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OpenAI's future plans, decline in Google Search, and extended Q&A! | #SEOUpdateByYoast
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- [00:05]
Ninke
Hey, everyone. Welcome to an all new SEO update by Yoast. My name is Ninke. I'm the Associate Director of Partnerships at Yoast and your host for the last update of the year. Obviously, we have a packed and jolly edition ready for you, so I'm not going to waste anyone's time and let our principal SEOs, Carolyn and Alex take over. I'll be back for Q and A.
- [00:27]
Alex
All right, so let's see.
- [00:31]
Carolyn
So when was our last one? The 26th.
- [00:34]
Alex
Yeah, it was. It was. It felt like it was 10 minutes ago, honestly. Let's get the. We need to get the slides down in the. I can't move.
- [00:46]
Carolyn
I can do that.
- [00:48]
Alex
There we go. Thank you. All right, so let's get started. I guess this is me and Alex. You guys know who we are, what we're going to discuss today. We've got some SEO and AI news, we've got a little bit of Yoast news, and we want to leave a lot of time for Q and A because I know we are notoriously bad about not doing so. So the plan is we're going to buzz through the news quickly, and then we will have plenty of time for all of your questions. And we'll do a little extra Q and A for as an early Christmas present for everybody, some housekeeping. And I, Ninka, already covered this, but please feel free to ask questions, upvote other questions if you'd like to see them answered. That's how we know what you're interested in hearing about, and we do our best to meet those requirements. If you'd like to learn more about today's topics, as always, the entire recap and transcript are going to be available at the website that you see there. The next how to Start With SEO webinar is going to be December 18th, which is two days from now. So if you're here and you're like, this is really a little bit more advanced than what I'm looking for, and I need something a little bit more intro. The how to Start With SEO webinar is definitely the one that you want to catch. It starts at 10am Eastern Time, 4pm if you're in Europe. So hopefully you'll be able to catch that before the Christmas holidays. And I think we are probably ready to get started. You ready to go, Alex?
- [02:18]
Carolyn
I'm ready to go.
- [02:20]
Alex
All right, let's get this done. Okay, so I will real quick talk about this one. This looks complicated. It's not really as complicated as it looks. C2PA metadata can appear in Google SERPs. If you skip down to that last bullet, honestly, all this means is that Google is going to be able to sniff out if your image was made by AI because there's metadata that appears in those AI images. Don't try to pass off AI generated images as legitimate undoctored images because the metadata is going to give it away. It's going to get labeled as AI and you're going to look like a liar. So the TLDR is don't do that. The next thing that we're going to have to cover is the first draft of the general purpose AI Code of Practice has been published by the European Commission. It's just the first draft, it focusing on transparency, copyright, systemic risk management. It sounds terribly interesting again, but it's a government bodies paper so you have to kind of expect these things. There's four drafting rounds and this is just the first one. It's not going to conclude until April. The goal is to ensure that AI is trustworthy and it's, you know, all of these rules are tailored in compliance with subject matter experts on like open source models and things like that. I don't think this is anything to panic about. Like I said, there's four more drafting or there's three more drafting rounds after this one. We'll know in April if there's going to be any major impact to how we do business, but I don't expect there to be. So this is just something to kind of keep in mind if you are interested in reading what the first draft has to say. Will have a link for you in the recap.
- [04:10]
Carolyn
Yeah, I mean that's law. That takes ages though, you know, by the time that, by the time the third draft is in like AI will be old school, it'll be like the cassette already and there'll be something else probably creating its own laws for itself.
- [04:24]
Alex
Our robot overlords will have already taken over, so it won't matter.
- [04:27]
Carolyn
Exactly. It's fine, everything's fine, everything. I'm sure 2030 will be cool for everyone. But until then, until then, AI are I think in the game for taking on Chrome, which I think is quite interesting. So they're going into the browsing experience in general and whilst they talk about it going into ChatGPT and search GPT is offering this may become a whole new product that will create more mass adoption for ChatGPT and OpenAI as a whole. And to. And to go with that, a few days later they actually announced that they'd hired a former Chrome architect from Google and now they're working for OpenAI so at least they're putting their money where their mouth is literally by hiring someone who would be very suitable for the job that they're pring. So that, that will probably happen. I reckon that that browser will be out way before the second draft of, of the legal document, I reckon.
- [05:30]
Alex
Well, and OpenAI is an American company, so I don't necessarily know that they're going to put the European Commission's preferences and desires at the forefront of their, of their design strategy.
- [05:45]
Carolyn
Yes, yes, I forget that the Europe is obviously the whole world in America is a whole different ballgame when it comes to that stuff. I don't know whether that's a good thing.
- [05:56]
Alex
Well, we do tend to, you know, worry far less about what the Europeans think than what we, than what our own government thinks. So it's, it does, it definitely colors the way, you know, products are developed because those rules, those rules are secondary and the addressable market in Europe isn't as large as the total addressable market in the US So companies I think justifiably care more about the US regulations than they do about what's going to happen after the fact in Europe.
- [06:30]
Carolyn
Let's see what happens with the browser wars. But at the moment actually I am as well because I know that ARC have been doing stuff and then they stopped I think doing arc but now they're going more into an AI driven one and I know that ARC already has AI into it and some people use it and if you're into AI browsing experiences, I do suggest using ARC at least until OpenAI blatantly release one in Q3. I'm going to go with Q3 in time for summer I reckon.
- [07:00]
Alex
Yeah, we'll flag that and we'll see.
- [07:02]
Carolyn
How it flag it up in July pre the pre holiday research that needs to be done or making sure that you need it for holiday. But up until that point Google have added recommendations in GA about Merchant center recommendations specifically to help fix product issues and way things to disapprove and it's kind of connecting the two together which I always find useful and obviously for the E commerce store owners who are listening to this will find it extremely useful that they don't have to just rely what's going on in Merchant center and they can be made aware elsewhere about things that they can optimize which I think is pretty cool. Small, small gains but every little helps, right?
- [07:45]
Alex
Every little bit helps, that's for sure. Apparently Google search has seen a UK decline.
- [07:52]
Carolyn
Yeah, I mean, we're more open to testing things right now also. You would think so. Yes, we think so. I don't know so, but I think so. But I also. Well, the second part of this title is very British, I think, you know, we express low trust in, in AI. Just, just change AI to anything new. We will definitely question those things. I don't know. As a Brit, I know that I'm. I'm stuck in my old ways with certain things. We're even discussing earlier today how I'm only now doing more and more ChatGPT stuff and I felt like the Britishness in me was saying, no, I don't like change, I like my Google search bar. And that's where I'm sticking. Not as an SEO, but as a Brit. And now I open my mind to it and maybe I'm now contributing towards this UK decline that I'm seeing because not just, not, not just me, but other people, let's just say that normal people I didn't expect to hear about Perplexity are talking about perplexity. Complete technophones, in my opinion. They don't know what the hell's going on with AI, but they know they use Perplexity for things that they do in work. And that, that I would say should, should worry Google a lot, but. And then maybe this data is going to make someone, you know, stand up a bit more. Unless they're already on a standing desk, I don't know. But if they would maybe act a bit faster to what the audience wants and not what they think needs to happen in the next three years, I.
- [09:21]
Alex
Think Google might be concerned about what's going on because I know in the last update I reported that when Search GPT was made available to everyone, it popped up a thing and said, hey, install our Chrome plugin and it'll help you. I installed the Chrome plugin and it effectively hijacked Chrome. So every time I typed something into my Google search bar, it piped it through search GPT and it shot me straight into ChatGPT. So there was no. I could just type something in and go Google. It just Googling things became very, very difficult for me. So all of the searches that I had been doing in Google got shunted over to ChatGPT. I've noticed that there's been a couple updates to my Chrome and that functionality no longer exists. I didn't install anything, but I think Google went hey, hey, no. And shipped some. And I don't have proof of this. All I know is suddenly, suddenly that isn't working anymore and I'm able to do Google searches again just by going to that search bar. So I think.
- [10:27]
Carolyn
Interesting, interesting. I like also, by the way, as we go to the next slide, how we're talking about AI and new platforms that there's a bunch of people having nostalgia of old platforms like AltaVista and Web Crawler. I love that. It also shows our age, right?
- [10:44]
Alex
We don't talk about that.
- [10:46]
Carolyn
No, no, no. So Chromium, what are they up to?
- [10:50]
Alex
Chrome in general, since we're talking about that. There was a report done about how Chrome site engagement metrics are used. So there's scores 0 to 100 as one does they measure user interaction and enhance or to enhance the browser experience. And the scores decay over time, which means if you score 100 today, but you make no changes over the course of the next six months, over time that score is going to get less because you're not doing anything to improve the user experience. So what they're saying is there's no, there's no possibility of being perfect and then just staying there. You can't just rest on your laurels. They're engineering it so you have to consistently and regularly make updates to improve that user experience. It helps them allocate resources, enable features and sort sites based on user engagement. So if users are engaged in the beginning and then they kind of fall off, that's going to make you less desirable. If users stay consistently engaged, they will consistently rank you higher and help you attract more users because it's going to help with your rankings. The scores are device specific. They are isolated in incognito and erased with history or inactivity. So it's, it's things that kind of, it's a score that exists within a specific portion of, of Chrome and Chromium. And it's not something that is reported to, I think, the mothership or added to your permanent record type of thing. It's, it's very, it's very user end specific, which I think is interesting to note. So it's not something you're going to be able to fix necessarily. Let me rephrase that. In the past, sometimes things would break in a certain, for a certain device or for a certain browser. And as SEOs we would look at that and say, I don't care that much about the people that are dumb enough to keep using that thing. The way this works is because all of those different things are scored. A bad score in one of those areas could affect things negatively everywhere. So you do have to Kind of be concerned about the user experience of everyone, not just this is the browser I use, so this is the browser I care about, which is, I mean, it's a subtle difference, but I think it's interesting to note.
- [13:12]
Carolyn
Yeah, yeah, I added what you can type into into Chrome or, sorry, a Chromium based browser. So if you're using Brave, etc. You can use it there. You just type that Chrome colon blah blah blah in there and then you'll be able to see everything you need to see. Oh yeah, and I've also added in Dejan's blog post that goes into highly technical detail. If you want to geek out and see everything that it looks at, he.
- [13:38]
Alex
Can be very, very technical. So this would be a fun thing for you to test your favorite AI tool on. Feed his blog post into it and say, can you explain this to me like I'm a 5 year old? Because I use that phrase all the time. It's very helpful, especially when you're trying to interpret something that is really outside of your field of expertise and you need, you need some help digesting it. This would be a great opportunity to test that functionality. Tell us about bluesky, Alex. Have you moved over to bluesky?
- [14:13]
Carolyn
No, I bought myself. I secured my usernames as best as I could because I've not got the most unique name, but other than that, I think I'm the classic. I installed it once, browsed through it once, twice maybe, and then never went back. And maybe this is why I was skeptical about even including this as a news item, because right now I'm sure that the data will say that three times as much engagement is happening on BlueSky. But two things. First of all, like, what are those numbers? What's that three times as much as what? What set of data is it? A big set of data, that's what. That's one thing. The other thing is that maybe this is a trend. And I think that I use threads as an example when in the first two weeks you would hear lots of stories about its supersonic growth and how many people have opened account. And then really, if you were to look at the same article three months later, you know that trend has gone way down. And it was just that FOMO of opening a new account on a new social platform where I found, at least with threads Anyway, I think 95% of the updates were people telling me that they'd left X to go there. But I don't, I don't need to know that. I don't need to know that people have arrived somewhere or leaving. I think someone actually said on X like you're not an airport, you don't need to declare if you're leaving or arriving on a social platform. And I get that, but it's okay. But I would say if for people listening and watching now, is Blue sky actually a place where it, where you're, where you're gonna find value for you, for what you're selling as a product or a service, is your audience there engaging? Because if they're not, then there's no point. Just like some businesses and products aren't going to go on to say LinkedIn to sell their stuff because it's not the most appropriate social network to be on.
- [16:07]
Alex
I think what's going to happen. So this migration to bluesky is very similar to the migration to Parlor before Parlor was shut down, except it's in the opposite direction and it's the user's self segregating and it becomes a little echo chamber. And if it has staying power, it's going to be interesting for businesses because you're going to have to decide are you going to invest in having a presence in the old place where everyone hung out and the new place where half of the people are hanging out? Because now it's just polarizing and self segregating by political affiliation really. So businesses are going to have to make those decisions. Who's our audience and where are we going to invest our money and are we trying to please everyone? In which case we have to invest and be in all the places where all the people are. It's interesting to see but everyone getting excited about 3X engagement, their engagement was pretty low to begin with and now it's skyrocketed. But 3, 3, 3x of 5 is 15 whereas 3x of 5 million is 15 million. So there's, there's differences. When you get percentages, it's, it's a little bit less impressive than if you were giving hard numbers and the hard numbers were impressive. So.
- [17:32]
Carolyn
It is, it is. But again that, that's not to say don't use it like again, I'm seeing in the chat that Blue sky is really working for people and like you said, maybe half the audience is there, but the other question is, is which half? Like, is it the more valuable half? Because if that's the case, then the 50% on the other one where you, you're shouting to half into a void essentially. So, so whilst I'm skeptical on some stuff like this and say is it a trend or Is it something that's going to stick for. In the long term, like. Like Mastodon joins the conversation as well, then I'm all for it. Right. I'm all for, you know, different, different social networks being around for different audiences. There are. Otherwise there'd just be one. Right.
- [18:12]
Alex
I am vaguely curious if a company tries to have a foot in both. In both camps, basically, where they're advertising to the people, let's say the people on the right that stayed on X and then the people on the left that all went over to Blue Sky. Assuming that that's how it breaks down, if it breaks down cleanly, if you're trying to reach both of those, do you tailor your message for each? And then if someone on one shares the screenshot of your ad there on the other place and goes, look, they're lying to you and like, oh, yeah, no, they're lying to you. And then what does that do to your marketing campaigns? It's an, it's an interesting conundrum. I don't know if it's terribly. It's necessarily SEO related, but it's, it's interesting in terms of how you're going to divide up your, your marketing budget. Fun things to worry about over Christmas.
- [19:04]
Carolyn
Yeah. Yeah.
- [19:06]
Alex
All right.
- [19:07]
Carolyn
How do people use Google?
- [19:10]
Alex
So SparkToro did an analysis where they looked at 332 million queries over 21 months about how people are using Google. They found that Google does still hold over 90% of the market share and drives 60% of referral traffic, which is not unexpected. I think, I think we all kind of knew that a third of the searches being navigational and over half are informational. I think that's interesting because I think, I think Google would like it to be a lot more commercial. They make money on those commercial. The commercial queries. So I think it's interesting that there are still so many that are navigational and so many that are informational. By the way, navigational is like when your mom types in aol.com into the Google search bar when she means to go to aol.com but she accidentally types it in as a query. That's what they mean by navigational. So there are still. Clearly. I think we could extrapolate. There are a lot of old people that are still using the Google to get around and don't quite understand how modern browsers work, which is, you know, it's cute. Branded search queries are nearly half of the searches. A small set of top queries drive all of the demand. Everything else is long tail. But the long tail is minimal in comparison to those brand queries and the head terms that we call them. Google's increasingly using zero click answers and the AI overviews to provide, well, not just provide, but dominate these major categories like arts and entertainment and finance. So really, any question you ask about a movie, Google is going to be able to provide an AI overview for, you know, give you a synopsis, tell you where it's playing, all kinds of fun stuff like that, which is changing the way we use Google and it's changing the results, it's changing how we optimize. So those are interesting things to worry about. And then they also found that search is a post discovery tool now with brand discovery shifting to social media and other platforms and then Google being a secondary place where you go to get more information. So you see an ad on Facebook, you see an ad on X, you see an ad on Blue Sky. If they do ads, I don't think they really do ads. TikTok, Instagram, you see something, you remember the name because it's interesting, you can't remember how to get there. So then you go to Google and type in the brand name and the, anything you remember about the ad and it tells you then how to get to it. So it's not, it's not used to help you learn new things, it's there to help you find more information about things that you discovered somewhere else. And I think that's another big shift that we, I don't know that anyone really expected to happen in the big way that it is happening.
- [22:02]
Carolyn
So no, I think the most interesting part of all of that was the half is informational, which is a trouble to some site owners because with the zero adding to the zero clicks. But again, we were chatting before about how I'm using ChatGPT more and the example I used is Venom. There's a new film and I wanted to know a summary of the last two because I've kind of half forgotten and I added to the search contextually and I realized that for that kind of search I'm never, not never, I'm not going to be going to Google to make that search for some time because ChatGPT gave me a much more concise answer. Not the ads play a part in the decision making. If you're going to make an ad for like, I don't know, Venom on DVD or whatever, the streaming thing, it's, that's fine. But I've now realized that especially with the wider and mass market, Google are now In a danger territory where they're one bad search away from churn for that person, just one, right? And it takes after 20 years of effort, a generational effort, to get everyone. They've got a verb for searching, right? But now people don't search anymore. They discover. So now even the name Google Googling something is becoming a little bit redundant and information gatherings done much differently. AIO is not as good as the others, in my opinion, giving the user what they want. So I'm really interested to see again what they're doing, especially looking at this kind of data to show that brand marketing and information or driven searches are booming in a place where they don't want that. They don't, they don't want that to happen.
- [23:40]
Alex
I think, I think part of the problem is that because things like ChatGPT make it easy, they'll do that research for you. They'll find those answers for you and prevent you from having to spend an hour going to five different websites and reading through those papers and or the documents and trying to find the answer or synthesize the answer yourself. It's doing all that work for you very quickly. So Google's answers just aren't as help. The AIO interface isn't as helpful as having a conversation with ChatGPT or, you know, perplexity or whichever, whichever AI tool you're using, having that conversation with it to get to the answer that you want faster. Like, I couldn't, I couldn't have asked Google which red wine I should use because these are the ones I have on hand in this recipe. Because Google wouldn't know the recipe right away. There's not enough room in that chat box for me to adequately fully explain and articulate what I'm trying to get at. Whereas I can do that with ChatGPT. It'll rework all of my recipes and say, yeah, that's Shiraz's spine. Like, okay, cool, let's now change everything else on the menu to accommodate for the fact that I'm using the Shiraz instead of the cab. And away you go. And then it does it. Google just doesn't do that right now. Which makes it, yeah, that one bad experience where it's just so much easier to do this other thing and not go to Google for that. Alrighty, Alex, I heard the Core Update member finally finished just in time for the December one to start.
- [25:27]
Carolyn
Yes, yes, it's. It finished rolling out. There wasn't too much of a massive disturbance in the force of SERPs that have been noted there's been no one who's been completely disappearing off the radar that maybe wasn't already in previous core HCU or there may be, you know, additional nails in a coffin that's already been made for them kind of scenario which is again a shame because no one's seeing huge benefits still from hcu. But the other thing that they were doing as well as the fact that they've already started another rollout that I think happened last Friday, maybe Thursday or Friday. That's always mean and they say that's mean but I'm sure from memory they do do this a lot. They do a lot of core or important updates just before Christmas to keep SEOs on their toes. I think it's probably some sadist who's working there who does it each year and with a, you know, an evil laugh but, but again it's not been the most volatile. It also came with an update and I don't know it wasn't in its own slide where in the last week someone from Google mentioned that there's going to be more core updates. There's, they're going to be happening more and more often. So you might see that this time of the year will have talked about a core update happening every single month. You don't, you don't know. But I'm going to assume that that's going to start happening now. Especially the catch up that they have to keep playing now with these, with these serious players.
- [26:56]
Alex
Yeah. And I think now that they've got, they've, they've got AI tweaking the algorithm now so everything is just happening so much faster. They don't have to wait for QA and for all of these other things that they would normally have had to put through different cycles and phases at work. So everything is like every timeline is just compressing and it's, I think we're, we're just racing towards the singularity. That's just.
- [27:26]
Carolyn
Just, just, just the light hearted stuff you want at the end of the year, right? Just inside the Christmas movies.
- [27:34]
Alex
Pretty much, yeah.
- [27:36]
Carolyn
Yeah.
- [27:36]
Alex
All right, so the other fun stuff that happened is OpenAI released ChatGPT01 which is the world smart, smartest language model. Their words, not ours. It's $200 a month. Yeah, sorry, I don't that often to justify that kind of expense. But hey, if you can, if you can afford it, then go for it and let me know how it works because I will not be investing in that.
- [28:05]
Carolyn
I'm sure there'll be micro influencers who have invested to A get status and B get a lot of engagement so that it they'll get a return on that $200 maybe by going on X saying here's what I found. That kind of stuff.
- [28:19]
Alex
Well, the micro influencers probably got financed by Open OpenAI to to try it out and then promote it. I doubt, I very much doubt they're they're spending that kind of money on their own. But it's the kind of people that buy Lamborghinis recreationally. So what do I know?
- [28:36]
Carolyn
Exactly. Exactly. I just don't think that the normal person needs all of this at least right now on the level that you would need to you would actually want to pay 200. My prediction, in 6 months this will probably be part of your 20amonth package and the 200 will have something else that none of us even know about yet or even heard of.
- [28:59]
Alex
I've been real happy with the the 4 0. I haven't had a need to do to use anything beyond that and so I don't know. It would have to be really amazing and like clean my house too for 200amonth.
- [29:12]
Carolyn
Exactly. Exactly. As well as that. Again, I don't know if it was also in the news, which I know is the next slide, but I do know that it wasn't in the slide in this slide. So it didn't get into a slide by now. But Sora has now gone on general release, which is the OpenAI video service that people can now go and check out. So that's another thing to check out. So what else happened in the news? So I did mention that OpenAI hires the former Chrome engineer, so that's already been covered. Google Business profile targets age restricted products. If you sell adult material and like tobacco, things like that, then you can now have more specific stuff on your profile. There's a new Google Analytics feature that helps hidden product listings which I think oh no, we covered that in the slide. I think it got into both. So it's very important for ecommerce that we needed to mention it twice. Bing Webmaster Tools only shows data for Bing and yahoo, but not chatgpt. Although in GA4 there are ways of finding. It's not open obviously my other tab at the moment but there is a way and I did mention it in the last one of how you can navigate to see how many people are coming into the site through ChatGPT. And no, it doesn't tell you what the prompts were that made them get there. Google Search CTR reveals shifting industry trends that's quite a long read. So if you're into industry trends, I suggest you go in there and check it out. That was on Search Engine Journal. And lastly, Google uses about 40 signals to determine canonical URLs. What did you say, Carolyn? Don't mess them up.
- [30:57]
Alex
Well, it's relatively easy to not screw it up, so just don't screw it up. Provide a canonical for a piece of content and don't send mixed messages because it's looking at a lot of things. It uses the things that it looks at to pick the correct canonical if it believes that the canonical you provided is bad. So don't give it a bad canonical and it won't look for reasons to replace it. Just don't screw it up and you'll be fine.
- [31:26]
Carolyn
Yeah, and I think that's all of our news. I think the only thing that wasn't totally newsworthy maybe is the One bit of WordPress news is automatic acquired WP AI, which is a service that would bring AI capabilities into WordPress. It's probably not going to be newsworthy now, other than me saying it, but I reckon in about three months we'll be chatting about this for about five minutes about what they've done with that acquisition, probably.
- [31:55]
Alex
And the curious thing though is like Everybody, all the WordPress plugins are incorporating AI into like we did. Everybody else is doing it too. So how are they? Is what they're doing going to step on what everyone else has been doing? Are they going to work together? I'm curious to know what the plan is with this.
- [32:18]
Carolyn
Aren't we all? 2025 is going to be interesting for AI and SEO and WordPress. It's going to be very. These are going to have to be 90 minutes, I reckon, by April probably.
- [32:30]
Alex
Well, so we're almost done. We have one more slide before we go into the Q and A for the yost news. We wanted to share some stuff, but it wasn't the announcement isn't happening until later this week, so we just want to tease everyone with there's an announcement coming, you know, some new product features. We're not allowed to talk about them. I've been given a list of words that I'm not even allowed to say. So I'm just going to say stay tuned. There will be, there will be something before you take your Christmas break and we're all very excited about it.
- [33:03]
Carolyn
The backend of WordPress on Thursday and hope that there's an update to a new version and make sure you hit it. That's all we're saying.
- [33:11]
Alex
Yeah, real quick. I mean, a lot of the upcoming events and appearances aren't happening until February, so you've got plenty of time to plan your travel for that. The next SEO update is going to be January 28th, which feels like 100 years from now, but it's like six, six weeks. So six week gap. We should have a ton of new news for you. Looking forward to that. And now we are ready for our qa.
- [33:39]
Carolyn
Hey. And we've got loads, actually. We've got time.
- [33:42]
Alex
Oh, my God. We've got.
- [33:44]
Ninke
Proud of you.
- [33:46]
Carolyn
We're just thinking once a year you'll get this. That's it exactly.
- [33:52]
Ninke
You all had to wait till the end of the year to get all this space. I will move the slides away and move us to the big screen. So everybody. Well, that was already erased. Really nice. Yeah. Let's start. So for everyone joining the stream, you can go through all the ask questions right now and upvote one so we can actually have an updated list of the questions. But let's start with the most upvoted question at this moment. Shauna posted it and it's about AI in Photoshop and images. The question is, I use AI in Photoshop to expand images to fit the dimensions needed. For example, change a square into a rectangular one, or by extending background trees. Will these images on the website now get banned or will there be a penalty for SEO? And eight upvotes. So I guess a lot of people are questioning this.
- [34:49]
Alex
That's a good question. I actually don't know. I think what's going to. So if it's a real image in the beginning and you're just using AI to expand it, the question is, is Photoshop going to add that metadata that triggers Google to label it as AI? So there's that. Are you going to get penalized? I don't see why you would get penalized. There's no penalty. There's no penalty there unless it's identical to what somebody else has done, which it's not. And even then, it's not a penalty, that's just duplicate content. So I would say, is there a penalty? No. Is it going to trigger a label? That depends on Photoshop.
- [35:39]
Ninke
I hope that helps Shauna and the other, oh, nine people now. Thanks, Carolyn. So there's another question. Posted by Toren I'll pop it on the screen. In terms of best practice for search engine rankings and the appearance consistency of results in search engines, would you advise using the SEO variables in a website's page settings? Like title or page title, or typing the web page's desired appearance manually.
- [36:14]
Carolyn
It depends. And it does depend. I mean, I'm here. I'm going to assume you're talking about the title tag of a title. I don't know if. Is it Torrin who's here? Maybe he'll say something in the chat. Go on, Carolyn.
- [36:32]
Alex
No, I think I see what he's asking. So you can define those variables in the Yoast settings? Yep. And that's great that. That's perfect for the default behavior. But Yoast already allows you to override on a per page basis what that title, page title, et cetera, appears like for the search engines on each. On each page, as desired. So I think the best practice is you set. You define the default behavior in the settings using the variables, and when you feel the need to manually override it, you do so on the page. I mean, I don't know that there's. You have to do what's best for the situation, if that makes sense. Yeah.
- [37:23]
Ninke
Meanwhile, thanks, Carolyn. I saw Don's question coming in, and Don, I have moved your question to the qa, so if other people want to know about that too, please upvote Don's question. My Q and A is reloading right now.
- [37:40]
Carolyn
Okay, an AI votes coming in as we're talking.
- [37:46]
Ninke
This question was posted by Meg, and the question is, as AI continues to impact search and Google continues to roll out updates, what are the core things we should focus on as a foundational SEO strategy? Is it keyword research and content? Is it technical SEO? What should be the main priority in 2025?
- [38:10]
Carolyn
I'd say yes to all the above. And I know it sounds weird, but, like at the beginning when I first started SEO, I kind of had to explain to people who weren't in my team that they had to. The more they thought about SEO, the worse it may get for them, and the less they think about SEO, the more natural they will become. This is from a content creative point of view and keyword point of view, such as back in keyword stuffing days. How many times. What's the. What's the proportion in the whole piece of content? I should say this keyword and the answer is as naturally as you should. That's what it should have always been, and I guess it's the same now and just kind of ignore the fact that AI is around. You need to adapt to it. And weirdly, in the next year, my belief is that AI is going to adapt more to, you know, what we've been doing all this time and there may be new things we have to do, some of which will be covered inside our plugin, some of which will be covered in the updates and methods that we'll have to do in blog updates. But the basics of what you're all doing now, I would say just keep on being helpful, honest, transparent and white hat, and the Internet in general will.
- [39:20]
Alex
Respect you back, I would say. We've published several articles in our SEO blog that talk about how to deal with and kind of massage the AI narratives that are being presented about any given topic that the AIs are asking about. The goal going forward is less to just rank and more to be one of the citations or sources that the AIs are using for these answers. And how are they deciding what to use as the source they're looking for? Consensus. So if there's a consensus answer, are you one of the consensus answers? Are you providing robust information? Are you an authority on that subject? So this is all about the eat. Are you doing. Are you doing all the things that are going to elevate you to an entity that is recognized for having expertise in whatever particular field you have expertise in? And I think the EAT portion is what you're going to need to be focusing on. That being said, I can think of three or four articles that we recently wrote in our blog, so if you want to go check there, there's a lot of information on how you should be prioritizing your tasks going forward.
- [40:44]
Ninke
Meanwhile, I'll read the next question and Carolyn, maybe if you can quickly put up those or at least one of those posts. I'm not sure if you. I'll give you some time. I'll just pick a really long question to read out. Okay, let me refresh for a bit. I think this ties into what we.
- [41:07]
Carolyn
Got to go with the 10 vote or we going with the long question?
- [41:10]
Ninke
No, I'm going with the tempo because I think that's URLs in the age of all the AI search. Okay, Derek asked the following question. How important are websites going to continue to be as a definite source of info and content for businesses, especially in the age of no click discovery? There's the word discovery already. Alex, you did a great job on that.
- [41:36]
Carolyn
I know, I know. I think they're going to be very important. They're going to be inviting, vital as they were before. If there is no information to discover, there's nothing to not click like it's you. I would say we should still be contributing towards the web and its content and doing so we will still get cited in some way in the future. So long as there's got to be something to discover, right? Otherwise there's nothing there. And without the site, Google can't source the site. Think of the search engine. They're just middlemen, right? Middle pe. Middle, middle machines. I don't know why, I don't know what they are. They're the messenger. They're the messenger between what you want and the answer. And if they don't have the answer, they can't be the messenger. So they need the creators more than the creators need them. Even though the power play doesn't seem that way at the moment. Like weirdly, if all web creators now just stop typing, right, Google will have serious issues. Serious, serious issues. So like they're playing with fire. I think in it because these small publishers, that's going to have a knock on effect. Because now if I was 18, 19 and I had an interest 10 years ago, I'd be all about making this niche website. Today. I'd read three things. I'd be like, why would I do that? Why would I spend my time and in four years like that, all my visibility is gone. Why would I spend all of that and build a company that could mean nothing if my one reliance is on the messenger? You know, true. But yeah, this, that's for another week probably that rant.
- [43:15]
Alex
So, so for businesses in particular, it is still important to have a website because if you ask your favorite AI for information. Let's, let's talk about Yoast as an example. If you asked a question about the features of the product or the features of free versus Premium, where's it getting that information from? Yoast is the authoritative entity on Yoast. So it's going to go look at the Yoast website and read all the information about the product features and then do a comparison for you. So being if we don't keep that updated and we don't take time to promote and prioritize the things that we think are important, then the AIs aren't going to know that to repeat it to the users. If we're not, if we're not owning our expertise and then taking advantage of the platform that it's provided us, then yeah, we've then wasted this opportunity to deliver the information to the AIs, even though there were no clicks involved. Somebody's got to go get that content from somewhere and they rely on the authority.
- [44:24]
Ninke
You rather be us to in the Yoast case, us to provide that info than Other people providing that info about you. Right. So that's the thing you want to own whether or not the search engine landscape is changing.
- [44:38]
Carolyn
Yeah. And I also get big boy travels issue like you don't care. As much as being cited as an AI answer, we want to retain our traffic.
- [44:47]
Alex
So the problem there is the only reason you. Okay, I don't, I don't know your specifics, but I, I'm going to make some, some assumptions. If you need that traffic because you make your money on traffic and not on conversions, then that's a problem with the business model. And I think that the business models that make their, their money solely on traffic are going to probably be in a position where they have to evolve because I see that traffic source drying up.
- [45:15]
Carolyn
That's one. And it's one channel. Right. Remember that like spread the channel. It's like any, any business will say don't. Well, any service level led business won't say. Well, make sure that less than 30% of your turnover isn't with one client, you know, one supplier, because then that's an issue here. All these small publishers are effectively saying that 98 of their turnover is with one client. The search, the search provider being the client. And if that's cut out, it goes. So spread as much as possible and attract as many as possible in different areas and maybe blue sky just, and.
- [45:57]
Alex
Just real quick to provide my English to English translation for the Americans. When Alex's turnover, he means revenue, not quitting. Because when we say trainer like a glossary.
- [46:12]
Carolyn
I'm sure all the AI platforms are telling me that it should, it should say that. But us Brits, we don't like going on to the new things, do we? We said that.
- [46:20]
Alex
I just know that when I hear it I get confused and my brain has to go.
- [46:24]
Ninke
Thank you.
- [46:25]
Alex
Okay, it's nice you take our American.
- [46:29]
Ninke
Based audience into account. Okay, next one. Oh, we have a tie between two nine times. Upvoted question. I'll just start with the top one from Johnny. I want to add videos to my product pages, which is good, I think. In terms of SEO, are there any important considerations, any specific settings maybe in Yoast to optimize for on page videos?
- [46:58]
Alex
Well, I think we have a whole Yoast video add on that you can get that is designed specifically for video and there are, there are SEO considerations for videos which you can, you can definitely set. I think within the tool there's a separate video sitemap that you can get. There's a lot of different video things you can do. But I would definitely say if you have videos to add to your product pages, then please do like anything that helps your engagement and provides more. More information to the user is going.
- [47:28]
Carolyn
To be helpful and the clearest possible so. So Carolyn was thinking about it from a technical SEO point of view. I was picturing it from a content point of view. Make sure they're helpful, of course. And it might sound obvious, but sometimes it's not. Make a use case out of. So let's say it's a product or a service. Find the solution and benefit. Find the use case of it if it's a product especially get it in its surroundings in in situ. If that's. I don't know if Americans know in situ as well as the term like as an example of when it would be used. And that will be then interpreted by all of these platforms which are getting more and more sophisticated. So in a year it'll be able to read the content of those videos and it will really complement the text around it and again it will figure out the context between the video and the text and the page that it's on and where it is on the site. So yeah, all very important. All ties in together.
- [48:24]
Ninke
In the meantime, I was searching for a few blog articles about this. So Johnny, if you just search the Yoast website, you'll find a lot of blog articles about this, but I'll share one that I think is like the. Maybe the starting place for you to discover this. So I hope this helped.
- [48:46]
Carolyn
Yeah.
- [48:46]
Ninke
And Phil Nottingham.
- [48:48]
Carolyn
Phil Nottingham knows everything there is to know about video and also like just annoy him on X or whatever is active on. He'll just have to answer for his personal brand.
- [48:59]
Ninke
We don't want them to get too distracted. Alex. But I get it. I get it. Okay, then there's oh, we still have time. It's amazing. I really have to get used to this. It's really nice. There's another question by Lee. If I pronounce this right, aside from working on all the standard stuff to rank ux, off site SEO and on site SEO optimization, producing quality content that meets the E80 standards, keyword research, organic backlinks, etc. What can be done to get Google to understand your website is worth ranking? Well, again, after the helpful content update, I have yet to recover and I'm pulling my hair out. Oh, don't do that. Trying to understand what I'm getting wrong when it seems I'm doing everything I should and am a true expert in my field. Thanks.
- [49:54]
Alex
So there are The HCU is a different thing. It's a classifier. And once you get. So there's two buckets, there's helpful and there's not helpful, and there are. It taught the machine to identify the characteristics of unhelpful by giving it an example and saying, if it looks like this example, it's not helpful. And then push everything that's not helpful into this bucket and you are. You are stamped with the unhelpful. You've got the embroidered unhelpful on your. On your chest now. And there's not a lot you can do to undo that without getting rid of the appearances of unhelpfulness. And the problem. This is a long answer that's going to be difficult to do in this thing. To give you a quick. Without knowing your situation, this might work for you. You could try moving everything to a subdomain and 301 in your main site to the subdomain. However, you would need to get rid of whatever elements of your site are betraying or causing it to think that you're unhelpful. And when you're like, but I'm not doing anything that other places aren't doing, that's a matter of interpretation. And the problem is that Google's looking for ducks. And even though you are not a real duck, you're apparently wearing feathers and have a bill and, you know, and occasionally quack. So Google thinks you're a duck. We need to figure out whatever it is that's making you look like a duck and take just enough off so that you stop triggering the oh, my God, it's a duck alarm. Because we want to unduck your site, if that makes sense. It's a long answer.
- [51:45]
Carolyn
The way you said unduck your site, I was like, you so used the right animal and word to go with.
- [51:50]
Alex
I know he did that on purpose. That was a plan.
- [51:54]
Ninke
Okay.
- [51:55]
Carolyn
See, she did a keyword research as well before she even answered the question.
- [52:00]
Alex
So maybe, maybe send us an email, because it is a long answer and I would love to help you with that, but because it's a classifier and not an algorithm thing, I think once you've got the, you know, the black mark on your. On your record, it's going to not take you out of that bucket until we figure out what's putting you over the edge or tipping you over into the duct bucket.
- [52:30]
Carolyn
We do wish you luck.
- [52:32]
Alex
Yeah, we do. Other sites have done it, so we just need to figure it out.
- [52:40]
Ninke
We have another question from Don. I think it's the same Don. I didn't remember the last name. I'm sorry about that. Can you speak to schema markup and how important schema is to the future of SEO and AI? That's a huge question.
- [52:54]
Alex
In a few words, Alex, why don't you take a lot?
- [53:00]
Carolyn
I'll be honest. I'll be honest. I don't know. I actually don't know because I am quite subjective about this. I'm a huge lover of schema. I think it's really important. It's clearly a foundation of our products as well. And it's been a foundation of structured data for a long, long time. And some people are skeptical. Oh, well, we're not going to need this structured data because AI is going to be able to structure all the data we have. But I would also like to think that over these years, structured data is there not. Not because Google and search engines couldn't read that. And it can do everything that people are saying, skeptics are saying already can do all of that. But it's, it's handing a bigger spoon to the messenger, right? They're handing a bigger spoon. It's making it easier to do their job. So if you put yourself as in, in the search engine shoes, like if you've got a choice of two and one has given you everything in a nice little platter and another site is giving you unstructured crap, essentially of like, it's like giving you a book with no punctuation, no paragraphing. It's just one big block of text. The more that that happens, the bigger the job is going to be for the messenger and they'll maybe not look at you as fondly as a site or a page that is giving you structured data. So maybe because I say, I don't know, maybe I should change it to. I can't predict how search platforms are going to interpret them because there's unpredictable stuff that's been happening in our vertical in general that I like to hope that schema isn't going away anywhere soon. But I don't also want to eat my words in 12 months and say that maybe something's been figured out. But things like merchant center feeds. Feeds are just essentially structured data. You know, that they all help. And especially in E commerce where I don't see unstructured data not helping. You know, when we dig into stuff like products and product variants. Right. If there's no structured data, I don't even know how a search platform would even deal with unstructured versions of a shoe that has different sizes, different colors, different prices, some are on sale, some have different returns and refund policies. It can't do all of that without structured data and therefore schema. So maybe that wasn't a short answer, but I'd like to hope that it is. In short, it was a big question.
- [55:28]
Ninke
So we didn't expect a short answer.
- [55:30]
Carolyn
Yeah. What do you think, Carolyn? I don't know if you.
- [55:35]
Ninke
Want to add to it or do we go to last question?
- [55:40]
Alex
Schema right now is still. If it's easy for you to implement, implement it. I think I actually. Oh, it's not published yet. I just wrote an article about that for Search Engine Land and it's not come out yet. But I have advice on which scheme is important, which scheme is not important, and I don't have time to tell you about it.
- [56:02]
Ninke
Another teaser, Carolyn.
- [56:04]
Alex
We'll talk about it. We'll probably be able to talk about it at our next update.
- [56:12]
Ninke
We're done with this one. Let's see if we have time for one. Two. We have one from David that has the most upvotes right now. Can you give an overview of the current state of play for geo when people search through AI bots, as in chatgpt rather than through a search engine or the messenger as we now call it and as you host any offering any training for this.
- [56:41]
Alex
So we have answered a few questions that were directly related to this. I just phrased a little bit differently earlier. So GRO is Generative Engine Optimization, which isn't really what I call it. I just tended to call it optimizing for the AI narratives, which is long and not easy to remember. But anyway, point is we do have some blog posts that were written to help you understand how the AIs are making decisions on what to include, which you can then extrapolate into. This is how I should optimize for that. So there's We've got a few blog posts. I know I've got some talks that I recently did that I think maybe we should turn into blog posts and that can provide some training. But is there a specific. You know, this is exactly what you do. What you do is you improve your eat and you make yourself an expert in the field, which makes you desirable to be cited. So the short answer is be an entity that is an expert in that field and then provide answers that the users are looking for and then you're improving the odds that you will be a cited source. Once you're a regularly cited source, you will be a cited source for all manner of things that are related to that topic and you can exploit that to your heart's content to add to.
- [58:05]
Ninke
That because now we really have to close the stream. I've just popped in one more resource which is our AI for SEO training, part of the academy that comes with any of our or our premium tool. So just take a look there if that might be helpful for you. Next to all the blogs and the stuff on the Internet, Alex is saying.
- [58:27]
Carolyn
Yes, I would like to say there's a few people who said they've had upvoted questions that haven't been answered. So one of two things, either they're being liked a lot in the chat and they didn't go into the Q and A part or something's up. Can you please connect with us? Connect with me or Carolyn. I don't care if It's X or LinkedIn or through the website. Find us and we'll get back to you.
- [58:48]
Alex
Wait, wait. Before we close everything out. Wait. So a couple things. Number one, Ask Yossi is back up. So if you go to the website we can answer the questions that didn't get answered in Askyossi. So it's Yost.comask-yossi y, o, a S I, E is how you spell that. So we'll be answering questions that didn't get answered there. Also just we have a subreddit now. If any of you are redditors and you're interested in discussing the podcast or asking additional questions or discussing that, I'm in there frequently. So the subreddit is Yoast SEO. Obviously you can spell that and hopefully we'll see you guys there. But that was all I had. So ask Yossi and then the Reddit.
- [59:35]
Carolyn
Cool or annoyed on social.
- [59:38]
Ninke
See you on yoast.com or see you in the next SEO update. Thanks for joining everyone. I think this was a wonderful way to close the year. We've covered a lot of news. We've covered, I think, most questions ever during one of these updates. So thanks all for joining us throughout 2024 and we're super excited to start the new year all with you at the end of January. For everyone that's celebrating holidays, happy holidays, make it a good one and see you in 2025.
- [60:09]
Alex
Happy holidays, everyone.