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- [00:05]
Flori
Hey there. Thank you for listening to the November 2024 SEO update by Yoast. My name is Flori, Director of Marketing at Yoast, and I'm your host for today. In this month's update, we have a lot of news to cover. Be prepared to hear a lot about SEO and AI news. So whichever company you're running, wherever you're working, if you're a freelancer, an experienced SEO just starting out, there's news for you which you definitely want to take into account when working on your SEO. Happy listening and see you next time.
- [00:40]
Alex
Thanks for having us, Florey. Nice to see you again, Carolyn. It's been about six weeks since we've presented one of these, and a few things have happened since then, haven't they?
- [00:51]
Carolyn
It has been a few weeks. There's been a ton of stuff going on. We're going to discuss today our usual, you know, range of things. We have combined the SEO and AI news into a single category because honestly, it didn't make sense anymore to keep it separate. So instead of having SEO and then AI broken out, everything's kind of all mashed together, but I think it'll flow a lot better. A little bit of WordPress news, little bit of Yoast news, and then we're going to leave extra time for the Q and A. Because it has been so long since we saw everyone last, we kind of anticipated there will be more questions than usual. We want to make sure that we can answer more than just a couple. So if it does seem like we're breezing through some of the slides quickly, it's because we are, because we want to have enough time for everyone at the end. The housekeeping as Florrie said, there's questions in the little question box that has the question mark on it. Ask your questions there, read the other people's questions, vote them up. The ones with the most upvotes are most likely to get asked and answered, so pay attention to that. Today's Topics if you want to read more about today's topics or get a transcript, that's going to be available at yoast, which is yoa st update November 2024 the recording will be available shortly, not immediately. We've got to clean it up, make sure everything's perfect for you. So the only other thing to mention is that if you are interested in our how to Start With SEO webinars, they are held bi weekly, so every other week. The next one is next Tuesday on December 3rd from 9:00pm Central European Time, which is 3:00pm Eastern Daylight Savings Time. So 3:00pm if you're in New York, 9:00pm if you're in Amsterdam. You can do the math from there. I think. I think that's everything. You ready to go, Alex?
- [02:47]
Alex
Oh, I'm ready, I'm ready. Let's go.
- [02:50]
Carolyn
All right, let's start it off. I believe this is me. So Google has revamped their entire crawler documentation. This is probably only interesting if you read crawler documentation, but if you do, they've split it into three focused pages for better navigation. It's technical updates, content encoding, user agent details. Again, this is probably only of interest to you if crawler documentation has ever been of interest to you. So you can read that if you like. We dropped the link in the. In the recap. So you can find that when you're ready to. This would be Alex.
- [03:32]
Alex
Yes. So AI overviews have been dominating in the last few months and they've been spreading more and more into all the SERPs. And I'm sure that everyone globally is now starting to see them and not just a few people in the US and places in Europe. But what we're finding from albeit this data does represent one day in search, which I know is quite isolated, but it still is consistent with a lot of trends. I think it was on a normal day and not a special day of any kind. But looking at it, informational based links are now becoming more prevalent. So if you were to go into ChatGPT or even Google AIO and as well as that in Bing, all of them are now starting to use a consistent citation baselink system which are mostly coming from informational based intent of search. And why is that? And that's because informational based intent is usually served on the search result page or it can be done. So whilst that takes away from some of the traffic that your site may get, I would only think of this as a position zero. Right? This is essentially bringing your information into the serp. But the good thing to note is that when you're doing it through things like AIO and other AI based search platforms, it's looking at a multitude of different citations before bringing back the answer to you. So it's even more important that you're doing your normal optimizations, which we'll discuss more in other parts of the story. But it does show that transactional is still a bit lacking and E commerce hasn't really been hooked up properly to all of these platforms platforms, but it will very soon.
- [05:11]
Carolyn
I don't know about that. Google ratcheted back the transactional and navigational results, because they can't make money on that. And there's no way that they can because of the way the AI synthesizes a bunch of information and presents you a single answer. How do you promote specific transactions? When someone is specifically looking for an item of clothing at Nordstrom or that item of clothing at a different store, they don't want a bunch of synthesized data, they want a link to go get that piece of clothing at that store. So I think part of it is it doesn't make sense to do some of these transactional or navigational results with the AI overview. And some of it is Google doesn't have the ability to monetize that. That behavior and they're going to stick to and promote the things that allow them to continue to make money, especially in light of the fact that they're about to lose money when the government comes in and breaks them up.
- [06:16]
Alex
Yeah. And all the platforms have been testing this stuff out as well. And like you say, everything's led by consumer behavior at this point. And looking at that, is it trustworthy when you're given one product as an answer? Because where has that come from? Perplexity have been accused or it's been observed that they would only put links to certain products if there was some kind of underlying affiliate deal with perplexity in there. I think that's been a closed gap. But still really interesting that from a consumer point of view, trust may not be there to say, well, you should make that decision. You're really good at researching stuff and giving me back informational stuff. But right now, where we are with the consumer, the consumer adoption, is that maybe we're not quite there yet or not trustworthy enough in the same way that, you know, the older folk, when the Internet first came out, were extremely distrusting of entering credit cards into a website. But now it's normal place the.
- [07:13]
Carolyn
And I know we'll Talk about like ChatGPT and Search GPT later. I know that when I get sucked into ChatGPT because of that Chrome extension I have and I'm looking for a product, I get mad because I don't like, I don't want it to tell me where else I can get that product. I know exactly what product I want. I don't want them to recommend alternatives. I want the product I want and I want to know where I can buy it. And that experience, that preferential. My preferential experience is still with Google in the traditional, traditional format.
- [07:46]
Alex
Yeah. So talking about trust, speaking of trust.
- [07:54]
Carolyn
There'S Been a couple hit pieces put out and then some follow up pieces. This particular thing I think was sort of a hit piece. CNN and USA Today have fake websites. I believe Forbes Marketplace runs them now. Lars Lofgren did this big piece on how USA Today and CNN have these. They're parasite SEO sites. It's where you're paying to have your news presented in a format that looks like it's real news attached to a real news site. So that you can arguably or plausibly argue that this was covered in the news when in fact it was pay to play. So it is entirely possible that the company that runs Forbes Marketplace is now running the pay to play section of CNN and USA Today. When I was in the newspaper business, they were all separate companies that were running them, but they were 100% fake. Native. Native marketing or content marketing, you pay, we run it, we don't even write it. The editorial team refuses to look at it kind of stuff. If it is the same company, I guess good for them. I'm not sure, I'm not sure why people still give credit and I'm not sure why people still believe the stuff that is in these sections because it is clear that they are not in the primary section of the site. If it's not in the primary section of the site, if it's not on the root subdomain so it's not on WW. If it's on iMoney or something else.cnn.com or something else.forbes.com then the editorial team is not touching that. If your editorial team is not touching that, it's marketing. And if it's marketing, you can't, you can't assign any value to it because you don't know who wrote it. There's, there's bias. Not that there's bias in real news, but that's another, that's another conversation. It's just, it's probably true at this point in time and everybody's all up in arms. Which leads us into the next update which happened, let's see, about a month later.
- [10:07]
Alex
Yeah, Google went.
- [10:09]
Carolyn
Yeah, go ahead.
- [10:12]
Alex
So it's interesting that just after that hit piece about a month later, coincidentally Forbes and CNN and lots of Forbes Marketplace have, that have affiliate based platforms and scale sites or get hit. So it's, it's very interesting because then it creates this, it creates the questions of was this manual or algorithmic? We believe it's manual. Does it also hit, are the classifiers being hit or is this. Googlers looking at hit pieces just like this and then maybe using them as an example. There's lots of different theories that are out there, especially on Twitter or X, about what thoughts are about what Google's up to and what lessons they're trying to teach smaller companies. What would you think to that?
- [11:04]
Carolyn
I think the classifiers that they use to define something is not helpful versus helpful. Were frequently fooled by these parasite sites association with these big respected brands that had bajillions of backlinks and tons of authority. So they weren't, not only were they not getting hit, but they were easy to get out of that trap by changing the subdomain or changing the folder that the bad content lived in. And because so many people were now calling that out and saying, Google, you know, what's your issue? Partially, I think because that HCU update was so bad and it destroyed so many businesses, I would not be surprised if people are gearing up to sue Google. So Google has to make a good faith effort to fix the problem and show that it was an accident and not something they did on purpose and also something that they're actively trying to fix. And their way of fixing it is if we can't fix this algorithmically, we're going to fix it manually and we're just going to start slapping people whether, maybe they didn't necessarily deserve it. But this is one of those cases that if, if we think that you're probably guilty of something, we just don't know what you're guilty of. We're going to slap you anyway. And I think that's what they're doing. They're, they're, they're destroying, they are destroying.
- [12:30]
Alex
Small businesses, which is, which is bad. And this can be made an example.
- [12:34]
Carolyn
Business for the newspapers. Yeah, newspapers are on, newspapers are on the verge of a huge existential event. And I don't, I don't know what they're going to look like when they come out of it, but I guarantee you they're not going to look the same.
- [12:53]
Alex
Interesting. Well, it's also interesting that they're showing a lesson, but then after that another update happens, which is what, a week ago now? And they update documentation on Google site reputation, which of course covers all of the Forbes marketplace stuff now, of course, but it widens the interpretation of what site reputation abuse is. And hopefully this is a lesson where it's not going to be abused more in the future or heavier penalties will happen for that abuse.
- [13:23]
Carolyn
They're going to have to, because this is really, this has honestly been a problem for 10 years. And I'm amazed that it took them this long to deal with it. But this kind of stuff, this behavior is the only way some of these companies can monetize because ad revenues have been plummeting and the users don't like experiences that are 90% ads. So how else are they going to make money? Because they can't run print ads anymore. The print product is dead effectively. They've got to have some means of monetizing and this is what they came up with. But then Google doesn't like that because it lets them cheat the algorithm and it lets a lot of companies actually cheat the algorithm because now you can buy your way into getting those really sweet backlinks which then boost up your other sites. And it's probably sites that are cheating in the first place, that are using this cheat to cheat further. It's a lot of cheating.
- [14:18]
Alex
But that's what they're doing and they're just making the opportunity, they're trying to close the opportunity to do that now with this, well, with this update that happened last week, but if you go to the next slide that not just this update back in September, the end of September, which just cut off, I think this was the day of our last SEO update. They've, they've widened the definition of spam in general or spam policies in general, not just site reputation abuse because this was written at the end of September and the slide before is only a week old. But even then, and this is pre core update that's rolling out as well, they've updated all of this and this is to me, reactive content from, you know, hearing from people, sites who've got decimated yet I feel like they're widening the definition so that they can include the people who did get decimated when some of them shouldn't have been, but still cornering another set of people who were clearly abusing the situation and didn't get decimated from hcu. Obviously it was a very complex update, this one that made a lot of people upset in different ways.
- [15:25]
Carolyn
And the more complex the update, the greater the likelihood that there's going to be unintended consequences that are going to be unpleasant. So it's, they're, they're clearly in defensive cleanup mode and we're all clearly in the what are you doing? Stop mode, especially this close to Christmas. Some of the other updates they're doing, let's see.
- [15:49]
Alex
Well, yeah, well, this is something that the audience can actually do something about. So all the other spam policy stuff and the site reputation abuse, we hope that no one in this audience is going through that because they're not adopting that kind of strategy. This is quite cool because one thing that has actually been bugging me for ages is that in Search Console if you for example it just defaults to the last three months right of search appearance. I always like looking at a year and then 16 months and widening it out. And then when you go back and you go through Search Console it forgets the choice that you've made. This is in short making it remember what that choice is. If you want to look at 12 months of data, you it will stay that way until your session's complete. So have fun with that in Search Console. What's the next thing? Oh they've done something else which is more breaking news. I put related 12th of November but we didn't have time because this happened in the last 12 hours. Search Console recommendations have been rolling out for some sites, larger sites. We were able to see it but now overnight Europe anyway or this morning for you Carolyn, that they're now rolled that out everywhere. So who everyone here. If you've got Search Console access, you should now be able to access this screenshot that I'm seeing here which gives you actionable tips on how to improve content and tech on the site via Google's messaging.
- [17:16]
Carolyn
Very cool. Google's also doing a thing where they're warning, I guess they're announcing to retailers that Google is effectively replacing your category pages. By being the category page, they're really expanding the transactional e commerce types of queries in the user experience. Probably because they almost need to justify their continued existence. But I don't want to get too far into that. The point is they're prioritizing product grids faceted search. They're reducing basically the category page visibility on your site in favor of keeping people within Google. This is good because it could get some more of your products in front of people, but it's bad because it's getting your products in front of people next to the exact same product on somebody else's site. So it's I think the moral of the story here is understand that your category pages may not be getting the level of visibility they used to. Your category pages are still very important to your business because the crawlers are using them to discover and verify the existence of various products and to understand how those products fit into your overall product offering. So don't not have category pages and don't ignore them. Just understand that they're not going to drive a ton of traffic it is very important though that you make sure your product schema is buttoned up, that you've got your shopping feed, your product feed buttoned up, the E commerce things that you've been doing, you still need to do. This is just a shift in priority and under an understanding about the purpose of what your category pages are at this point in time.
- [19:07]
Alex
The devil's in the detail of the products, right?
- [19:09]
Carolyn
Oh yeah, 100%, yeah. I mean if you're, if you're not filling out your product pages and you're not filling out your schema and you don't have a product feed, you're probably not even going to get into these Google category pages. So you have to make sure that you're doing all of those things if you're going to stay competitive. Some of the other things that have been happening on October 2, Bing Generative Search experience rolled out, which is very similar to like Search GPT where you ask it a more natural language type of question and it does a, it does a bunch of searches and it figures out what's the right information, what's the consensus answer. Then it synthesizes all of the information it gets from those various sources and presents you with a narrative, a story that answers your question, hopefully in excellent detail. The selling point of this is presumably that their AI is better than everybody else's AI, which is what everybody's saying at this point in time. So I suggest that if you're interested, go check it out, see what it knows, ask it some questions, Just remember to ask it detailed natural language questions. We can't search with AI the way we've been searching with Google. It's not puppies, it's I have an active lifestyle and I'm not home much. What's the best kind of puppy for me? You have to ask it specific questions if you want to get good answers. If you, if you give it a keyword, it's not going to know what your intent is and what kind of answer you want. You have to be very specific and communicate with the AI like you would ask a question of a person. Because people aren't mind readers and neither is that machine.
- [20:51]
Alex
Yeah. Which leads me onto, within 24 hours of Bing saying something, wouldn't you know, Google says that they're doing something quite similar. So they're rolling out AI organized search results pages, which is kind of, in a weird way trying to conquer the challenge you just said about just taking a keyword but having, instead of natural language, they're trying to combine or bridge those two by organizing answers in that way. But unfortunately for Google, they, they're gambling more so with the. This is one answer to the question that you're asking, whereas. Or as. Whereas. I feel at the moment the other platforms like you chat a GPT, you search GPT and Bing go away and create more of a consensus. You called it before when we were chatting, rather than a well, we're going to make that decision for you. That was something I found quite interesting. But I feel for everyone in the audience, everyone should be searching not just for them, not just testing out their own sites and where they are visible, but using it as an end user. And then you'll. You'll probably find after a month or two, you'll understand that there is a. You'll. You'll naturally form a different way of behaving and experiencing search GPT than you would with Google. I always say you might as well try and give Google a bit of length and give it a break and use something else and see how it changes the way you operate as a searcher. But that was interesting to see because I'm seeing a lot of AI organized search results now.
- [22:24]
Carolyn
It's interesting that they started with recipes and meal searches because I feel like those are. Everyone's a little bit different and they have different flavors and different, you know, there's just differences about them that make them not the same. So how do you choose the one that's the best? Because especially with a recipe, taste is a matter of taste. How do you say this one is definitely better than the others? I mean, unless they're talking about putting glue on things, which obviously was not a good idea.
- [22:52]
Alex
Yeah, well, I remember weirdly, about 18 months ago I was a guest on a previous SEO update with Jono and we were talking about, you know, all the upcoming AI technology and I interestingly used a recipe as an example of a problem that these LLMs face because I said if I'm searching for spaghetti Bolognese, weirdly I prefer Google's 10 native search links because I'll probably look at all 10 and I will make the decision on which recipe I want personalized to me. Whereas on AI models it's going to say this is the recipe based on everything I've searched with. But how do you know that I like carrots? Like, now that 18 months have passed, you should know how to behave. Going well, I want spaghetti Bolognese recipe, but remember that I really like carrots. And adding that, like you're saying as much detail as you can to the prompt. It's like a super long tail search essentially. But I find it over. It has been answering those questions and it has been dealing with the problems. But you're right, it still won't know which spaghetti Bolognese is for me and which one's for you because they are going to be different.
- [24:01]
Carolyn
Yeah, like I will. I've gotten in the habit now saying things like I want, I'm looking for a. I'm looking for a wine to go with this but I really prefer dry wines or I'm looking for. I'm looking for a wine to go with X, Y or Z. And don't forget I don't like this brand. So it's, I'm, I'm training. I've been conditioning myself to give very specific questions and very specific answers or very specific criteria for how I'm searching because I want it to be very specific in the responses that it gives to me. But I don't know that everybody is quite there yet. So that's an interesting thing. About the same time they announced that they were going to do the AI organized search results page, they Google. They Google officially launched ads now in the AI overview. So this is like October 3rd, so you know, six weeks ago or so. It's interesting, you know getting the ads and the AI, the AI overviews feels a little. Not sure how I feel about.
- [25:08]
Alex
Yeah, it does feel a bit dirty but like you were just saying before, as you want a more specific answer than is more appropriate for Google to then not appropriate relevant to then display an ad or serve some sort of add in context to what you're searching for. But that's going to. I think it's going to still be a while and it's going to be quite difficult for them to still generate the revenue that they are in the native SERP right now, which is again going to be quite interesting. Which I guess leads us on to the next story of Google doing their blog, which I'll put in the chat here offering a couple of updates on the new ways of searching. So in a weird way they're like advertising how you should change the way that you search from their own model that we've all been used to for a generation, including looking at pictures and videos which of course leads to products which of course is through ads and everything. So you can see that the direction they're leading us through. But that doesn't mean that it isn't useful. I mean I'm now using Google Lens quite a few times a week now, and it's not just about what product is that. I'm either looking for a manual for an old product or seeing if something, a part's for sale or looking at where something is. But I'm also using it to circle around a screenshot and then use that to bring out text to do something else. So it does have a lot of uses. What it's going to do with all that data is really more interesting. What it's going to do with this in the next year.
- [26:42]
Carolyn
Yeah, I know we've used it looking for major big appliances where we used to have to stand there and try to type in the, the code, the, the really, really long code for that specific appliance to try to find more information or comparison shop prices. Now you can just take a picture of it and it reads it and it goes, oh, okay. These are all the places you can get. And this place is on sale. So it's really, it's really interesting and a little scary because you hook this up to like your meta glasses that can take pictures of things and talk in your ear and you can just start real time doxing people. Like it'll, it'll identify faces and go, oh, I know who this guy is and tells you exactly. And this is where he lives and this is what his mom had for breakfast. It's all, it's all very scary.
- [27:29]
Alex
That's very, very scary. I mean, I've got the meta glasses and in the UK you can't do that yet. So there are some GDPR laws that are layered over the product themselves. I don't know what you can do in the US but you can do it. Interesting. It is, it is very interesting. But that creates legal issues. Right, but Google's got enough legal issues, don't they? Tell me Google's got, Google's got a.
- [27:52]
Carolyn
Lot of legal problems going on right now. So I don't know if anybody remembers, but there was an open AI. Well, no, Google was being sued because for being a monopoly. So it was antitrust lawsuit. I was confusing my lawsuits there. They've got a lot going on because basically they're a monopoly and they use their position in the marketplace to stifle competition and to prevent other people from even getting a toehold in the marketplace. So it's, you know, all Google all the time. The government came in and said, yeah, you can't do that. We're going to break you up. So if you remember from that article I wrote a couple months ago, there were two different ways that this, the Remedy, which is the punishment could go. They could do like they did with Microsoft, where they didn't break Microsoft up into constituent parts, they broke it. Or they. They applied restrictions and rules about how Microsoft could do business, which really effectively hamstrung them in the marketplace. But they didn't break them up. Or Google's going to get the att treatment where AT&T, which was Atlantic Telegram and Telephone, I think that's what it was. Basically ran all of the telecommunications in the United States and the government came in and said, you have too much power and you are preventing other people from not only coming in and trying to run businesses that compete with you, but you're preventing other people from innovating and making this technology better. We had the same T1 lines from the 1920s, basically from when my grandpa started working at the phone company 70 years ago until the 90s when they finally started doing digital lines. It was a long time before things changed. ATT got broken up into a lot of different parts and the company was really never quite the same. But it did allow for a lot of innovation, which was great. A lot more companies, a lot more competition that kept prices down. So, you know, there's good and there's bad, depending on which end of the punishment you're on. Anyway, the DOJ has decided that it wants to break up Google. They want to make them spin off Chrome, which, you know, Google's like, oh, we don't make any money on Chrome anyway. No, you don't make any money on Chrome. You give it away and you give it away because you get a lot of click data from that. You get a lot of information that you then use to make other business decisions. So this is really going to disrupt their information chain and make it so that they don't have this chokehold on all of the data that they're using to make search better, make decisions about product development. They have so much data about everything that we do. It makes it so that they can run their business. And without exclusive access to that data, it's going to really radically change how they do business. The other things that they wanted to do is making it impossible for them to do exclusive licensing with like, cell phone providers, because there are certain cell phone providers that have licensed Chrome or licensed the Google stuff, and they can only have the Google stuff on their phone. It is a violation of that license for them to put Safari on the phone or to ship it with Opera installed. They just can't do it. And the government's saying you can't force people to choose you or somebody else. You've got to be, you can license it to them, but you can't tell them that they have to be exclusive. It's like trying to date and immediately go in with the. We're going to go on a first date, but by the way, we're already married and you can't date anybody else. That's not how it works. So now that the proposed remedy has been issued, now Google can appeal. They couldn't file an appeal until the remedy has been issued. So I don't expect.
- [31:59]
Alex
And they will, it's going to be.
- [32:00]
Carolyn
This is going to have to go through the courts. There's going to be a lot of appeals. I wouldn't expect any of this to take immediate effect. We've got a new administration coming in, isn't it? Yeah, you got, you got Elon Musk coming in with the Doge. And who knows how that's going to affect what the Department of Justice is doing. We don't know what Trump thinks. We don't, we don't know any of these things. There's a lot of factors at play, so it's interesting. However, I don't think it's going to change anything in the next six months. I would expect at least a year before there's any, any reasonable outcome to this.
- [32:34]
Alex
Okay, well, what else has happened? Because there's still, I think we're not even halfway through, are we? And we've got, we've, we've got to go through time. So let's crack on. ChatGPT rolled out search GPT in the US so do we need to explain much of this? This is the search version of ChatGPT. It's more behavior around. They're trying to introduce you through keywords. So when I got first access to it, it just said, here's a few examples. It just said Jeremy Clarkson. And it gave not a search result page, but it gave me all the information that I needed to know about Jeremy Clarkson. And that's fine. But it's a good interface. Again, more informational in my opinion, and more useful for informational intent. And then now for everyone else's attention, on the 31st of October, they opened up from just the wait list and journals and stuff like that to everyone. So if you have a ChatGPT Pro account, you can now access Search GPT by going to chatgpt.com and then there's a little globe icon where the search bar is instead of the magnifying glass icon. So, yeah, Go and give it crack. It's fun.
- [33:45]
Carolyn
If you do have a paid account. And this is what I did, it came up with a message and said, hey, we've got a Chrome extension. Would you like to install the Chrome extension? Like a dumb, dumb. I said, okay. And now it's completely hijacked Chrome. So where I used to be able to search for Google, search Google from the address bar at the top of Chrome, now it goes, it takes that and it goes into Search GPT instead, which is frustrating for me because sometimes I actually do want to search Google, but it's really modified how it's modified my search behavior, what I type into it. And it's also interesting because as you do those searches, you can pop open the citation sidebar and see exactly what sites it's taking the information from. That's going to be useful for SEOs because rather than just trying to get into, you know, be number one for a certain term, you want to see what data it's taking from which sites and figure out why are they more authoritative than I am. Why are, why is this particular site talking about this particular company when I would really prefer that they talk about me? And then you can kind of reverse engineer how you can get your citations included in that rather than, you know, your competitors or someone that you don't feel as knowledgeable on that subject as you are. So it's going to be good for SEOs. And I think if you're, I think you should probably, you know, test it out. I wouldn't ignore it. Definitely do not ignore it.
- [35:13]
Alex
I would say like a car brand, test them all out. You know, there's quite a few out there, they all work in different ways and one will be personal to you. But back in Non AI land, because there are stories in the Non AI world that happen now and again. Now Google Merchant center lets you name your shipping policies. So this will only apply to maybe a small set of e commerce site owners who have multiple brands that have different shipping policies. I don't know, maybe you sell a T shirt with a 30 day refund policy and different shipping policy because it comes from a different place. And as well as that, you'll have, I don't know, furniture that will have a completely different shipping because it's, you know, different weights and all of those different things that go into it. But now Merchant center has been very nice to expand all of that so you can really scale what you need to rather than have a flat refund policy and shipping policy. I keep on getting mixed up because they are interchangeable refund and shipping. But they kind of have the same issues and hurdles when it comes to interacting. What else has happened? Back to AI.
- [36:19]
Carolyn
Yeah. So Google changed around a little bit of their team. This is just an announcement about that. I don't know how interesting this is for or how this affects most of our lives lives. But it's worth a mention that the guy who was there, whose name I would say, but I'm pretty sure I would butcher it and I, and I don't want to do that, has been replaced by Nick Fox, who I don't really know much of what he, much of what his plans are, but apparently he's really good with AI and that's why they're pivoting to him because they're really going all in on the AI as they should, as everyone is as at this point in time. Google's also changed the site links box. Did you even use that, Alex? Because I don't think I did.
- [37:04]
Alex
I never did. I would, I don't know. Again, maybe it's just me. I don't know if I, because I do. I think differently as an SEO because like I can't look at a website like a normal person, for example, and like this, I don't think I can see a search result like a normal person and therefore interact with one like a normal person, even though I know what a normal person would want to do. Me personally, I never use that site link search box. I just did the Is it raining near you? I clicked the link, I went into the site and then I searched from there where I needed to be because I felt like that was the most relevant place. And like you were saying, this is essentially the site colon search operator for people who don't know how to use search operators with type and with commands. So I don't think it'll be missed. I don't think, I don't think anyone in the chat here is going to go, oh no, it's, it's gone. Whatever, whatever am I going to do with my business? So what's not needed?
- [37:55]
Carolyn
Well, it is going to change some of the reporting, I guess on Search Console. So if you're, if you're accustomed to looking for that and you like it, it's not going to be there anymore. But I wouldn't, I don't think this is going to be a big deal changer.
- [38:09]
Alex
Yeah deal.
- [38:10]
Carolyn
Rucker. Google's also updating the Google Trends documentation has been updated. They've got, they're analyzing term Popularity and trends over time. The trending now tool is getting a little bit of an update. This is basically just if you've been using Google Trends and you're curious about the documentation. Documentation has been duly updated. Please check if you are inclined. If you don't care, that's cool too. I do like Google Trends. I do tell a lot of people who aren't SEOs, like editorial journalist type people, take a look at Google Trends. Good for that stuff. Especially good for things that don't have historical search data. So if you're looking for keyword volumes, all those keyword volume tools are using historical data. Google Trends is using current data. So if it's a thing that didn't exist before, there will be no search data volume data for it in a lot of these tools. But Google Trends will have data. And that's one of the things that's very nice for. Let's see. Oh, me too. Core Web vitals also documentation updated. INP is something that they're talking about now, which is interaction to next paint. It's the latency for user interactions. This is what replaced the first input delay or fid. So if you were again accustomed to using FID as a metric, it's gone, it's replaced with inp. This has been coming for a while, but if you need to tune up or refresh your memory on how it works, this documentation is a great place to check.
- [39:42]
Alex
And I've added both the documentation links into the chat there. ChatGPT Search powered by Bing's index so people have been noticing that a lot. A lot of the ChatGPT information is all powered via Bing, which is great. And obviously why not? Because it's all kind of owned by the same group and so on. But what's important for everyone here to notice is that maybe people should. If they're not focusing on Bing Webmaster tools thus far, you should look at it a bit more because not just to say that Bing follows what Google does, but they have their own little tweaks and quirks and things that work and getting more visibility out in ChatGPT, you would inherently want to do as much right in Bing Webmaster Tools as you need to. So I would say get involved in that as well. And also very good to note that Yoast Premium has index now included and enabled by default, which helps the indexing of a page now, doesn't it? It helps quicker indexation of indexing of a page that's been modified or has been created very recently. Yeah, immediately.
- [40:54]
Carolyn
Yeah. And it's only in Bing? Well, it's in Bing and some other and Yandex and things that aren't in the us. But Google doesn't use index now, so it is great to know that if you've got premium, not only is it already installed and turned on, it's already configured. So there's literally nothing you need to do to take advantage of that. If you're using free and you do not yet have premium, then I hear there's a Black Friday sale coming up in just a couple days that you might want to take.
- [41:23]
Alex
So Google AI overviews are doing another thing that may or may not be cool. It's got highlight feature which I can only describe as search inception. You do a search for one thing, it gives you a partial part of an answer, it may recommend something, you can then highlight that thing and then you're searching in there. But there's two things to think about here. A that's quite cool that it does a search within a search, but importantly it knows your intent and your original search or the first search in the chain. So the deeper down you go, it's starting to understand where you're trying to end up based on the highlight that you're doing and the net search that you're performing. But as an SEO and site owners out there, the more information, the more honed down someone's getting in their search result, the more your site may be visible in that search and in that context because every single search you have to do it kind of the LLM has to go out and find that consensus again. So it's kind of if you're searching three times, it's kind of doing it's looking potentially at 30 sites to bring back this one answer to you with a consensus bit of information. So it's really cool that I like that and I haven't used it yet, but I have a feeling I will.
- [42:42]
Carolyn
One of the interesting things that I think is happening so There was this OpenAI on Reddit and ask me anything where they were specifically answering questions about SEO for ChatGPT search. The information that came out of it was, you know, probably somewhat expected in that they rely primarily on Bing, they've got some other sources, they focus on natural language queries. It's an ad free experience. These are mostly things that a lot of us knew already. They're trying very hard to reduce hallucinations and introduce personalization within dynamic web pages. Also good to know the hallucinations we knew they were going to try to reduce because everyone complained about them. So that's not terribly surprising. Aligning Bing with natural language queries that the middleman of the AI is taking. It's using your natural language and it's picking out the important things to search for. Because if you watch it, if you ask it a question and then watch it search, because it'll flash what it's searching for very quickly, you can see that it is still taking keywords, but it's picking out keywords from what you just said based on what it thinks will get the best result for what you're searching for. So you no longer have to think, okay, I want to ask about this and I want to ask about this and this and this and this. And you don't have to formulate your own query anymore because the AI is processing your language, your natural speech patterns to determine what your intent is. So unless you're one of those people who cannot articulate what you want, which to be fair, people like that exist, it should be very good at answering those questions. Now, in addition to reading this, if you're curious about it, this is available in Search Engine Journal and we'll have the link available to you later. If you have ChatGPT, consider asking ChatGPT for information about how it searches for things and be, be specific when you ask your questions and ask probing, iterative questions. So, okay, if you do this, then what happens when this, when this occurs, how do you handle that? So give it, don't give it too open ended of questions, but give it like scenarios and tell it what you understand. Ask it if you have that correct, you know, have a conversation with it like you have conversation with a smart person that you're trying to get information out of. You know, and that is going to help you optimize better for these new AI interfaces.
- [45:19]
Alex
Oh, so what else has happened? Because we've got 11 slides in four minutes.
- [45:23]
Carolyn
Oh, okay. Google rolled out the November 2024 core algorithm update. There's not a whole lot we can say about that except buckle up kids, it's going to get bumpy.
- [45:33]
Alex
Yeah, it was at the beginning of the month, so I imagine it'll take about another week, maybe something like that within the next week to roll out.
- [45:39]
Carolyn
But even then, because why not, right?
- [45:42]
Alex
Exactly, exactly. Something to discuss in December or January's update, once we see data. What else has happened?
- [45:50]
Carolyn
Google updated their ML courses. ML, of course, is machine learning to help users build SEO understanding. So if you want to learn how, Google wants you to look at machine learning and large language models, automated Machine learning and then responsible AI. You can go take these modules and you will be, you know, Google trained on how Google wants you to think about these things. Do you want to know, you know, do you want to be a Google robot? You know, it depends on how you look at it. I think it's useful to understand what Google wants us to think and then look at what the other places are saying too and you know, do my own synthesizing of the data and processing that just, just so that you have a really, I think, well rounded view of what the different companies are doing and what their different perspectives are.
- [46:41]
Alex
Which is interesting because Microsoft also did the exact same thing and they're giving AI based SEO tips. So I've added all the links here because we shouldn't be going into them too heavily. But essentially from an SEO perspective, it's kind of the, you know, the same messaging that we've been giving out before all of these platforms existed. Look at user intent, look at search intent, use natural language by just do all of those things that you would actually be doing. Don't abuse it.
- [47:08]
Carolyn
Yeah. Be helpful, answer the questions and improve that. Eat. This is kind of a throwback to what we were talking about before where the DOJ wants to force Google to sell Chrome and unbundle Android. And I feel like we already beat this one to death. The only new thing here is that Google has responded and they criticize the proposal as a radical overreach beyond the case's legal issues. Government. Google complaining about government overreach makes me chuckle. That's a long story, but we'll leave that one there. Let's see. And Google has since, let's see, as of the 20th, which was just last week, has issued a statement saying that they do both site wide and page level ranking signals. So you can't say that, you know, specific pages are affecting the whole site with certainty. Is it possible? Yes. Is it for sure? For sure? No. Because they do have different levels. They'll do. And they have them both on the same site. They could have special pages on your site that they like, but they hate the rest of your site or they love the rest of your site and there's specific pages that they hate. They're not going to treat everything as just a collection of single pages or just a whole site kind of grade. There's definitely a combination there. So you're going to have to figure out what it is you're suffering from.
- [48:30]
Alex
Cool. And that's pretty much it. But before we leave SEO and AI news there's been other minor stuff like Google adding two best practices per product markup, which is fine because that's all in Yoast for WooCommerce or Yoast for Shopify. Already Google's now recommending high resolution Favicons, which I've always kind of recommended anyway. It's always nice to, to not just have a 16 by 16 pixel, but also have the 48 by 48 and so on, just so you can think of things like iPad bookmarks. That's when I first started remembering it and when everything became an icon for itself. So that's another thing. Even though AI usage and advertising is harder in AI platforms, Microsoft and I think Google as well have both shown that revenue has been up something about 18% at least from Microsoft. I think Google was a good 15 to 20 as well. And lastly, Google is retiring the search console page Experience report, which no one was using anyway, so.
- [49:28]
Carolyn
Well, I mean I was, and I'm very upset about this, but I suspect I'll live.
- [49:33]
Alex
So I was using it. I like. Yeah, yeah, it was, it was nice to look at, especially when it was a good report. Right. But what's happened in the WordPress world in the last six weeks? A couple of things.
- [49:47]
Carolyn
Oh, fun. So I think a lot of people have heard that there's been some, there's been some legal wrangling between Automattic and the guy who founded WordPress and a company called WP Engine. And we're, you know, we're neither interested in nor in a position to comment on the merits of those legal cases. But I know that I've heard some feedback at some of the conferences where businesses are concerned that this is somehow going to cause WordPress to become unstable or collapse as a platform. I don't think that's at all, that's not on the table. So if you're thinking, oh my gosh, we're going to have to move off of WordPress and move to Drupal or something similar and re platform our entire site, I would, I would catch a bubble, take a break. This is not, this is not that. So while it's interesting to follow if you're into that stuff, I don't think this is going to be an existential crisis for WordPress itself and I would like everyone to feel reassured.
- [50:54]
Alex
Yeah, chill. Everything. The product itself is fine and just as concrete as it was before. But talking about the product itself, WordPress release 6.7, called Rollins. It debuted 2025, which is the new theme, and it did lots of other cool stuff in there. I know that repository, which I'm just going to paste in here, did a nice little rundown of things that's introduced in there. I would say most of it is either performance related or theme related, so unless you're using a full site editor at the moment, which probably a lot of you aren't, it's not too much of a huge thing. So just think of the performance enhancements and speed enhancements. So with that, there's one main bit of Yoast news, and that is that.
- [51:39]
Carolyn
Our AI Generate function is live. So if you are interested I should have made that Stop dancing. If you have Premium, you can use AI Generate to help you come up with meta titles, meta descriptions, headlines. I think so it'll it should be helpful if you're stuck. Sometimes when you're writing about the same thing over and over and over and over again, you run out of different ways to write the same headline over and over and over again. And that's where this AI can be super helpful. So I hope that if you have Premium, you've tested it out and you're.
- [52:15]
Alex
Interested in trying it. This is the Shopify. It's live.
- [52:21]
Carolyn
It would help if I so many.
- [52:23]
Alex
Products, so many products, so little time.
- [52:26]
Carolyn
I'm not yet halfway through my second coffee, so I blame my caffeination levels. But if you've got Shopify, honestly, for Shopify it's even more important because how many times do you have a bunch of products that are really similar and you're struggling to come up with different headlines and different descriptions for them because they are so similar? So for Shopify especially, I think this is a great option.
- [52:49]
Alex
All right, two events. WordCamp Netherlands, if you're near the Netherlands, and WordCamp Asia, which is in Philippines I believe. Yeah, yeah, if, if you're there or nearby, please go along. Yeah, yeah, we'll have stands, we'll have games and stuff like that up for grabs. So be sure to meet some of us there. And lastly, there's a Black Friday sale. I don't know if any of you aware that there's an event once a year called Black Friday Friday and usually it's when people out there do sales for their products and services. We have one and it's starting on Thursday until the end of Monday I believe.
- [53:32]
Carolyn
So I'm gonna real quick jump to our next webinar is Monday, December 16, which is pretty close, but we need to get it in before Christmas. And now we're going to jump to the Q A because I Said we were going to go fast and we didn't. So yeah, I was already waiting because.
- [53:50]
Flori
There'S so many questions. So we need to well get this. Yes. All right, the first question for both of you is with the rise of the AI driven search models like search GPT, do you feel link building becomes different for SEO? Who wants to jump in on that?
- [54:11]
Carolyn
I can do it real quick because we'll answer this. So link building, you're using your link building to build up your expertise and your the eat right. So you're looking for links and not necessarily fully qualified links but citations from expert websites that are authoritative in your topic. So just the cheap links are not good enough. They're not going to help you focus on high quality citations. Even if they don't link to you, you want them to mention your brand, build your brand. That's what the links need to focus on is building the authority, the authoritativeness of your brand.
- [54:53]
Flori
Yeah.
- [54:54]
Alex
And weirdly anchor based text links for targets are, can I say gonna maybe become a thing of the past because it, everything's going so sophisticated that it knows things like not just intent but entities. But yeah, branded search is always, this is going back to Marketing 101 which is what all of these platforms have to base themselves around those Essex. So yeah, link building may change over the years but PR and digital PR in this sense and branded citations, branded visibility is always the way to go because it all trickles from that. Next question.
- [55:27]
Flori
Julian, next. All right, the next question is from Robert and he asks what specific SEO components or plans need to be built or refined and executed within our E commerce site to maximize our search results to display in AI.
- [55:44]
Carolyn
I would say product detail like we're saying product details. So the AIs are very good at extracting text from the page. They're not necessarily looking at your schema like the like Google traditionally does. So I would focus on the text and the descriptions on the page to make sure that you've got things well articulated. Don't rely on the users to look at the images and make and make those connections in their head. This does go back a little bit to like really old school SEO where we're making sure we're saying the things that we want to rank for. Let's still, let's still do that. Make sure you're articulating exactly the messages that you want the AIs to pick up on.
- [56:30]
Flori
Yeah, okay, thanks. Around AI because our next one is also around AI. Isabelle is asking how to measure brand appearance in AI search models like Search, GPT and Perplexity.
- [56:46]
Alex
There isn't anything by Google quite yet. But I would say that I know that Semrush are doing a lot in AI overview visibility. I know that in terms of visibility that's different. I know that in terms of visits, you can actually see some of this stuff in Google Analytics. I think there was another question in the chat asked about that whilst we were in this update. I went into analytics just to make sure. If you go into acquisition and then traffic acquisition, session stroke medium, you can go in there, you can make your own part of the customized part of the report, but if you just search for chat in there or GPT, it'll come up. So I'm seeing that live right now. And I also tested with Perplexity and stuff. So there are measure ways of measuring it, at least at the moment, before Google Analytics probably takes all that away and says not provided again. But let's see what happens with time.
- [57:40]
Flori
All right, thanks. Okay then, we've got another question in our last minutes coming in by Johnny. Should you have a blog section on an ecommerce site that is regularly updated? Are there any benefits of doing that?
- [57:55]
Carolyn
Yeah, it can attract links from places that have good expertise. So ideally what you want, the reason you've got the blog is because you control your message and hopefully you're providing good information to other places. So a lot of the news stories that we cite in this webinar are news stories that were unlike Search Engine Journal or Search Engine Land, one of those industry publications. Right. They're frequently writing those stories based on information they're getting from the blogs at Google or the blogs at these companies or the blog that somebody did a case study on. So what you're doing is you're writing the stuff on your blog with the hope of attracting these great links because you want other people to write about what you've written about and link to you, which is going to help your authority, it's going to help your visibility, it's going to provide backlinks to your site and it's going to basically boost your brand. That's what the function of these blogs is supposed to be.
- [59:00]
Flori
All right, well, thanks a lot for that answer.
- [59:03]
Carolyn
Speechless, because I covered it all.
- [59:06]
Alex
If I'm not saying anything, you know, Carolyn's done a spot on answer and.
- [59:10]
Flori
I actually see that with that answer we are exactly at 5pm my time. @ least I know everyone's visiting from all over the world, so it's not everywhere 5pm but at least we're at the end of this hour, so thanks everyone. That was great seeing all the interactions in the chats, the questions coming in, and also huge thank you to you, Alex and Carolyn. It was again a lot of news that we had to cover. So I'm happy that we have our first SEO update already in a couple of weeks. So no six week wait this time. And indeed make sure to watch our Black Friday deals because they're coming up and hope to see you all next time. Bye.