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Helpful content update recovery, Google's AI overviews, and more | #SEOUpdateByYoast
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- [00:00]
Tako Verdonsgrott
Welcome and thanks for listening to the May 2024 SEO update by Yoast. My name is Tako Verdonsgrott. 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. This month we have a lot of news that's related to AI as Google's been getting hit for some pretty bad results in its AI generated answers. They briefly discuss Google's response to that. And in other AI news, OpenAI made the news by not releasing its own search engine. And we end with Happy news as WordPress just celebrated its 21st birthday. 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. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this episode of the SEO Update by Yoast.
- [01:00]
Alex Moss
Thanks so much for the intro, as always, Taco and hello, Carolyn. How are you?
- [01:07]
Carolyn Shelby
I'm good. How are you?
- [01:09]
Alex Moss
Good, good. I'm excited to go through this month because we've got got quite the agenda, haven't we? But you know who we are, guys. You know, I'm Alex, I'm a Prince Palacio, and Carolyn from the US is also a principal SEO indeed.
- [01:25]
Carolyn Shelby
So now that you know who we are, we should probably get into it because we've only got an hour and I know you guys have a lot of questions at the end and we want to have time for that. So what are we going to be discussing today? As per usual, SEO news, AI news, and to be honest, they kind of overlap a lot today. Little WordPress news, a little bit of Yoast news, and then we'll do the Q and A. The recording is always available afterwards, so if you miss it, if you have to leave, if you know, the dog decides to throw up on the carpet and you have to run away from the computer, you can still watch the replay afterwards. Don't forget there are questions that you can do in the sidebar, so if you have a question, put it in the Q and A area. I know we keep saying that, but it's easier for us to answer questions if you pop it into the Q and A than if you just put it in the chat. So keep that in mind. And this is why, because we can upvote them and we can keep track of the questions that are asked. If you want to learn more about today's topics, you can go to Yoa St, which spells Yoast update May 2024. That is where you will see our webinar for today's link. And afterwards, that will be where you can find the link to the replay. If you are new to SEO and you would be interested in joining one of our beginner SEO webinars, they happen every week, so bi weekly. The next one is June 6th and starts at 10:00am Central European Time, which is not 10:00am in the U.S. and the math is eluding me at this point. So I will let you figure out the time zone difference yourself. But again, we do have replays of that. All right, Alex, are you ready?
- [03:10]
Alex Moss
I'm ready. I'm ready. A year.
- [03:13]
Carolyn Shelby
Let's do the SEO news because it was a lot this this month. So after our last update, this was still in April, but we're going to count it. Google's John Mueller went on websites there went on. He was doing a press junket basically where he was talking about website recovery after the core updates. He says that Google. Okay, it says it confirms. He's claiming Google doesn't hold grudges against sites that were impacted by the update, but he is acknowledging that recovery is not going to be quick. Recovery is not only not going to be quick, but it is difficult to ascertain exactly what needs to be done. He says recovery timelines vary, which I don't know if you remember the royal debate with recollections may vary, but that sounds like. That sounds like it's been wordsmithed a little. And significant effects could need multiple cycles to take into, you know, take effect. He also said the following day or two days later that the helpful content update recoveries could take much longer than others too. My interpretation of this is that there's been so many complaints and so much uproar from big companies and big companies pay. Google spills ultimately that they need to go out and calm everyone down and this is an attempt to calm people down. I don't know that they're going to roll it back though. I don't. I don't think they can at this point.
- [04:45]
Alex Moss
No. I don't know who it was, if it was John or someone else inside Google who said we are not rolling it back. And that was a few months ago. And you know that that isn't just one person tweeting their personal view. That tweet will have been checked to make sure that that tweet can be posted by at least 10 people. So it must be a very conscious decision that it's. And it's now in core as well. Helpful contents now in core, which means it's part of the main secret source. So no part of me is like it's doubling down, but I like it. It varies. It's like our version of it depends. Timelines can vary. We should start using that now.
- [05:26]
Carolyn Shelby
Timelines can vary. That just sounds like an AI smoothed version of it depends. The interesting thing I see here is in both articles in different publications, meaning they're saying this in multiple places. Google is reaffirming it doesn't hold grudges. I don't think Google ever held grudges, but what I think Google does do is, and I don't know if you guys have this in Europe or in Britain, but when you're in grade school, the concept of a permanent record. And in your permanent record, they know everything you've ever done from the time you enter school until the time you leave. And while I don't think Google holds grudges, I think the things that are in your permanent record color how they treat and evaluate your site later on. For example, if you are a known paste eater when you are in kindergarten and then you fail a test when you're in fifth grade, the teacher is going to say, well, Johnny did eat a lot of paste in kindergarten, so I'm going to say he just definitely failed that test. Whereas if you're little Patty perfect and you've never missed a day of school, you never ate glue, you never beat anybody up on the playground, did anything wrong at all, and you fail a test in fifth grade, the teacher will look back on your glistening record and say, oh, my goodness, something must be wrong with Patty. What? We need to get her. We need to find out if she's okay. We need to let her retake that test. We're going to reevaluate because clearly something's amiss. So while I don't think they hold grudges, I do think that they evaluate your past actions in light of your current performance. And if you're known to be a bad actor, they will come down on you like the fiery fist of God. And if you're known to be a generally good, good player, they'll say, you know what? Maybe this was a glitch. We're going to come back and reevaluate in a couple days, see if they fix the problem. One might even reach out to them and say, hey, did you know there's a problem? They'll treat you differently based on your record, which is not the same as holding grudges. So it's not that they're lying here. It's just that they're being very semantically careful with how they phrase things.
- [07:38]
Alex Moss
Yeah. As though it's more anomalous behavior rather than pattern of behavior.
- [07:44]
Carolyn Shelby
Yeah. Which is why I think maybe when I know we'll get into this later. I think newspapers in particular are going to have a difficult time with the site reputation situation and we'll, we can address that when we get to it. Can you tell me about the, the structured data stuff?
- [08:03]
Alex Moss
I can. So Google have been on a mission to update the documentation. They've been doing it and each month and we've been telling you, I think it started with things like review snippets and FAQ snippets and then they started telling where things, things would appear in which SERPs. And this one is, is, is growing the product. Structured data documentation. Not restructuring. I mean, maybe it technically is restructuring, but it's more elaboration on the same thing. What was once one page is now three pages. They can go more long form and it's got a bit more information that's a bit easier for the beginner to understand as well as more useful documentation for developers as well. What you need to know is you need to do nothing in terms of stuff on your site or there's no update of Yoast that's specific to this. And it's all kind of, all the rules and documentation are there already. And it's just elaborating on it really. It's just filling out their encyclopedia that bit more. Or maybe it's making you, hey, look over here. That stuff over there isn't happening. Look at this. We've done this documentation. Check it out.
- [09:09]
Carolyn Shelby
I, I really feel like there's. They've got so much, so much dumpster fire happening that they're, they're telling the other teams, hey, the AI team, they need a little cover. Let's, let's look busy so that we can give the people the old razzle dazzle and distract them a little bit from the flaming pile of poo that is happening over in this corner.
- [09:33]
Alex Moss
So yeah, that was that, that was, that was part of the documentation. But yeah, this is another. Is it a flaming pile of poo? I mean, it's still excretion from a human, right? This story.
- [09:47]
Carolyn Shelby
Yeah. So the Google AI now is recommending that you drink urine to pass kidney stones more quickly. I'm going to say that that's questionable medical advice. This is the prime example that's been making the rounds on X of the AI. Giving people really goofy, goofy results. And like, how on earth did they think this was ready for prime time?
- [10:16]
Alex Moss
You see, you do wonder because these aren't hard tests that are being done. Right. You would have thought there was a bit more testing around it. I know that it's being, well, not, it's not fully rolled out. So for example, I'm not getting any AI overview here in the uk, but you are, you're getting a lot of AI overviews in the US and maybe that's the test to see. You know, here's one very large country in our primary, you know, business location that maybe we'll try here and see how it works. Or someone really, really was adamant inside one of the European headquarters not to roll it out and let maybe the American team take a bit of the fall for what's happening without them going, look, we warned you and we treaded lightly.
- [11:04]
Carolyn Shelby
It could be, I don't know, there's a couple different ways to look at that, but this is definitely, this is definitely a big issue for them. I, I half wonder if they're localizing the pool of data that they're learning from and reporting from to specific geographical reason regions. And the US is just so vast that we have a much larger pool of commentary and data to pull from. Maybe they can't differentiate it. There's a lot of reasons why they didn't roll it out everywhere. But this is just, I don't know if I'd call this teething problems. This is an algorithm issue that they're going to have to resolve because this is manipulatable and Google doesn't like things that can be manipulated.
- [11:49]
Alex Moss
Yeah, I mean, I've also, as we go on to the next story, I've added a link to a directory of embarrassing Google AI overview answers where you can see that this isn't the only problem. I mean, we laugh about this, but this is actually D, because someone will do that, right, Based on the direct advice of a search results page without doing any further research. So there's a scenario where that will happen. And this is not just this one term. It's amongst multiple terms and multiple niches and verticals and query bases. It's, it's, it's so wide that again, like we say, how is it not, how is this not red flagged at any point beforehand? I don't know.
- [12:29]
Carolyn Shelby
So here's a thing that I've been kind of researching this week. If you have a topic that has a lot of data about it around it, it's going to be more difficult to influence the AI than if you have a topic that isn't as broadly discussed. If you have a topic or subject that isn't broadly discussed, but there also isn't a lot, there isn't enough data or enough mentions of it out on the Internet to contradict a narrative that maybe you don't like. I found that if you have a Reddit presence, even if you don't have a great deal of authority or longevity behind your, your Reddit account, you can post things on Reddit. Google will find it and read it pretty quickly. And, and if there's nothing, if there's no contradicting points or contradicting viewpoints or opinions also in Reddit, it will repeat back what you say pretty much as fact. So I know people used to do this a lot with Twitter to get things indexed more quickly, but I, I would say that if you don't have a brand presence on Reddit, you might want to consider throwing one up there real quick and, and do make sure that you manage it and stay on top of it because if you can control the narrative there and do it in a non ham fisted manner, I would expect to see some positive AI results. So AI is only bad if it's saying things that you don't like.
- [13:58]
Alex Moss
Yeah, that's also true. That is true. So well away from AI for one slide at least Google are actually putting their foot down on other things such as big sites with abuse policy. Right. Reputation abuse policy. You might have a nice insight from your days of news publications.
- [14:20]
Carolyn Shelby
Yeah, I spent, you know, the better part of a decade at Tribune Publishing and LA Times was one of our, one of our papers. And the way the newspapers make money is they would rent out subdomains of their site. So you have latimes.com but you'd have coupons.latimes.com or directory, which was a business directory that people would sell links in. And they were, let's make, I don't work there anymore. The company that I worked for that owned them at the time doesn't exist anymore. So I can say this. They were absolutely selling links. They were, there were subdomains that were for thinly veiled affiliate sites that were purporting to be doing reviews. But again, they were affiliate sites. So they had affiliate sites, they were selling links on these directories, they had the coupon sites they were selling, they were selling their reputation because these, these companies knew that if they came in and they rented a subdomain from a big newspaper, they would have instant authority and instant ranking. And it was, I don't know why they're surprised that this happened. This was, this was a strategic business decision on the part of these newspapers to continue making money while there was money to be made. Never mind the fact that it was going to come crashing down at some point because they needed to make the money. And the business model that old school news publications operate on never really made a good transition to the digital world. And the digital news landscape is not conducive to original old school news business models. You can't make money and you can't sustain your, your giant newsroom and your giant building and all of your, your giant expense accounts with what you can do in, in digital news. So I don't, I don't feel sorry for them because this has been 10, 15 years in the making. So they were told they knew it was coming, they didn't care. They wanted to make the money while there was money to be made. And now they're just going to have to figure out what to do.
- [16:30]
Alex Moss
Well, it's like the same people who did Scaled Link building before Panda and Penguin came out. Don't complain when you do, you know, you're abusing the algorithm and what it's looking for. So, you know, it's also going to be interesting to see what the news niche in general is going to do. If it can't rely on its organic visibility as much and do the things that it's doing. It's going to be much harder for them, maybe in a good way. You know, it'll, it will cease bad journalism or not cease. It will make it much harder for bad journalism to really pull forward into the wider online visibility.
- [17:09]
Carolyn Shelby
They were for the most part pretty good about keeping, keeping that wall between editorial and, you know, evil capitalism intact so they wouldn't cross pollute the results, especially like in their site maps. But they are losing a significant revenue source by losing out on the ability to rent out these subdomains. And I think it's going to result in layoffs and contracting businesses. I don't, I don't know how they're, it could adversely affect journalism because they can't afford to pay the writers anymore. You know, I, this is going to be big for the news industry and I don't, I don't know that news as we've known it for the past, you know, 50 years is going to, is going to survive into this new age.
- [18:01]
Alex Moss
I'm going to be interested to find out what happens in the Next year. But, yeah, kind of related to output of what you see in SERPs. Eric Schmidt came out of nowhere. Ish. Because you don't really see him much anymore, do you?
- [18:17]
Carolyn Shelby
No.
- [18:17]
Alex Moss
And he came out telling us that everything's kind of gonna be okay. Yes. Things are gonna stop linking to sources maybe in Gemini, and they may still show links in Answers. But really, like, I. I just found it is a bit very odd that he's talking about stuff that's happening right now when he's probably not in any of. He's not inputting at all, any of those moments.
- [18:42]
Carolyn Shelby
But I think he's out doing damage control so that he doesn't lose money. I did some checking. He owns 1% of Alphabet and 1% of $307 billion is a lot. And I think he doesn't want his investment and his net worth to get flushed down the toilet. So I think he's out doing damage control on behalf of the. On behalf of the board.
- [19:08]
Alex Moss
It's going to be interesting to see if he does any more publicity about it, especially, you know, after more recent news, which we'll touch on later. Touch on later. There's still more to come. So what happened after that two days later? There was search volatility.
- [19:25]
Carolyn Shelby
That's what it looks like. I haven't heard anything really about it after that, but there's been so much happening. It's possible that it was still. Still churning, but we've all been distracted by all the other nonsense that's happening. I mean, it's not nonsense. It's. It's just so much chaos. And I think it's easy to kind of forget that there's ranking changes happening. But the, you know, the increase in Reddit pages, the thin discussions, it's all contributing to people's frustration, which is contributing to big companies whining to Google and pushing back on Google. Google getting spooked about their. About their market share and their stock prices and then running around doing this apology tour tour that they're on.
- [20:13]
Alex Moss
It's. It does seem like an apology tour because Sundar, the same day is having an interview with Bloomberg and from, from watching parts of it. I didn't watch all the full thing. I watched quite, quite a bit of it. It was, it just seemed. I was saying before, it seemed like it was personification of the GIF or GIF of that dog saying everything's fine with fire around them. And there are so many concerns. And all they've kind of said is, yeah, yeah, like, we acknowledge that there are issues with essentially their core product for the mass market. But it's all fine. Everything, we'll, we'll, we'll sort it out. Don't worry about it. But also, if you're a publisher, maybe worry a bit more.
- [20:59]
Carolyn Shelby
I just, everything he says, I just wanted, I just want to respond with. But you told people to drink pee. Like everything he says, it's like, yes, but you told people to drink urine. So I don't know. Good luck to him. I, I wish him the best on his apology tour. In other, in other news, speaking of, you know, let's give him the razzle dazzle and distract them a little bit. They've now written AI overviews into their documentation, which in theory means it's not going away.
- [21:32]
Alex Moss
Yeah, another bit of documentation that's been, look over there, look, we can read about it now about what's happening, but it's interesting that obviously it doesn't go into, hey, these answers may not be foolproof and they've been generated by an LLM that doesn't know enough quite yet. But here's the answer anyway. It's going to be interesting to see what they're actually going to do in the next couple of months with all of these. You know the link that I shared before of all the wrong answers and potentially incorrect answers or just stupid information. But again, it's here to stay if they're giving the documentation. So it's going to be what, what, what can they do with it? They're gonna have to do another version very, very soon, I think, before people really start to lose confidence in searching with them at all. Because that can be dangerous. If even 0.5% go.
- [22:28]
Tako Verdonsgrott
Yeah.
- [22:29]
Carolyn Shelby
How many people are going to turn it off? Because they've got those new tools that will let you just completely disable the AI overviews so that you never have to look at them. So I don't even know if this will be a net gain for Google in terms of the introductions. Another thing that they're doing to distract us from the AI debacle is they've added two new crawlers, Google Other Image and Google Other Video. I don't know that this is going to make a big difference in the lives of particularly Yoast users just because it's not something you necessarily need to be blocking. I can see some edge cases where you might want to block it, but I think this is a. Oh, this is cute. Yay. But this is a, this is a non story.
- [23:12]
Alex Moss
Yeah. I mean, if this wasn't announced, would Anyone have noticed if a new robot, if a new robot is created in the forest, does anyone know?
- [23:22]
Carolyn Shelby
No, no. That is, yeah. This is just, you know, hey, let's, let's distract them because searchers want to turn off the AI overviews. People don't like it, people are complaining. Tools have been developed to shut the thing off so you don't have to look at it. That is a fascinating commentary on the public's reaction, I think, to this tool that people are so upset about it, they want a tool to shut it off.
- [23:49]
Alex Moss
Yeah. And usually in previous things that get updated, I'm usually supportive of those changes. I think the thing that most people can probably relate to is when Facebook updated their whole ux, everything about the profile page, the news feed, and people are like, how dare they do that? I'm going to leave Facebook. And no one left Facebook and they stayed and everyone got used to it. Right. And I guess that could happen here. But the start is so bad that it's going to be really, really hard to win everyone's trust over when, when it's not a human produced, potentially human produced answer creating more trust in humans. Unless in the technology that's going in the search results.
- [24:32]
Carolyn Shelby
It was. This has just been so widely panned. It's, it's, it's almost. People stay with it now to mock it because it's funny to mock. They, they're deliberately asking it weird questions so that they can get those nice screenshots just to share in social media and, and go viral. God bless. I, I, I, I hope they figure it out.
- [24:55]
Alex Moss
Yeah.
- [24:57]
Carolyn Shelby
Back to the. We're going to distract people from AI. Google's now hinting at improving site rankings in the next update. And I think this kind of ties back to the whole. How long is it going to take to recover from the hcu? How long is it going to take to recover from the algorithm updates? Because I don't, we talked about this earlier. I don't, I've heard that people have recovered, but I can't think of a specific example where there's been a significant recovery, can you?
- [25:24]
Alex Moss
No, I think there was a hit like Whispers of one, but I remember now going in the thread, they never actually shared the URL, which means to me that is it real? You know, because there's no real data to look at and compare and replicate in another platform like Semrush or anything. So yeah. And if there's still only one that might be for it may have been a recovery of some other sort that had Nothing to do with hcu. That again, none of us have context over. So at the moment it does feel like Google are saying, look, I know that like we, we reduced your visibility by 95% but like wait a little longer, maybe you'll lose just 90. I don't know. It just doesn't feel like a great consolation price to wait longer for another update business.
- [26:14]
Carolyn Shelby
For a little bit longer, we promise something might get better. Maybe.
- [26:19]
Alex Moss
Yeah. And when will it happen? I don't know. We can't say the guidance though, I.
- [26:24]
Carolyn Shelby
Mean the guidance is valuable, the guidance is accurate, demonstrate a genuine commitment to helpful high quality content. But how do you, how do you demonstrate genuine commitment? That, that seems, that seems a little subjective.
- [26:39]
Alex Moss
Yeah, just a little. And with, you know, not just subjective of personality and tone of voice, but niche and everything, there's too many, there's too many subjectivity variables to go into it, which, which is a bigger problem for them to have. But yeah, so what's happened in the last. Yeah, we skipped a week because not a lot happened. Right. Everyone was just too busy, you know, making screenshots of bad AI overviews. And then yesterday Mike King and Rand Fishkin published together two different posts that complement each other. But in short, there's been the biggest leak outside of the DOJ case is it of Google. And it's so new that we don't want to put any bullet points on because it's a lot of reading. While Carolyn continues to talk in a second I'm going to post, I'm going to paste the two links, but there's a lot of reading. Mike King, his content I know from his posts as well are very, very complex and it's a 40 to 45 minute read and there's a lot to dig in. And it's also going to be interesting to see how Google responds to this because in short, there's a lot of things that's implied in these leaks that completely contradict things that spokespeople have said in the past, both far as away as a few years ago, all the way up to slides that we've covered in the last, in the, in this, in this act. One, I think it's the first couple of slides about one John Mueller said have already been contradicted in this league.
- [28:16]
Carolyn Shelby
Do you mean that they, they might not be 100 clear and accurate in their statements to the public?
- [28:23]
Alex Moss
I don't know because up till today I thought that Google basically told the truth about everything they said and were very, very transparent with everyone about Everything that they do.
- [28:34]
Carolyn Shelby
So did you really?
- [28:37]
Alex Moss
No. I don't know. But if I said that, would AI have known that I was sarcastic?
- [28:42]
Carolyn Shelby
No, because I don't think AI is very good at picking up on sarcasm.
- [28:46]
Alex Moss
No. Especially when it's British. Right?
- [28:49]
Carolyn Shelby
Oh there. Yeah. Because nobody can understand when you guys are being sarcastic.
- [28:54]
Alex Moss
Not even the humans have figured that out yet. But it is, it's going to be very, very. I think this is going to have ripple effects. Yeah, it's definitely the biggest thing I think has happened in several years and is only making. It makes the last month of the bad PR month that we've been describing that that was nothing compared to what they're about to have to face now. And I would not like to be in the search team today.
- [29:22]
Carolyn Shelby
Maybe next month we can have a slide on Google's very, very bad, horrible, awful month.
- [29:28]
Alex Moss
I know, maybe, I don't know. We'll see what the. And we'll also, I'm also interested to see who starts taking other search engines more seriously, you know, and giving up Google for Lens or something like that. And just checking because I know more people are doing that, giving up search engines for chat, GPT or other chat based AI platforms. But this is. Maybe people might have an exodus knowing that they've been telling website owners the incorrect stuff, which means they're not going to get support off that lot. And now you've got AI overview, so you've not got public support either.
- [30:01]
Carolyn Shelby
I don't know. So look at the number. The, the ratio of young people to old people is shifting in favor of the old people. Right. So the, the world's population is just getting older. Old people are the people that have kept AOL in business because aol, FYI still in business. My mom still has an AOL email account. Like, I think it's really hard to break these, these patterns and this level of comfort we have with technology. So maybe, maybe the kids coming up can, can get us off of, you know, the Google addiction and, and get us on to, to different search engines. But I think, I think that's going to be a slow transition just giving how entrenched they are with the demo with the majority of, of their user base.
- [30:52]
Alex Moss
It's very interesting. I can't wait for the next month and I'm going to be off for a couple of weeks as well. So I'm, I'm going to have to.
- [30:59]
Carolyn Shelby
Work while you're on holiday.
- [31:00]
Alex Moss
I know, I don't want to though.
- [31:03]
Carolyn Shelby
All right, well let's, let's stop talking about AI and start talking about AI.
- [31:07]
Alex Moss
Yes. So pure AI.
- [31:09]
Carolyn Shelby
On May 2, I kept this slide for a reason. So on May 2, everyone was hyperventilating because Chat OpenAI and ChatGPT were going to have a big press conference the day before Google I o and everyone is like, they are definitely, definitely going to announce a search engine. They have registered search chatgpt or search.OpenAI.com it's active. It's a thing. It is absolutely happening. And then OpenAI said B I n G no, and they did not. So. And I've been waiting all week to sing that song. And also I like Grumpy Cat. I think that was a huge letdown because everyone was genuinely excited for the, you know, at the idea of a Google killer. You know, OpenAI. They've got the Google Killer and it's going to come out. And then it didn't. And it was just very. I don't know, it's depressing. It really kind of set a down tone for going into Google.
- [32:09]
Alex Moss
I O. Yeah, it's also interesting the, that anticipation. You said people were excited that there was another option and I think that's another thing that Google maybe should be scared about. That there was so much anticipation simply from someone opening up subdomain search.chatgpt.com that it created media attention not just within SEOs and AI people but, but actually in the wider, in the wider world. And that excitement, again, that would scare me if I was a Google.
- [32:42]
Carolyn Shelby
What if that was an accident? What if that wasn't even intentional?
- [32:47]
Alex Moss
Tell me more.
- [32:49]
Carolyn Shelby
No, like what, what if, what if people, people create subdomains and like register things all the time. What if that was just some guy who's been working on something in the back room and they keep him, you know, his office is behind the boiler in the basement, he's got his red stapler and he set that up because it was a project he was working on and no one's ever going to find it anyway. And then, oops, someone found it and then it just blew up and got away from him. I just, it would be funny if. Funny and sad and ironic if that's what ultimately happened.
- [33:19]
Alex Moss
I would assume that now may be working for the marketing team in a higher, in a higher managerial position going, this guy, they know.
- [33:28]
Carolyn Shelby
This guy knows how to make stuff happen. So moving on. On May 3rd, this was at Google IO actually. So the day after, apparently AI answers cost 80% less to generate. And again, I'm going to say, who cares that's nice. I don't think it really affects anyone.
- [33:50]
Alex Moss
Yeah, it's a great CSR post the PR firm can dish out. That's great.
- [33:57]
Carolyn Shelby
This is a message to the shareholders. That's what this is. This is 100% for the shareholders.
- [34:03]
Alex Moss
And again the skeptic in me says, wait a minute. So it was four times as expensive last month. Why? Why did you do that? You know, for this amount of time. But that's what happened. And again, in three months time they'll say it's 80% less again. And part of us doesn't really care anymore about the cost of what it cost Google to do these things. It's not even correct or perfect anyway.
- [34:29]
Carolyn Shelby
They're talking about how much money they're saving because they can't talk about how much money they're making. And this is a message for the shareholders.
- [34:39]
Alex Moss
Yeah, yeah. Interesting how it's all being pieced together.
- [34:44]
Carolyn Shelby
In other AI news, Gemini stopped linking to most of their sources. They used to have inline links. Now the citations do not have links. And we've got examples here. So you, here you can see on the left the blue links in line with the citations on the right. No longer linking to the citations. I don't know if this is a good idea for them. I think maybe it's not. But I personally use the documentation in the SGE experience in line on the web browser they'll show you websites that they got the information from at the bottom. So there'll be like your answer right here. And then you've got little boxes that show the websites where they, they got the information from. I use that to kind of judge whether or not this information is likely to be valid. So if all of the inform information they're citing comes from Reddit, I'm going to go, eh, maybe, maybe not. Depending if like if they said to drink 2 liters of urine and then said that they got the information from the National Institutes of Health, that might lend some credence to it. So if they've stopped linking to sources, I think that's, that's a negative user experience.
- [36:00]
Alex Moss
Yeah, that is the equivalent to me taking away the link and then comparing it to the urine answer is the equivalent of me telling you to drink urine. And then when you say who said that? That's that on my mate at the pub told me that he's got a mate who's a doctor and they said it's fine and there's no more checks, no more due diligence on that. But it's also interesting that none of the other AI based search platforms are taking links away like you look at perplexity and they actually double down on the source information which is again I think something Google should be like learning from. Right. But let's see.
- [36:40]
Carolyn Shelby
I think yeah. Who knows it's all changing so fast. There have been some good analysis done of how the SGE is impacting organic search traffic and it was. This one was actually divided up by different verticals. I think bartvos wrote this so it's in Search Engine Journal. We'll have a link to it if anyone's interested in reading it. But it's looking at the effect on the SGE across organic traffic just looking for triggers and patterns. It's showing how different sectors suffer or don't suffer. And I think it's useful to know especially if you are in one of these affected sectors.
- [37:19]
Alex Moss
Yeah, I'd also love to see over the next months and years. I'm sure we can talk to Bart about it. Is maybe having a timeline of what that figure is in four weeks time, eight weeks time and see how it goes up and down because some may stay steady. Right. So you look at somewhere like real estate will stay at 82 maybe but actually they'll realize that beauty they heavy handed 94 and maybe switch that down a bit. We'll see what. We'll see what they do but it's very interesting to see how they are attacking. Is that the right word attacking different verticals in the SERPs and and seeing how they work with it. Especially because we know that not all of them are 100 proof correct answers as well.
- [38:06]
Carolyn Shelby
Well let's move on to some WordPress news. This should go quickly and then hopefully we'll have extra time for q and a. WordPress 6.5 enhances SEO with last mod support I don't think this is a terribly huge deal. The last modified element in the site maps is not even something that Google says they use anymore. So yay that they included it. But I don't know that this is a big deal. It's supposed to improve crawl efficiency and Gary said yay and thank them for for doing this. The more exciting news is WordPress turned 21 on May 25th. I don't know if anyone noticed but we should all have some cake to celebrate our favorite cms.
- [38:52]
Alex Moss
We should. I actually had it. It's my birthday coming up soon. I actually had a blue and white cake that looked not too dissimilar to that. I'll have to share it with.
- [39:03]
Carolyn Shelby
With WordPress. How? I don't know that I'd be worried that they would. You don't want to share your birthday with famous people.
- [39:10]
Alex Moss
No, no, no. But it was. It was on Saturday and it was a pre. My birthday's yet to come. It's on this Friday, so. So not yet. Not. Not. Oh yeah, Axel did point out as well, I was going to say, before you turn to the next one, that Fabrice at Bing also kind of gave the last mod a thumbs up, so. Cheers, Axel. Very observant.
- [39:29]
Carolyn Shelby
Well, maybe they are going to start using it again. That would be interesting to know if they're adding that back in, because I know there was a time when they explicitly said they're not looking at last mod. So if that's coming back, that would be relevant and useful to know.
- [39:46]
Alex Moss
You know what, Axel will reach out for briefs and try and get a comment for next month for you. So we actually have a definitive answer from the horse's mouth then that would be cool.
- [39:57]
Carolyn Shelby
Thank you. All right, let's quickly blow through the Yoast news. Our Yoast SEO for Shopify, the latest update has a brand new dashboard feature. So if you are a Yoast Shopify user, there is a pre made priority list of things that you need to work on for your SEO and you can kind of check through it and make sure that you've got all of your bases covered. If you have not yet updated, please go out and do that and you will see all of these fun new updates. The other thing that there's not a lot to say about the update, but if you are a Yoast free or premium or video plugin user, there was an update that just went out this morning. So if you have not yet updated, you might want to log in and run those updates to get that the new changes. Not a ton of new functionality, it's not a big release, but it did come out today, so I wanted to make sure I mentioned it. Our next SEO update is going to be Tuesday, June 25th. So again, the last Tuesday of the month. Alex and I will be back and so will Taco. Yeah, I know we have a lot of questions, so let us get to the questions.
- [41:10]
Alex Moss
Yes, let's go.
- [41:12]
Tako Verdonsgrott
Sounds like a plan. Let me get these out of the way and then your face is a little bigger and then I'm not as relevant so I'll be on the side. Alrighty. So we indeed do have a lot of questions. If you have a question that you haven't posted yet to the Q&A section. Or if you haven't upvoted questions because you were paying so much attention to Alex and Carolyn, then now's the time to do so because we will almost go through them by popular order. I say almost because I always pick a few that I like best.
- [41:51]
Alex Moss
I have a question first. Taco, are you going to be at WordCamp Europe? That's my question.
- [41:57]
Tako Verdonsgrott
Yeah, most definitely, yes. So there will be a big WordPress event happening in Turin in Italy on the 13th, 14th and 15th of June. So that's in a few weeks and a large Yoast crew will be there. So if you want to meet some of us in person, then make sure that you head over to Torino to Turin for WordCamp Europe. And don't forget if you're in the city at that time on June 14th to join our Pride event that we're organizing that evening. Enough self promotion. Let's get to some questions. I think we have a unique situation where we have multiple questions that are upvoted over 10 times. Yeah, and Steve's question is the one we'll be starting with. While I appreciate you dunking on Google and the gallows humor. Thank you. Really appreciate that as well. What do you suggest for those of us who depend on Google rankings in our business and have bought Yoast products to help us do SEO?
- [43:09]
Alex Moss
Well, do you want to go with that, Carolyn?
- [43:13]
Carolyn Shelby
I can. So the Yoast products help you do SEO in a fundamentally sound manner. They're not necessarily going to help you with your off page SEO. These are complicated, nuanced answers. It seems that the AI narratives, if you don't, especially if you don't like the AI narrative, is influenced strongly by the authority level of the people's the authority level of the narratives that Google's finding. So if there is no predominant narrative about something on the Internet, it's very easy to influence that by creating the narrative on an authoritative site like Reddit. So if you had a thing that doesn't exist anywhere in the universe except a mention on Reddit, that mention will be what the AI repeats back as fact. Basically, if there are a lot of competing high authority high eat narratives, then Google's going to start having some trouble determining what's fact and what's not. And it isn't really good yet at offering a statement and then saying that it's disputed or it's not factual. AI likes to present things as they are, as though they were fact. So what can you do about that? I would make sure that you are paying attention to all of the. All of the things that go into making you an authoritative entity, do you have a Wikipedia presence? Which I understand most people don't. If you can get into Wikipedia and become a Wikipedia presence, that is like instant entity status. If you cannot do that, do other things to make yourself an entity and then constantly reinforce the thing that you are authoritative about. And the plugin will help you do that. If you have the opportunity to go to the places where the narrative is happening that you don't like and offer authoritative sounding contradictions to that narrative in the same location, the AI will learn and see that there are conflicting opinions about that and that at the very least, you're going to disrupt its ability to present that counter narrative as fact. I know this feels like it's getting very complicated to explain. The point is you have to make sure that you are an authoritative entity on the thing that you want to be known for, and that is what's going to color the AI results.
- [46:00]
Alex Moss
Yeah. And I've pasted in a small link about semantic links and entities from our blog, just in there to help you start out with understanding entity SEO. There's also another great post, not on Yoast, but by in Links by Dixon Jones. I think I've got that here in my. I do in my clipboard. Amazing. There it is. That's great. More information for you there. Hopefully that I'm. I'm hoping we answered, Steve. Although we don't dunk on Google, we. It's very interesting to see that the monopoly is harder for them now. So it's interesting that whilst we all think that we're relying on Google, we're not just relying on Google. And the things that we do in Yoast SEO are for the greater good of all search engines and best practice.
- [46:45]
Carolyn Shelby
I think. I think the reason Google being in what looks like a bit of a panic makes it more interesting and more news is because they haven't done this before. And I kind of likened it to the way the royal family used to never, never complain, never explain. They're doing a lot of explaining all of a sudden and they never used to do that. And that's what makes it interesting and newsworthy because it is so different and such a departure from past behaviors.
- [47:16]
Tako Verdonsgrott
All right, that's a very long answer.
- [47:20]
Carolyn Shelby
But also it was a complicated question.
- [47:23]
Tako Verdonsgrott
Yes, well, the good news is we have more of those, so the audience is really putting it to the test today. We have a few more that are in a similar fashion as the one you just answered, but this is Quite different from Jania Dahl. They ask, is Google ranking sites with a significant YouTube presence more prominently?
- [47:48]
Carolyn Shelby
I haven't noticed that, but I would wager that a significant YouTube presence, depending on your definition of significant, would play into the authority of the entity and the when the authority of the entity is higher than that information is going to be trusted more.
- [48:08]
Alex Moss
And also remember that YouTube's owned by Google. It's another Google owned platform that they will of course use to their benefit in the same way that even though Reddit isn't Google, that's the same way that they're doing all of that stuff at the moment and clearly giving it more weight. So if you can produce videos on YouTube and have more presence, do it and connect it as well as you can. Course, using our products and any other structured data that you can that may not be there.
- [48:36]
Carolyn Shelby
And Google, Google wants to keep it in the family because what are the competitors to Google? There's Instagram reels and that's owned by Facebook. There's TikTok, which is not owned by Google or Facebook. If it's a Google owned property, I feel like they're going to be slightly biased, maybe not tremendously biased, but at least slightly biased, partially because they have deeper and easier access into all of the metadata and other details of that content that they might not necessarily have access to at Instagram or TikTok where they don't have a business relationship with those, those companies.
- [49:12]
Tako Verdonsgrott
All right, thank you very much. So speaking about competition, is Microsoft Copilot doing better than the new Google AI?
- [49:24]
Alex Moss
Emily asks, depends what better is? Is that financial? Is it user experience? It seems that the answers that are being given out by Copilot are a bit more correlating to the correct answer.
- [49:42]
Carolyn Shelby
Or maybe just less. It's better. It's better about not making goofs that are mockable.
- [49:53]
Alex Moss
I also feel like they're trying less but accomplishing more at the same time. Like Google's issues that have been happening, I feel like maybe because of a bit too much red tape that they may have in the under the hood of how it's looking at information. And weirdly, Copilot might not be thinking about that as much and therefore giving a wider range of information and learning from it as well. But yeah, I would personally my experiences with Copilot have been better than what I've seen with Google related products so far.
- [50:28]
Carolyn Shelby
That being said, if your definition of doing better is taking market share from Google, I don't, I don't know that that's happening. Either. So they might just be, they might just be stepping back and waiting to see what happens as Google kind of Leroy Jenkins its way into, into AI. You know, let them, let them tank. And I don't mean tank in the, in the die kind of way. I mean tank in the Dungeons and Dragons. It's the big guy that can absorb all the damage kind of way. That was very unclear.
- [51:02]
Alex Moss
All right, so I hope that answered Emily.
- [51:07]
Tako Verdonsgrott
Let's see, we have a very interesting question from Sandra as well. Sandra asked the past year I've invested in keywords and content as technical. SEO often can require site improvements. I have left that behind in the past, a bit in the past year. As Muller now speaks about site improvements. Would you recommend investing our time and budget in technical SEO or a new site? Technical SEO or new site over content and keywords?
- [51:39]
Alex Moss
Oh, I wouldn't go as far as to say, get a new site. I would say, yeah, have it audited. Have a technical audit, see if there's anything glaring out there. And there are improvements to make. But depending on the outcome of the audit, that may define what needs to be changed to change a site.
- [52:00]
Carolyn Shelby
Well, I mean, you can have a new site without changing, without changing the URLs. So if what you're talking about is taking. I like to think of it as a cake, right? So your content and your, and your keywords are frosting and decoration. The technical part is the cakey part. So what if you can. If you have a lot of technical problems, that means your cake tastes bad and all the frosting in the universe is just going to mask the fact that, that your cake tastes bad. If a new site to you means I'm going to like, surgically remove the frosting, put in a different piece of cake, and then put the frosting back on, that might be okay. I wouldn't go through, I wouldn't get a new domain, I wouldn't change the URLs. Those kinds of things will screw up whatever search authority you do have. So if you can preserve that and maybe just swap out the, the technical underpinnings to make them better, that would probably be worth it. The reason Content. Content and keywords are great. If there's something technical that is preventing Google from easily crawling your site, it's not going to see all that great work that you're doing, which is why technical can be very important. If there's something technically wrong with the site, it won't matter how good the content is and won't matter that you've Got great keywords. Because it's just. It's not that technical problem is stopping Google from seeing the full benefit of all the great work that you've been doing. And this is why technical can be very, very worth the investment.
- [53:40]
Tako Verdonsgrott
So that means that you first have to determine whether the technical problems are preventing Google from visiting your site or understanding your website.
- [53:51]
Carolyn Shelby
Yeah, yeah.
- [53:52]
Tako Verdonsgrott
Before. So basically the answer is. It depends.
- [53:58]
Alex Moss
It depends on the outcome. Yes to auditing. But from the audit, it depends what to do next. But, yeah, Carolyn's right. You know, I've been involved in loads of sites that I wouldn't call a new site. It's just a theme update and a theme change and content.
- [54:16]
Carolyn Shelby
It's still not technically a new site.
- [54:18]
Alex Moss
Exactly, exactly. So, yeah, definitely look into getting a site audited.
- [54:24]
Tako Verdonsgrott
All right, thank you very much. We have a few minutes left and there's a lot of good questions. So let's do a good one first and then we have a little bit of a fun question as well to end our day today. So Laura asks, what is the impact on paid Google Ads with a new generative search?
- [54:51]
Alex Moss
There isn't an answer yet, is there? I mean, I know that they're going, they're going to show ads in these answers, which I guess is their main model, and it will probably get more aggressive as time moves forward. But from where I'm standing, and again, Carolyn, you may. You're exposed to more of this. It doesn't seem like. It seems like it'll be a trickle into more aggression rather than, bam, here's a bunch of ads and this is what you should be doing towards it.
- [55:17]
Carolyn Shelby
The only thing I've noticed, and I don't do a lot with paid search, but as a user I've noticed that there are, there'll be like three ads now above the AI overview and there'll be three ads below it. And I don't, I don't think about the effect on paid as much as I do on organic. I know the effect on organic is organic is pushed so far down the page that I don't know that normal people are going to bother scrolling that far down to get to the organic results. So I think if I had to guess, I would say that makes paid more important because if you need to get above the AI overview, the only way you're going to do that is by paying for an ad.
- [56:06]
Tako Verdonsgrott
Yeah, obviously not what we want to hear doing SEO, but yeah, it's a clear answer.
- [56:13]
Alex Moss
Look on the other part, Sacco, it makes SEO more Valuable because there's less to fight against below, below that scroll. Even though, like Carolyn said, not everyone scrolls. Right. But when you do, and you want to do any form of research, the 10 links that we see may now be two or three, which means that fight's even, even more important.
- [56:34]
Carolyn Shelby
The building of your brand and the establishing yourself as an authority on your topic is going to be maybe less readily visible, but more important because now instead of fighting just for position on the page, you're fighting for control of the narrative. And that narrative is going to be reflected in the AI overview.
- [56:56]
Tako Verdonsgrott
All right, as we're coming up on time, we have the one fun question that we saw. It was the first question asked when we opened this webinar and Larry Hilton asked, what does the title Principal SEO actually mean? We're in a back channel chat wondering as well.
- [57:20]
Alex Moss
I didn't know. So we obviously both interviewed for a position at the same time and from my experience, it was just a title that was in our contracts. When it was sent, I was like, all right, that's it. Didn't look into it too much and didn't think about it. But probably the easiest and most conservative answer is probably a hierarchy thing. And we may be at the top level of the SEO knowledge gap of team building. What do you think, Carolyn?
- [57:46]
Carolyn Shelby
I had to do some research on that because I actually had to explain it for some other reasons. Apparently principal means that you are at the top of the individual, individual contributor chain. So if you know the difference between a, a role that manages people and a role that is doesn't manage people is just an individual contributor. We are individual contributors, but we're at the highest level of individual contributors.
- [58:14]
Alex Moss
Oh, that sounds really nice.
- [58:16]
Carolyn Shelby
Go us got that from. From an AI overview.
- [58:22]
Tako Verdonsgrott
Well believe because I mean, you are the SEO experts at Yoast, so I think with that we can go to the closing for today's webinar. We've come up on the full hour. There's one thing I would like to ask you if you're joining us here live. I just posted the link to a tweet in the chat and it would be fantastic if you learned something from the webinar today to share that in a reply to that tweet. So if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast platform, it's slightly harder because reading out Twitter links is virtually impossible. But we'll post it to the Show Notes. Do reply to our tweet, let us know what you learned and we'll take that into next month. As well to bring more of your favorite content. Alex, thank you very much for sharing your wisdom today. Carolyn, thank you so much for keeping Alex in check and sharing even more wisdom. And I'd love to see you all next month. Thanks for joining.