← The Yoast SEO podcast
The Yoast SEO podcast
Google’s core & spam update, Core Web Vital changes, and more | #SEOUpdateByYoast
00:59:23
Loading summary
Transcript127 lines
- [00:01]
Tako Verdonsgrad
Welcome and thanks for listening to the March 2024 SEO update by Yoast. My name is Tako Verdonsgrad. I'm the Head of Relations at Yoast, and today I'll be your host. In this month's update, our SEO experts Carolyn Shelby and Alex Moss will take you through the latest news in SEO. They'll discuss the latest Google Core and spam update rollouts, explain why interaction to Next Paint is replacing first input delay as a core web vital and introduce list. Read Google's new Head of Search. In other news, they also Discuss the upcoming WordPress 6.5 release, which includes many new features. And they'll discuss the introduction of bluehost Cloud. After all of that, I'll be back for the Q and A where Alex and Carolyn answer our audience's questions on all things SEO. Sit back, relax, and enjoy this episode of the SEO Update by Yost.
- [01:01]
Alex Moss
Okay, fine. Well, let's, let's get through it. It's been not the most amount not, not not the biggest quantity of news items, but I'd say the quality of the news items is one to talk about this week. I know this what we usually do SEO news and we'll go out through any AI news that's been happening, which has been quite a bit as well. Then we'll see if there's anything happening in the world of WordPress. And lastly, do any announcements about Yoast as a product and a company. And lastly, we'll go through Q and A. As Taco mentioned before, you can feel free to chat using all the icons on the right, but if you look at this one over here with the question mark in there, if you want to ask any questions, Carolyn and I may be happy to help you. So yeah, what next? Where can we get the updates after this? You can get that from our short URL, can't we?
- [01:57]
Carolyn Shelby
And I never know how to pronounce this. It's Yoast. Yoa StUpdate March 2024. The recording will be available later. You can also go to yoast.comwebinars and you'll find all of our current and upcoming webinars, plus links to the videos from the old webinars. So if you have any questions or you want to just revisit some of your favorite Yoast memories, that's where you would go.
- [02:24]
Alex Moss
Yeah, and also we've got if you don't not just listening to us, right? You can get how to Start with SEO, which is great for beginners just starting out and wanting to learn a bit More. Whereas this one's, you know, what's happening each and every month in the world of SEO, WordPress and AI.
- [02:42]
Carolyn Shelby
And I'm fairly certain. So we did have a bit of an argument about this this morning. Originally it said bi weekly. I think they're semi monthly. And if you're confused about the difference there, biweekly is every other week and semi monthly is twice a month on specific days. I believe these are the first and last Wednesday of the month. But it's entirely possible that I'm wrong. The way to find out is to follow that QR code, go to the page and check the next date. So please, by all means, if I have planted my flag on the wrong hill, please let me know. But I do think it's semi monthly.
- [03:17]
Alex Moss
Yeah. Two a month. Two a month. There's two a month for you to choose from and you can go to as many as you like. And if you're on mobile or anything, you can scan that QR code right there. But I'm going to remove it now because we've got to go through the SEO news. Oh, what's happened? What's happened this month? Well, tell me more about core updates and spam updates, Carolyn, because there were both. They happened at the same time.
- [03:46]
Carolyn Shelby
Yeah. So Google has gotten into this, this phase where they're rolling out tons of updates either at once or stacked on top of each other. The latest core update, they said, could take up to a month. I think we're like three weeks into it at this point. They're urging patience, which I know no one has and no one wants to exercise before deciding how they're going to react to the update. I heard some chatter and some examples on X and around the community, especially over the weekend. People are saying, I don't know if I got hit by the update. And the response that came back was, I assure you, if you got hit, you would not be asking that question. So I think the consensus is if you saw a catastrophic drop in traffic, congratulations, you've been hit by the update. If you're asking yourself, I wonder if I've been hit by the update. You haven't, because you would know the three new spam policies that Google is implementing. One is expired domain abuse. This one confuses me a little because I'm pretty sure this has always been a thing. Maybe they're just making it more clear. Expired domain abuse is where you go out and you register an expired domain for. Because it ranked well and because it was doing well when it was active and it's still got a lot of valuable backlinks to it. So what you're doing is you're trying to capture all of those old backlinks and redirect that authority to your new site. In my experience, this has never worked well unless the expired domain that you captured was directly relevant to your current website and you could set up direct 3011 to 1301 redirects from the valuable backlink that was coming in from, say, Wikipedia to directly relevant, analogous content on your new site. And if you can't do that, you kind of wasted your money. And the boost that you're going to get from that expired domain, unless it's a type in, is going to be diminishing over time. Scaled abuse. Scaled content abuse, which is churning out AI contents, really AI copy at mass scale. I like this one because Google can tell that the rate at which you're putting out new copy is just inhumanly fast. And if it's inhumanly fast, chances are it wasn't done by a human and then they're going to take an extra look at it and they're going to ding you. So if for some reason you are in that category where you're putting out more content than Google believes that you're capable of putting out, the solution there is just, you know, slow your roll, make it, I don't want to phrase it like this, I don't want to phrase it like, make it look human because it should be human. But slow your roll. Don't do something insanely fast, inhumanly fast, because it will be interpreted as inhumanly fast. And then the reputation abuse. I'm a big fan of this one because it's always bothered me that people with a lot of money could rent or borrow subdomains from high authority sites like newspaper sites. Not to name names, but the Tribune used to do this all the time where they would like coupons.the newspapername.com they would sell or rent out to a coupon site or directory site. I hated those directory sites too. Probably shouldn't say that, but it was low value sites and they were ranking almost instantly because they were directly attached to those big authority sites. Google's really coming down on that now and saying that if you have these low value sites that you're putting on your subdomain, it's going to adversely affect the primary domain and no one's going to be willing to murder their golden goose for whatever profit they're making from those subdomains. So I'm Happy about that one.
- [07:45]
Alex Moss
Yeah.
- [07:46]
Carolyn Shelby
According to this, it completed on the 20th. So we're six days. Six days post, I think. I think if you had something to worry about, you would already be aware that you have something to worry about. And if you don't have, if you're not yet concerned and you're not yet running around like a chicken with your head cut off, then you're probably, you probably survived this round, which is, which.
- [08:07]
Alex Moss
Is at least good to note. Like the bandages or band aid has been taken off. Right. Already. Yeah, you don't have to. You don't have to know anymore. Although from a core update, you don't know anything yet because it's not, it's not complete yet. So it's been three weeks today, I believe. Yeah, three weeks today. And it's not, it's not completed rolling out. I would suspect it'll be done within the next month. But there has been volatility. I think Barry Schwartz noticed there was volatility overnight, which may signify signaling the beginning of the end of the rollout, maybe.
- [08:43]
Carolyn Shelby
Or is it the beginning of a new rollout? Because they've been rolling them out so close, it's almost like we're in a continuous rollout cycle.
- [08:49]
Alex Moss
Yeah. Which is annoying because they do say that they try to avoid rolling more than one update out at a time, but this one literally happened on the same day and one's still happening. Who knows? Who knows what they tell us anymore?
- [09:04]
Carolyn Shelby
Yeah, you really have to dissect what they say.
- [09:08]
Alex Moss
Well, at least on the other side of things, Bing are actually telling us more now as a site owner, which is great. Bing Webmaster Tools, they're adding features to what's already. I've always found them kind of useful. And even though they are the underdog, the amount of random posts and updates I've seen about people who diagnose something in Google. And then they'll also, of course, look in being Webmaster Tools and they'll see different issues or issues that are more important to, you know, Bing's platform that again, enhance what's happening on Google. So it is definitely good to have a look at everything. And Index now is even better. And if you haven't read enough on Index Now, I will paste the link to the blog article that Fabrice, I forgot his last name. Carolyn Canel, who's basically the Bing Webmaster Tools face, has explained more. So, so the updates happened on the 5th, but this one over here that I'll put in now tells you much more about it. And that was written on the 21st. But yeah, no, it's really interesting to see that they're adding more and more insightful stuff and actionable things in there. So it is more of a workable dashboard in there. One thing I also did notice, although they didn't announce it anywhere, is that they may provide up to 24 months of data because I believe it's only six or something at the moment. So it isn't the best subset of data that you can look back on historically, but none of that's confirmed that was in some Mastodon or extra.
- [10:40]
Carolyn Shelby
It would be interesting if they can offer up to 24 months because GSC only offers 16 months. So that would be, you know, I can't do math a lot more.
- [10:53]
Alex Moss
Yeah, but it's easier to do those year round reports. I find 16 months, it's is a bit of a random number. It's neither here nor there. I don't know, there must be a logic behind it. I thought maybe it was, you know, turning the volume up to 11, let's find out.
- [11:09]
Carolyn Shelby
But no, well I, you know, two year reports could be directionally interesting. So I would be, I would be a fan of that. Or maybe they're just doing 24 because it's slightly higher than 16. You know, either way I'm, I'm always a fan of more data but I understand that it's expensive to house all of it.
- [11:30]
Alex Moss
Yeah, yeah, but, but yeah, there'll be more stuff coming from Bing I'm assuming quite soon, which is quite cool. So the next interesting one is Google actually delivered manual penalties which they kind of haven't done in this way for quite some time, if at all kind of in my memory, maybe it was two or three times that they may have done it like the way that they've done it.
- [11:55]
Carolyn Shelby
I've never seen it go out in such big batches like this before. But the people that are. Nobody in my circles has been hit by these manual penalties and it's probably because I don't really hang out with spammers but it seems like they're getting serious about making examples of people and putting, you know, the fear of God into the spamming community.
- [12:21]
Alex Moss
Yeah. And I mean we've both been in SEO long enough to remember the BMWs and the Inter floras of the world where, you know, the context of audiences who weren't around there. This was the, I would say the wild west of SEO where you could do anything. This was pre Panda, pre Penguin update. BMW made essentially these abuse. Yeah. Doorway pages. They did, they did that. And still stomping down on it now and into Flora. I forgot exactly what they did. But all I remember is that Google knocked them off a lot of their organic rankings on 10 February, noting that.
- [13:03]
Carolyn Shelby
Before Mother's Day.
- [13:04]
Alex Moss
Yeah, so it was before Mother's Day, did you say?
- [13:08]
Carolyn Shelby
Yeah, I think it was before British Mother's Day.
- [13:11]
Alex Moss
British Mother's Day. And you've got Valentine's Day and this is a flower brand. You know, they'll get hit hard. That's like, like, that's like penalizing a Christmas shop in December.
- [13:23]
Carolyn Shelby
They were. Well, they were. That was back when they were hand picking people to hold up as being the cautionary tale. And now it seems like it's just a lot more. We're just going to hit everybody and then you can all go cry to each other about it.
- [13:37]
Alex Moss
Yeah, but I think it may get the confusion of. Well, not confusion, the heated discussions that have been on X all this month and on how people interpret everything that Danny Sullivan said. I do not envy his role right now because as soon as one thing is answered he. Not his own fault, you know, the community will ask five more questions which he then has to elaborate on which then creates five more questions and the web just opens and everything's into. Maybe this is the way of being. This is into Flora and BMW. But you can't just do it with one site. You maybe have to do. Quite a few sites give out manual penalties to quite a few that have different scenarios and therefore there's no pattern. Or maybe there is a pattern of what exactly each one does and people are trying to find that pattern. Also it will show that there's many variables that go into why you may get a penalty nowadays and much more sophisticated ways of being able to identify that abuse. I would say this is a lot.
- [14:43]
Carolyn Shelby
More data points though. So with all of these additional data points it should be easier for the community to kind of triangulate what exactly the problems are and mitigate those. At least that's why I would be a fan of the broad based issuance of the penalties so that we have hundreds of data points instead of just this one company. What are they doing wrong?
- [15:07]
Alex Moss
Yeah, and it is, it is annoying because you do see some people who are genuinely believe that they are producing helpful content, whether or not that's subjective or not. But there are so many examples of. If you look at why they're penalized you will go, yeah, fine, they should have been penalized, like it. But then you do get this minority, or maybe it's not a minority of webmasters who've been pumping out content for years and years and years, but it's not publishers game as much as it used to be. Maybe that wild west is ending.
- [15:41]
Carolyn Shelby
I, I come across lots of sites that don't know they've been hacked and, and don't know that they've got a problem. And hundreds and hundreds of pages that you don't know about that have bad content on them would be enough to color your entire site. So I wonder how many of these are. Especially when it's, we're a reputable company where we're a nonprofit, we help people. But it turns out that frequently it's these small, these small helpful sites that don't have the best, they don't have world class security teams, you know, working for them 24 hours a day and it's easy for them to get hacked and they don't know that they've got a problem. So it's, it'll be a wake up call either way.
- [16:25]
Alex Moss
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And not only have Google been dishing out manual penalties, AI content websites have been de indexed. And by the way, for the audience, this isn't something that Google has just gone out and been blatant. They've not announced anything. This is observations from other SEO experts in the industry who look specifically at hip types. They're seeing that sites that happen to have a lot of AI generated content got de indexed. And you know, I like to sit there thinking, well who? Oh well that's captain obvious, right? That eventually if you do too much AI scale content and you were probably showing off about it in December, weren't you, when all the HCU updates were hitting unhelpful content but not AI gen produced content is now maybe they may be deleting those tweets as much or they'd be in ratio now, aren't they?
- [17:24]
Carolyn Shelby
I know, at least from past history, if you found a tactic or a trick that you were using to manipulate Google and then you talk about it and you announce it and you brag about it to the community, don't think they don't pay attention to that. Don't think they don't go, oh, oh, I see what you're doing here. I'm going to go, I'm going to dig a little bit more into what you're doing. I wonder if that's a violation of the, oh, look, it is a violation. Now we're going to clamp down on it because you made a lot of noise. So it's almost not in your interest to brag to everyone that you found an exploit that's going to make everyone a million dollars because it will shorten the amount of time that it's making people money and it will increase the amount of scrutiny that is going to get paid to that particular trick.
- [18:14]
Alex Moss
I would go as far as to say I would then create a stopwatch from the moment that you make that tweet or update or whatever you do and see make bets with your friends on how long it will take for your domain to get penalized or de indexed because that's what will happen if you keep trying to abuse stuff. Right?
- [18:31]
Carolyn Shelby
Matt Cutts used to have a little black book that he kept like a little notebook and every now and then he'd pull it out and he'd just start writing things down. And I'm positive he was writing down websites to go look at later to see if they were doing anything naughty.
- [18:45]
Alex Moss
Yeah. And people are even now in some of the paranoia of all these updates. I swear that there's people inside Google who are going back years on what's been doing well in the industry and what should be done here, there and closing all of those loopholes that have been all those processes of SEO that have been happening a few years ago that even Google told the audience to actually do are now being changed. Which obviously causes a bit of mistrust or distrust in Google. But we'll see where the AI driven content is going to go soon. The next thing I know is FID is gone and inp, which is interaction to Next Paint, has now been not only introduced because it was introduced about a year ago and Google did the whole hey, look at this for a few months and then it was look at this more seriously. And then they said this is going to be part of core web vitals. And now you can see it in Search console. But yeah, for people who don't know what IMP is, why don't you explain implementation to the audience?
- [19:56]
Carolyn Shelby
Carolyn so the difference between INP and FID is that INP indicates how quickly a web page is going to respond to a user's action, where FID is more of an early input metric. So it's looking at that was looking at the timing from when the user is first able to successfully interact with the website, which is a slight difference. INP is more of a gauge of how much lag the user is experienced experiencing when the site loads. FID was waiting until the user was able to actually do something. So I think what you'll see is that most of your scores are probably going to get better because I think the FID was just generally slower. INP is the way they're measuring it. I think more of you will find that you're doing better than you were when it was looking at fid. But if you are having problems, it's already showing in Core Web Vitals in the Google Search console reports. It's already providing feedback. You can get lighthouse reports on how to improve it. The improvements are kind of similar to the recommendations, are pretty similar to what the recommendations for FID were. The standard things, you know, limit the. Did the JS limit the main thread, blocking JavaScript, all that good stuff. The other interesting thing though is that the day after they made the switch, Google then confirmed that the core web Vital scores are used in the ranking system, which we all kind of knew. But it was nice to get that confirmation because the naysayers were then silenced. The nice thing about this all is we have a lovely blog post that explains all of this that Edwin wrote and you can go get it. It was just published@yoast.com INP interaction next paint.
- [21:59]
Alex Moss
Yeah, and that explains everything. And it also shows a bit of what it looks like on yoast.com and the improvements that were made there. But more importantly, this to me is a more natural metric to look at, a more sensible one anyway. It looks at potential human interaction and the way that someone would actually work with your site and have a journey through it rather than.
- [22:22]
Carolyn Shelby
We just had a question asking how Google is judging this and if they're using a bot or they're adjusting it as if it was a real human interaction. Core Web Vitals is actually sampled from real human interaction that Google is collecting over a 28 day rolling period. So the core Web Vital scores that you're getting, you can only get those if there is actual user feedback that that's coming back to Google. So pages that. Pages that don't get any traffic probably aren't going to really be. They're not going to be able to apply definite measurements to them. They have to have a certain amount of traffic in order to generate a score. So I would say please don't worry about the. Is it a bot? Is it a person? They are supposed to be using human feedback that they're using to calculate those scores.
- [23:14]
Alex Moss
Yeah. And also lastly, don't obsess about getting to 100%. Do not do that. Just make sure things aren't bad.
- [23:21]
Carolyn Shelby
If it's Green. It's good. You don't have to be 100%.
- [23:25]
Alex Moss
No, no, you don't. So next up is Liz Reed has been announced as the new head of search of Google. This might be interesting because me and Caroline were talking before and said she's not really been in the SEO realm of someone to read up about. And that's seemingly because she's not been in the general part search team and that actually she's been in the AI and product team for some time and that's where her background is from, which also says a lot about her new role and what the next year might bring. Right.
- [23:59]
Carolyn Shelby
The consensus seems to be that they're going, they and she, you know, by extension are going to be all in on AI. So I would, I would interpret this to mean that we can expect a lot more AI integration into the general.
- [24:13]
Alex Moss
Search experience, which is something we can chat about in the AI news.
- [24:18]
Carolyn Shelby
Yes.
- [24:18]
Alex Moss
Before that I went to Smex Munich. It was quite good. I thought I'd share very quickly some stuff that might, that might be good for people to think about. And Paddy Mugen, who've known me for years, been speaking at all the shows, he's great. He also had a cheat sheet on the best way to do E commerce product pages, which I'm sure you can search for. He said true strategy is about placing bets and making hard choices and the objective is not to eliminate risk, but to increase the odds of success. So I just found that interesting when everyone's going through a strategy is you shouldn't always be there for, you know, absolute figures right from the outset and that something is just placing a bet that something will succeed and that you don't actually know it's going to succeed until you actually partake in it. I just always found that was good. And it does go into SEO every day and with content production. The other thing I found interesting was what Rand Fishkin said. He said, we only spend 11 minutes a day searching and we spend so much time on our devices doing things that I actually thought even as an SEO, maybe it's because I am an SEO that I search more than the average person. But when you actually do come down to it and you think about it, how often do you actually spend on a Google on doing Google searches, do you want to do that as a verb in the day? And the answer isn't that much. And it just made me think that there's so much more to search in general because it isn't just about entering keywords, it's about just experiencing a whole thing. And now to me, search can be any form of discovery, whether you think you're searching for it or not. What do you think about the 11 minutes a day searching stat?
- [26:09]
Carolyn Shelby
It shocked me, to be honest. But then I thought about it and maybe I don't use. I don't use search as much as I think I do. I'd love to know where that figure came from because logically it doesn't seem right. But then I have a hard time coming up with hard facts to disprove it, so.
- [26:29]
Alex Moss
Well.
- [26:29]
Carolyn Shelby
And kids, though, the kids today, if I can sound like an old person getting off and wrong, they don't use search the way adults use search. They, they tend to ask questions in forums. They ask questions on. They'll search inside of other things. They're not using traditional search the way us oldies do.
- [26:53]
Alex Moss
Yeah. Which I also found interesting because even though it's not listed here, Jono Alderson, our previous SEO here at Yoast, he did a talk on contentless marketing and elaborated on conversational based searches that are happening. Which. Which is exactly what you're saying. It's more conversational where we're old school. I just type in the bare minimum short tail keyword for what I need at that moment and then I go from there. And actually it's the younger folk and therefore the future users who are going to use it in a much more conversational way.
- [27:25]
Carolyn Shelby
They seem to depend more on other people telling them things. And it's very annoying to me because my tendency is to say, well, let me go Google that for you, which you could do yourself. And they're like, no, just tell me, just tell me. And I don't know if that's saying they don't want to do their own homework or I'm just jaded, probably. I'm just jaded, probably.
- [27:46]
Alex Moss
But they want to know more, right? I don't know. I was very inquisitive as a kid. But let's not look, SEO's for the children, right? Everything's for the children. Which is. Next lesson is Will Reynolds, who quoted Lily Ray, which I love. This is don't confuse a loophole with a strategy. And that's exactly some of the previous stuff we've been saying with AI content. It's not a strategy, it was a loophole. And they closed it pretty quick. And that is just a prime example of don't try and abuse the algorithm, especially if you know that that's what you're trying to do, because it's cleverer than you and your loophole strategy. Loophole.
- [28:25]
Carolyn Shelby
Anything, anything that cheats the system is going to get closed, that loophole is going to get closed and that trick is going to get squashed at some point. So the only question is how long can you, can you make money off of it before it stops working?
- [28:38]
Alex Moss
Exactly. And Cindy Crumb actually, well, she, she kind of compared eat with like soup and you have lots of ingredients and there can be different methods and different ways of cooking the same thing. And what more of one ingredient can change the way that the soup tastes in general? But when you order soup, you don't. You get the soup, you get the mix and that's what you get. And you have to have different variations of each one. She's, she's. I think she's actually going to be uploading her talk to X at some point in the next few weeks. So someone, everyone do hound her for this video. I'm sure she'll share it if enough people do.
- [29:15]
Carolyn Shelby
Cindy's got a lot of great content so. And she, she'll upload content from almost all the talks she gives. So I, if you're not following mobile moxie on X, I would, I would recommend it. She's great.
- [29:27]
Alex Moss
Yeah. And lastly, Marcus Tober from Semrush, he said something interesting about SGE and the way it's taking over the normal. The normal organic SERPs. Right. And that the normal organic results there'll be less real estate. And he said if there'll be less real estate as time passes, this means that SEO will actually become more valuable because there's less real estate to fight for and therefore more competition. And when you do get those two places instead of 10, that is so much more of a win than being on position four of the old cert. I just found that really interesting. And in other news because there were other things, I'm going to whip through these very quickly. Google are releasing massive search quality enhancements. They said in March. It's near the end of March, so I'm going to assume hopefully in the next week which might delve a little bit more into content and general search quality and the way in which we should go about things. They also explain doubling down on AI content may be a bad idea. This was put in a couple of days before the actual the de indexation of the AI generated content. That was a good warning shot. Google replacing a perspective filter with forums filter because weirdly they probably just said should we say perspective. So it's not just forums. And realize that you can't hide. So we're just going to call it forums because it is kind of the same thing. We've got Google mitigating and migrating. Mitigating, migrating Safe Search. So I think this will may not even apply to anyone. Anyone who's running an adult based store of any kind. Anything to do with Safe Search is now inside search console for you. And lastly, Uber were unable to remove an Uber Eats button from Google business profiles which kind of sucked for people who didn't want it there. I don't know, I never read if that was even resolved. I haven't seen if it is resolved. I think it's still happening right now. I think that was about a week ago, wasn't it that that happened. Weird, weird. Hopefully they'll fix it.
- [31:33]
Carolyn Shelby
Yeah, those Google business profiles have been notoriously difficult to deal with and they seem like they've got a lot of problems. I think, I feel like that's a kind of a problem child product for them because there's so much competition and people are constantly trying to find ways to game it. I think they, I don't think the amount of trouble it's worth is worth the money that Google's making off of it. So they, they're just kind of like whatever.
- [32:00]
Alex Moss
Exactly. Well that's all the SEO news. Let's crack on with AI news. Let's both chat about the AI Act. It doesn't affect you at all. It's only in Europe at the moment, so it affects me amongst others. Interestingly, it's the first legal or sorry, not legal. Is it legal? It's a set of regulations around AI technology, how it can be produced. It add requirements and limits and other things that makes people stop doing what they want in AI systems and making something evil potentially. And this is actually expected to take effect by the end of the year.
- [32:40]
Carolyn Shelby
I feel like there's been movies made about limiting AI so that the robots can't kill us, but then the robots find a way to kill us anyway.
- [32:48]
Alex Moss
Yeah, well knowing that singularity may happen in what, five years that anything probably.
- [32:53]
Carolyn Shelby
Next year at this point.
- [32:55]
Alex Moss
Well they'll probably take that loophole is not a strategy and not adopt that and find every loophole possible that humans come up with and say we can't do that, you know they're going to be cleverer than us anyway. So hopefully they'll be able to control themselves instead of realizing we're only good for battery and power.
- [33:13]
Carolyn Shelby
Framework for AI has been established and Skynet's response was meh yeah, but at.
- [33:19]
Alex Moss
Least something's happening, right? And even the, even the leaders, at least we're trying.
- [33:23]
Carolyn Shelby
That's true.
- [33:24]
Alex Moss
Yeah. Yeah. Or it makes it seem as though we're trying, but yeah. And that goes into kind of a very long interview. If anyone has heard of, I don't know if it's Lex Friedman or Fridman. I learned today that it was Fridman. I don't know how you pronounce it, but very, very long interview and very in depth with Sam Altman going through lots of different stuff from OpenAI to, you know, this beef with Elon Musk and all of that kind of stuff. But in that he, he was talking a lot about the future of OpenAI, where AI in general was going, AGI, which is artificial general intelligence, which is, in short, for anyone who doesn't know too much about AI, the one that we should be scared of. If I actually define it, there is difference. In contrast, an AGI system can solve problems in various domains, like a human being, without manual intervention. So right now, AI is information gatherer. It just knows facts and things and then it tries its very best to be right. That's the current AI system. AGI goes beyond that into, well, it knows whether it's doing something right or wrong and then adapts to that immediately. Combating that is going to be a big thing for OpenAI. I think, like he said, mitigating bias as much as possible, making sure that these systems aren't negative on human evolution in general and that AGI and AI in general should just be helping humans. But one thing I did take away from it, which I did like, is its impact on jobs shouldn't be looked at so negatively. So we hear, and we've been speaking about in previous ones, is AI going to take our jobs? And maybe if we should cast our eyes back to the early 90s and the birth of the Internet and mass adoption of the Internet and people thought that their jobs were going. Now look at like the U.S. office and you look at a paper company going into a digital world, maybe a bad example, but actually it's about adapting to that new technology and taking advantage of those things and being a bit of an innovative with it. Right?
- [35:39]
Carolyn Shelby
Yeah. And one thing that, since you gave the newspaper example, one thing that we learned from adapting to new technologies is you can't use old traditional business models on these new technologies because they function so differently that if you try to apply the old onto the new without adapting for the new, it just, it doesn't work. Well, so there is a lot of retooling that needs to happen to some of these legacy businesses to make sure that they can continue to grow and survive with all of the changes that are happening.
- [36:16]
Alex Moss
Yeah, I'm just looking back at, you know, you look back 50 years and where the Internet didn't. This couldn't happen right now, this webinar, like none of this stuff could happen. And yet we've all kind of got jobs, despite the technology that's been put in front of us that we thought would have ruined those jobs. And yeah, if the Internet wasn't around, maybe I'd be a lawyer, but I wouldn't have been as happy. Right. I mean, this is much more interesting to me and it keeps us going because there's new stuff to learn all the time.
- [36:43]
Carolyn Shelby
And there are things that have. That have kind of phased out, like the Yellow Pages. When was the last time you got a phone book, a printed phone book? They don't. They don't even do those anymore.
- [36:52]
Alex Moss
So I got a phone book two weeks ago. We don't know why it was posted to us. We're never going to open it. Went straight in the bin. It was a waste of. Maybe that's just a contract. Someone's legacy contract is trying to stay alive as long as possible.
- [37:07]
Carolyn Shelby
I haven't seen a phone book in so long. You should save it for posterity.
- [37:12]
Alex Moss
Should start selling them in Antiques Roadshow or something. But the opposite of phone books is sge. So this is interesting. SGE is now being tested in a subset of a US audience with a subset of search queries. And I haven't been able to experience it because I'm in the uk. But you have, Carolyn.
- [37:34]
Carolyn Shelby
I have. So I will say that I use it for things that I, as an SEO, I probably should not like. I will ask it for answers to questions and then not go look at the website that it's referencing. If I do go look at the website, it's just to make sure that I got the entire answer or that the answer wasn't excerpted in a weird way. But I do believe that it's going to result in. In loss of traffic for websites, especially when it's just information gathering and it's not transactional. The other thing I noticed, and this is someone asked a question about this. I saw the. When you search for, let's say, a brand and it pops a carousel of recommended pages. The pages that came up and the primary page that was recommended for, for this brand name were not the brand's website. And that confused me. And what I saw that was that was a common thread amongst all the pages that were in the carousel was the brand name was first in the meta title and it was first in the H1. And it was mentioned in the first sentence in the body copy, once the body copy started, which is kind of a newsy thing to do. But when you look at how big businesses especially treat their homepages, the first word in your homepage title is often not the name of your company, it's the word home or it's your slogan. And then you, then you put your business name at the end. Whereas if someone's writing a review of your website, they'll have your business name first and they'll have it first and prominent. And that's what happened. We ended up with a lot of reviews of that business rather than pages from that business. And it was. I was able to manipulate that a little by going to the product's website and saying, okay, I'm going to take this page because I know that the SGE is already aware of it and I'm going to move some words around and, oh, look, I was able to get more of the pages into that carousel, but not quite overtake the first, the first results that it seems to me, especially in conjunction in consideration of. Lily Ray posted some things, some screenshots of spam sites showing up in the SGE carousel. The SGE carousel seems to be less picky about authority and less able to detect spam. Yeah, I don't know if there's a more elegant way to say that. Not that everything that it chooses is going to be spam, but it seems like its parameters are slightly less sensitive than the normal. The normal search algorithm is. So I think you might find in the SGE results things that would have betterwise filtered out or not promoted in the regular search rankings, which is going to be a tactic for a little while, but I assure you that that tactic is going to get squished.
- [40:41]
Alex Moss
Yeah, it's, it's interesting because some of Lily's examples are actually quite bad, I think. I think I remember seeing one that she went, went to an adult site for a brand term. I don't know who it was, but she actually tagged the brand in the tweet I just found that was. I mean, I guess, I guess there's, you know, the search team are reading every single Lily Ray update and taking it right back to the office. Anyway, so thanks for reporting it, Lily.
- [41:08]
Carolyn Shelby
I bet they're, I bet they're best friends with her.
- [41:10]
Alex Moss
Yeah. Yeah. But it's good though because it is a good form of data and hopefully by the time it goes out for mass adoption. So. So yeah, and let's see what's happening. It is interesting that they're doing the Updates now. Google IO, one of big light conferences is in mid May.
- [41:28]
Carolyn Shelby
I think you're onto something there. I think they're going to have a big announcement about it at that.
- [41:33]
Alex Moss
Yeah. And they did start publicizing that only a few days before they started this testing as well. So it's all part of press plan, right? All part of the press plan. Not say I knew. So WordPress news not much news this month except that WordPress 6.5 was about to be released today, but it's been pushed back a week probably to close some gaps and stuff like that. But scheduled to be released on 2 April. But there are lots of features, not just one or two. There's a couple of things here and it's actually a screenshot. You can actually upload your own fonts soon, which is great, which has been a real pet peeve of mine as a developer over the years and also which is great for editorial style revisions, not content revisions, which we've already kind of got already, but specific style revision. If the style of a page does change through time, you can see exactly who did it and when, which is great to see. They also have been doing a faster method of sorting out translations. That's just a performance update. And of course the Interactivity API, which is more of an advanced feature that I wouldn't think that the audience needs to go through. But if you do want to know more, of course we've written everything about it in a nice little blog post@yoast.com WordPress65 lastly, we've got Yoast News, so some products and company updates. The first one I'll do very quickly, very two quick updates in 22.2. A lot more improved key phrase detection and a lot of improved inclusive language stuff. So don't be not inclusive. Is it exclusive? Disclusive? I'm not the content person. I don't know what the word is, but don't be not inclusive. That's another office that thing. Don't, don't not bother someone.
- [43:32]
Carolyn Shelby
Don't be exclusive.
- [43:34]
Alex Moss
Don't be exclusive.
- [43:36]
Carolyn Shelby
Don't exclude people.
- [43:37]
Alex Moss
Inclusive. Marina has told us it's non inclusive. Thank you. Marina is non inclusive. So don't be non inclusive in your language.
- [43:43]
Carolyn Shelby
Don't be non inclusive. Okay.
- [43:46]
Alex Moss
Even Though we're just told your word for it. We're getting told big time in chat. And the last one is in 22.3. We've finally introduced the AI features into taxonomies. So it's not just in singular posts and post types and pages. So that's Yoast product update. And you can tell us more about bluehost Cloud.
- [44:09]
Carolyn Shelby
Bluehost Cloud is a big initiative that was just announced at WordCamp Asia. It's a hosting option that Bluehost is offering. They developed it in conjunction with Automatic, so it utilized. You know, sometimes people talk about managed WordPress hosting. This is WordPress hosting that only does WordPress. It's optimized for WordPress the entire breadth and height of the, of the tech stack. It's only for WordPress. So. And I believe I could be wrong, I believe it comes. It ships with Yoast kind of automatically. But the nice thing about it is that it is, it's targeted for heavier users for. So if you're a casual user or you have a small blog, this might not be for you. The prices are a little bit higher than what people are accustomed to with traditional shared hosting, which is very inexpensive. This, I believe starts at like $30 a month, which for managed WordPress hosting isn't off the charts bad. I don't even. That's actually pretty reasonable now that I think about it. Okay. Point is optimize for WordPress entirely. Great for speed, great for security. Availability. The SLA, which is the Service Level Agreement, includes 100% availability, which means you're up all the time. You get a dedicated special customer service and support branch. So they're just WordPress experts. They're just experts in the cloud. You don't have to go through three layers of regular support to get to the specialists. They shoot you straight into that. It sounds like a really, you know, it's a really great product. There was, there was a lot of work done. There was a lot of, a lot of preparation. They're really proud of this and it was, it was exciting to see the rollout. So if anyone is curious, you can go over to bluehouse bluehost.com and check out the cloud hosting because it's, it's the jewel in the crown now.
- [46:18]
Alex Moss
Yeah, it looks really good. It actually looked impressive. I'm going to be trying it out a bit more. I've done a little bit of test, but it's been quite cool so far.
- [46:26]
Carolyn Shelby
They're really targeting agencies and they've got a lot of agency offerings. So if you've got more than one website like I think the base offering can host up to five different websites. So even at the base offering you've got the opportunity to do multiple sites and still reap all the benefits of this really enterprise level service.
- [46:47]
Alex Moss
Yeah, I'm looking forward to delving in more but. But yeah, and that's all the news we have for this month. Next month if you're in Brighton in the uk, I'll be there attending with a few other Yoasties. George I think is speaking as well. We'll be at your WordCamp Europe with. With bells on I'm sure, which is in mid June and also before all of that in a few weeks. There's Yoast contribute today, so if you want to contribute whatsoever towards WordPress Core, you can go in to contribute today itself and that's on the 18th of April, which you'll be able to find. And lastly, the next SEO updates with us will be on the 30th of April because this is one once monthly, this one once monthly at the end. Last Tuesday generally, isn't it last Tuesday? So yeah, next month will be on the 30th of April same time. And we have 10 minutes for Q& A as usual we still sp. There weren't a lot of news items but there was still enough to chat about. Yes.
- [47:56]
Moderator
So as you've seen, we have a very active chat, but we also also have a very active Q and A. So we have more questions lined up than we can possibly answer. But we'll try our best and start with the most popular one, which is a question by Sarah Scott asking. There's a lot of talk about sites experiencing adverse effects from the rollout. Are there sites that are benefiting from the rollout?
- [48:26]
Alex Moss
I've not seen any personally. There's not been a lot of win kind of posts around. They've been. And it depends. Well, I guess it depends. I'm seeing any wins of people who've survived where everyone else has lost. So you've kind of stayed even. But as a result of someone else's decline visibility, you get increased visibility. But I kind of. It's kind of half skewed data. Have you seen anything around, Carolyn?
- [48:49]
Carolyn Shelby
I haven't seen anyone report any wins that are comparable and opposite to the deaths of the losses. So I would say, I would say if you didn't get hit, that's about as happy as you could generally hope for.
- [49:07]
Alex Moss
Yeah, yeah. If you're staying the same, that's a win.
- [49:10]
Carolyn Shelby
If you're keeping your head above water. You're still swimming.
- [49:15]
Alex Moss
Hope that answers the question. Sarah.
- [49:19]
Moderator
So the next one As a news SEO specialist, how important are ranked popular keywords or key phrases to a news article, especially to a nice regional B2B website?
- [49:32]
Carolyn Shelby
Louisa asks, I can answer this one. Okay, so the thing with news SEO, I'm making my monitor jiggle. The thing with news SEO is you have about 48 to 72 hours for an article to rank and do well. So it's not really that algorithm isn't looking at particular topics and key phrases that have been ranking traditionally very high for a long time. It's looking at what are people searching for right now. So I would be more worried about what news is breaking right now, what news is trending right now. And make sure that you're matching the phrases that are that Google's favoring. So let's say there was a train wreck. I know it's horrible, but that's where my mind went. Let's say there was a train wreck. You want to look and see what other articles, if any, Google has its ranking for that event. And if you're writing about it, if Google is favoring train crash over train wreck, that's the phrase you want to use. So you're looking more at Google News and maybe Google Trends for emerging breakout trends. Then you are looking at anything that's showing historical volume because the historical volume for breaking news is not really relevant.
- [50:49]
Alex Moss
All right.
- [50:51]
Moderator
That's a very clear answer. Thank you. Kelsey asks, do the Google updates affect Google Ads in any way? We noticed a drop in paid traffic, but not organic.
- [51:07]
Alex Moss
I mean, they never say it, but I mean you always hear these stories about how your ad spend on the site and magically organic rankings seem to also increase and vice versa. But generally, no, they don't affect ads. It may, it may be more of a, because I'm not a PPC specialist, it might be more of a quality rating in terms of the paid quality score that they give as well. If you know more about that. Carolyn.
- [51:39]
Carolyn Shelby
I don't know more about it, unfortunately. But I was thinking what if with more people dropping off the organic page because they've been hit by the update, the price of getting the premium positions in paid has gone up and your bid isn't as high as other people's. Could that, I mean, I feel like that could be possibly related. I don't know. We're just kind of, we're not PPC specialists.
- [52:06]
Moderator
Yeah, I've learned last week there's a whole different world that does nothing but ppc.
- [52:12]
Carolyn Shelby
Yeah, and it's very different.
- [52:14]
Alex Moss
SEO is for everyone, not PPC ipsies.
- [52:19]
Moderator
For everyone with big deep pockets. Okay, so Meg asked, moving towards less SEO real estate on the serp. What should we be focusing on? Are the core of SEO strategies still important like keyword research, technical optimization, producing quality eat content?
- [52:40]
Alex Moss
Yes, to all of those things. Still crack on and do those things because if you are the most helpful result, you will should deserve to be there. And like I was saying before with Marcus Toba's quote about there's less real estate, which means it's even more valuable. It's probably from my opinion, even more important to ensure that you're doing those things again without going over the top and showing things for Google, which again, I think John John Moo has specifically said this week, don't do stuff just to show us that you're doing stuff, because we're going to figure out that you're doing stuff for us, not for your user. Just try not to think about the search engine and then you might find yourself being more naturally helpful.
- [53:26]
Carolyn Shelby
Make sure that you're handling all of your technical SEO, because making sure that the search engines can easily crawl and see all of your content is the biggest hurdle right there. What kind of analogy do I want to use? Cakes. If you could have the most beautiful frosting on your cake, it could be a masterpiece. But if the inside tastes like Styrofoam, it's still a bad cake. That's right. Sorry.
- [53:59]
Moderator
I've heard better analogies, but I think I get it.
- [54:02]
Carolyn Shelby
Sorry. Getting very hungry.
- [54:07]
Moderator
So Adi asked, could you share suggestions to overcome the hit to impressions? Due to the core update, it's knocked off over 50% of impressions and there must be a way to offset.
- [54:22]
Alex Moss
My answer is I'm sorry, I can't answer that question today. Maybe next month like and that sounds bad because you have taken a 50% hit, but as people from within Google are saying, like wait until the core updates rolled out completely, which should be in the next week, and then decide what to do next because that means that all that data can then be talked about a bit more. There's a lot of people, including Lily who we keep mentioning, but she's even sat I'm not saying too much because it has not completed rolling out and then once all of that's there and it can be evaluated in full, that's maybe where you get a better but hopefully Addie, if you're here next month, will have a better answer for you or an answer.
- [55:05]
Carolyn Shelby
And you can't just look at, you know, your overall site traffic. You have to isolate it to. You lost it from specific keywords, I would imagine. So you need to identify that, identify the pages those were attached to, look at who benefited from the rollout and what they're doing differently than you are. There's a lot of factors that go into it. So it's really difficult for us to offer a solution on such little information.
- [55:33]
Moderator
So would it be worth already reaching out to an SEO specialist for help or wait until the rollout's complete?
- [55:41]
Carolyn Shelby
You might be able to get started just to start identifying where you think the pain points are, but it's not going to be a quick answer.
- [55:51]
Alex Moss
No. And if you want an SEO's help, maybe you can look into looking for someone now because by the time you've made your decision and pick someone like the rollout should be complete and therefore in a better position. But yeah, I would say don't just go for anyone who go, oh yeah, I can sort it. Anyone who claims that they can source it now, never contact them again.
- [56:15]
Moderator
All right, I think this is a related question. Question by Carly. What changes to site traffic would you deem as a result from the update?
- [56:26]
Carolyn Shelby
A drop, a big drop, A drop.
- [56:31]
Alex Moss
That doesn't make sense for seasonal troughs as well as the weekend or something like it's something that you can sell after a week, maybe, maybe even less, depending on your kind of site.
- [56:43]
Carolyn Shelby
And you're looking for the kind of drop like not like a gradual drop, it'll be a cliff. So if you see cliff, I would say that's an update related drop. If you've been suffering from a gradual decline, that is probably not update related.
- [57:02]
Moderator
All right, that's a clear answer. I think we have one more minute. And I really like this question. It's very, very much unrelated to most of what we've talked about today.
- [57:17]
Alex Moss
Okay.
- [57:18]
Moderator
But it is interesting. It's a question by Timothy who says, is there a simple way for a neophyte to check if your site has been hacked and this is happening?
- [57:30]
Carolyn Shelby
I would go to Google and do site colon and then your domain name. So if Your domain is abc.com, it would be site abc.com, no spaces. See what comes up. Go through all of the listings. If there are more pages than you were anticipating, that could be a problem. If there are pages you don't recognize, that is 100% a problem. If there are, if you're selling Viagra and you didn't know it, that's a problem. But that is a really quick way to see if. If Google's indexing things on your site that you didn't know about.
- [58:07]
Alex Moss
Yeah, and there are security based plugins out there, some which check for things, some which limit future occurrences. And then there's also Cloudflare as well, which have their own layer away from the WordPress installation to handle some of these things like hacks or phishing. Also neophyte, Great word. I've learned a word today that's great.
- [58:29]
Carolyn Shelby
Travel player over there.
- [58:31]
Alex Moss
I was going to say I'm not playing with him.
- [58:34]
Moderator
I have to be fair, as a non native speaker, I had to google it because I only know it as an artist. But yeah, I did.
- [58:42]
Alex Moss
Okay.
- [58:43]
Moderator
Anyway, that brings us to the full hour, so I want to thank you again very, very much for sharing all your knowledge with us today. We've had a very lively audience, so thanks to everyone who joined us today who participated in the chat. Chat Ask questions. We couldn't do this without you. So see you again next month. Or maybe in one of the Intro to SEO webinars that happen bi weekly, semi monthly, every other week. Figure something out. But tomorrow for sure.
- [59:17]
Alex Moss
Thanks for having us. And yeah, we'll see you next month.