if you are an agency and you're looking for excuses to promote a specific hosting company, you can check this out and it will tell you all about it. I think bluehost had one other thing that they announced they did. They announced an AI WordPress website creator, which I believe is supposed to create a full functioning publishable website in minutes based on answering questions. So that's also kind of cool, especially if you're running an agency and you know, if you have a fixed project price and you can finish that project in 10 minutes, that dramatically increases your, your hourly rate when you, you know, do the math on that. So always in favor of that, you help them with. Was this the one you helped them with? Or did you help them with the agency offering?
- [40:25]
Carolyn Shelby
Agency offering stuff. The. This website crates. I've seen a video demonstration of it which was pretty cool because I'm quite skeptical on stuff like that in general until I actually see it happening and. And got to explore the produced. And it wasn't. It. It wasn't. Not good. Which is a good thing. You'd have to use the double negative there. Right. But it was. It worked well. So. Yeah. And that's all of our WordPress news.
- [40:55]
Alex Moss
It is. So we've got one announcement for Yoast. Do you want to take this? Because I know you were instrumental in the application.
- [41:02]
Carolyn Shelby
Yes. We have been shortlisted as a finalist in the Global search awards of 2024. Woo us. I know. For the best global search software tool. So with any luck, we'll be a winner of that and we'll let you know in September's edition about the results. Or we ju. If we don't win, we just won't share and we'll forget all about it.
- [41:25]
Alex Moss
Yeah. We just won't talk about it.
- [41:28]
Carolyn Shelby
Yes.
- [41:28]
Alex Moss
All right. That's it.
- [41:31]
Carolyn Shelby
Yes. Other than that, I guess it's the next SEO update, which is on the 30th of July or July 30th, however you want to take that. And you can sign up with a link that will be sent to you in tomorrow's Digest email.
- [41:45]
Tako Verdanskott
Yeah. Or you can click the link below because the green button is now the link to the sign up for the next SEO update.
- [41:56]
Carolyn Shelby
Amazing. Amazing. So we kind of made it. Considering we were 12, 13 behind, I think we're doing good. It depends what the Q and A is like, though. What do we think?
- [42:09]
Tako Verdanskott
It's going to be busy. We have quite a few questions for those who haven't posted their question yet. You can still do it. Go over to the Q A section. That's the little speech bubble with the question mark in it on the right side of your screen. I'm not sure which one's right because I know this thing is mirrored. Head over there, upvote your favorite questions and definitely post your own question there if you have one. The most upvoted question is something that we briefly touched on earlier, but I think you may have some valuable insights here because James says my traffic has been so low following the Google Core updates in the last six to eight months. And how are we supposed to recover from this? And are there any yost unique tips and tricks we can use to help us?
- [43:06]
Alex Moss
So I would say there's a couple things if you have helpful content and you're positive that your content is unique and useful to people. If, if you're doing everything right and you cannot find anything that you are, any areas in which you are wanting, the problem might be that the links that you had coming into your site that helped create your domain authority, if they got hit and they're not valuable anymore, that decreases your value. And that might not be something you can directly control, but you can seek out new linking opportunities to help rebuild that authority. So if there's, I mean, you have to do a very objective evaluation of your own site and if you are positive there's nothing that you've done that is wrong or could be done better, then you have to start looking outside of you. And I think it's probable that if you look in your backlink profile, some of the sites that were linking to you may have also been hit. And then that's going to decrease the value that's flowing into you. That would be my.
- [44:17]
Carolyn Shelby
I would also add, whilst you've still got time to do comparisons, just quickly go back in Search console, because they only do comparison six months to six months. So knowing that the HCU of last year happened in mid September, you've only got up until mid September to compare with the data before you got hit. So have a look at that. Even though you have 16 months in total, you can't have those comparison handy comparison tables. So every day that, Every day that now that data's getting less helpful to you, and by the time it's the end of September, it will be of no use.
- [44:53]
Tako Verdanskott
All right. And Carolyn, I heard you say find new backlinks. Does that mean go to a website and buy a bunch of them?
- [45:03]
Alex Moss
Absolutely not. That is wrong. And I would never encourage that because that is wrong.
- [45:08]
Carolyn Shelby
No, Taco, no.
- [45:10]
Tako Verdanskott
I knew the answer. I just wanted on record for everyone who's watching. Yeah, don't buy any shady links whatsoever, okay?
- [45:20]
Alex Moss
Especially not one where they're promising you. We can get you a thousand backlinks in a month. The more they're promising, the less likely they are to be valuable. I mean, backlinks, quality backlinks are hard to acquire. And anyone that's promising you a quick fix is trying to sell you a bridge.
- [45:41]
Tako Verdanskott
All right, I do like that. In the comments, people are fully agreeing with my statement. No, they're not. All right, so we have Giuseppe, who asked something similar. How much will it take for Google to reevaluate things? We touched on that before, of course, as well. In the next core Update might be the moment to do this. No other way to speed this up.
- [46:19]
Carolyn Shelby
There's no fast track, there's nothing like that. There's no queue skipping.
- [46:26]
Alex Moss
You could try taking out your sitemap and then resubmitting your sitemap. I mean, if you're desperate and you want to just try something, it's, it's. That is sort of like pushing the elevator button multiple times. I don't know that it's going to make it move any faster, but you might feel better if you do it.
- [46:46]
Tako Verdanskott
All right, maybe placebo effect, but it might feel nice. Gotcha. On a different topic, we touched on the mobile indexing in one of the articles and Brooks asking so if a link doesn't exist on mobile, it doesn't exist to Google. Does that mean that when we hide things on mobile for UX like sidebars, it will hurt Google's understanding of Cornerstone content without all the inner linking exposed on mobile?
- [47:22]
Alex Moss
Yes.
- [47:29]
Carolyn Shelby
Concise answer you can get. Right.
- [47:32]
Alex Moss
So that was a well formed question and it can. And I can answer it in one word. Yes, it will hurt. You have to. If you need Google to be aware of those links, they have to be exposed.
- [47:44]
Tako Verdanskott
All right, so that means making your mobile pages longer or being smarter about it.
- [47:54]
Alex Moss
How.
- [47:54]
Tako Verdanskott
How would you then solve it?
- [47:55]
Alex Moss
There's usually in mobile the menus will come out from the side. So if it, if you can access the link, if you can make the link visible, then Google can see it. But if you've hidden it such that it is inaccessible and does not physically exist on that mobile page, then that's bad. So a lot of the themes I see have like a little hamburger menu and if you click it, it pops out and then all of your links will be there. So if that's the case, you're fine. But if it literally, if it literally does not exist, then that's bad.
- [48:30]
Tako Verdanskott
All right. That's a very clear answer. As was the yes. All right. I think we have time for one or two more questions. Let's see, this been upvoted quite a bit as well. It's from Dabney asking. My site's been around for over 25 years, but our initial descriptions are non descript. What do I gain and lose by changing them to more descriptive ones like meta descriptions?
- [49:03]
Carolyn Shelby
I was going to assume so if, if Dabney, you're here in the chat still do clarify, but we'll answer as assuming it's a meta description. If you don't answer, I would say if they're not descript. Make them more descript and relevant. Increase that potential for ctr. What you lose is a lack of visitors and what you gain is potential increased visitors. I'm not saying that it's a ranking factor because there's, like we said, even in this session it isn't. But CTR is potentially also tracked and increasing that will increase visibility. Blah, blah, blah, blah blah. The snowball effects of brand authority and domain authority.
- [49:46]
Alex Moss
I think if you're going from something that is vague and useless to something that is useless, there is low risk of damaging things. I mean, I'm not comfortable saying the risk of damage is ever zero, but I would say that the risk of damage is incredibly low.
- [50:06]
Tako Verdanskott
All right, thank you very much for that, Dabney. If you're still around and you want to clarify in the chat, please do so. Then let's scroll through the questions because quite a few popped up and I think we have one interesting one that you might have interesting insights on, and that's by Umer. During a hosting switch, the website address was accidentally changed from using www to without using the www. This caused all of our internal links to become external links. We are gradually fixing them back. But how much will it affect our website's backlinks and online presence?
- [50:56]
Alex Moss
So first of all, this should be a quick fix because you can go into the back end in the database and do a global search and replace and fix all of your URLs. So I hope everything is fixed. You should have good 301s though in place to catch the none catch the dub. I'm confused about where you're at right now. You should always catch.
- [51:25]
Tako Verdanskott
We're now back to using www is what Amir said.
- [51:30]
Alex Moss
Okay, just to be on the safe side, make sure that you have 301s in that catch the non dub dub dub traffic and do a 301 rewrite to with the www and then make sure that all of your internal links are correct. And like I said, you can do that on the back end with a search and global search and replace in the database itself. Did I cover everything there?
- [51:58]
Carolyn Shelby
Search and replace. Make sure a competent dev does search and replace and does it on staging before they publish anything. Htaccess rules that would be good. Nat catches anything that's non dub dub dub sends it to dub dub dub. I think you you're all set after that, to be fair. Oh, sorry. There's nothing more that you can do after that point.
- [52:21]
Tako Verdanskott
All right, yeah, thank you very much for that. That was the last question for today. Again, a big thank you to our audience for sticking with us despite the initial problems that we had with the stream. You've been amazing and super supportive. Carolyn, Alex, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom again. And I know that you'll be back next month with more fantastic news from the field of SEO. Thanks everyone, and happy optimizing.
- [52:55]
Alex Moss
Bye.