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The Yoast SEO podcast
SEO predictions for 2024, developments in voice search, and more! | #SEOUpdateByYoast
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- [00:00]
Ninke
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the January 2024 edition of the SEO Update by Yoast. My name is Ninke. I'm the Associate Director of Partnerships at Yoast and I'm your host for today. Our principal SEOs, Alex and Carolyn, will take you through this month's updates. When preparing this update, they thought January would be a slow month in terms of SEO. Well, that turned out differently. One of the things I hope you are all excited about to hear are the latest updates of AI in the Google search result pages. So hang on for our AI News section to hear more about that. I'll now let Alex and Caroline take the mic to talk you through the SEO updates of this month and enjoy. I'll be back when we start Q and A.
- [00:50]
Alex
Thanks very much, Ninka, and welcome, everyone. Thanks for coming. There's over 1100 signups this month.
- [00:57]
Carolyn
Oh, my gosh, no.
- [00:59]
Alex
One of our highest ever, I think. I think.
- [01:01]
Carolyn
Good job, guys.
- [01:02]
Alex
I know. Just do it. Keep on doing it. Keep on doing it next month as well. Just keep going. This is good for our KPIs, right?
- [01:09]
Carolyn
Yes, excellent.
- [01:13]
Alex
Let me start. Let's go through some stuff. Let me make this. Do I move us to stage left. All these buttons everywhere. And now we can start. Who are we? Very quickly. We're both principal SEOs at Yoast. Is that it? That's all they need to know. That's very good. Two of us. And what are we going to discuss today? We're going to go through 2024 predictions and trends. We'll go through some SEO news, which, when I was devising these slides on the 7th, really thought it was a slow news month, but we'll find out it really was not. Next, we'll go through AI News, which has been a bit of a turbulent month for the technology. And lastly, we'll do Yoast news, because you might have missed. There is no WordPress news because it's really been a slow News month for WordPress, which should hopefully mean that there's double news next month, right? I hope so. And if we've got any time with all of that nonsense, we'll answer some questions you have. So, as you know, there's a Q and A tab at the top if you want to ask a question. I don't know which way I'm pointing, but to your right there is a tab where you can ask a question and other folks inside the audience can also up and down vote. So we'll obviously be answering the most popular first. If you want to read more about this and get a few more links from all the citations because of course, we like to cite our sources. You can get that by following this link or bookmarking it and you can get that afterwards as well as being able to access this replay. And if this is a bit more advanced for you, when you're just starting out in SEO, there is a lot of nice little webinar series that we have going on where there's loads that you can sign up on. Just visit our website, go to the webinar section, you'll be able to see all of the intro to SEO webinars that we do. So with that predictions and trends for this year, what do you think? What did you say, Carolyn? Is going to be a different year, this one, isn't it?
- [03:13]
Carolyn
Bit interesting, hopefully a bit interesting. But it's so hard to. It's so hard to make good predictions. And I hate doing it because I feel a bit like they never come true or if I predicted it definitely won't come true. Kind of like with watching my favorite baseball teams, you know, if I don't watch, they win. If I do watch, then they don't. So.
- [03:35]
Alex
And it's not like superstition, right? And some.
- [03:38]
Carolyn
And you know, it is a little bit superstition. But, you know, AI is going to be big. I think how we end up embracing AI is going to really be, I think, determined kind of by how this year goes. This year is really, it's big. Everybody knows it's here now. What are we going to do with it and how is it going to be rolled out? Is humanity going to be responsible with it or are we going to abuse it like we have a tendency to do with everything else and ruin it? So it'll be interesting to see what happens.
- [04:10]
Alex
Well, our trends and predictions may be watch that we aren't to be trusted. So let's dig into all of this. So the first thing that you said as part of a trend or predictions, kind of alluding to this already. So only in the last couple of weeks have Google announced that they've introduced two new features that use AI technology to enhance your search experience. So the first one, as you can see, is a video of a nice little dog wearing some cool goggles. And you can use your finger on your phone. You can just do that around the sunglasses and then all that. I got a Facebook message then for some reason, very good timing. And when you do that, you can then search on Google and it will show you related products, which you can then go and Buy. The more interesting thing in my opinion is multi search, which is the second thing they've introduced where you can take a picture of something and then you can ask a question about that picture. So here they're using a backgammon set and instead of taking a picture, the obvious answer is what is it? Right, but that's not the question they're asking. They want to know what it is, but more importantly they want to know how to play it. So that multi search option is very interesting in the way in which people are using the beginning of their search experience. Right.
- [05:25]
Carolyn
I feel like this is going to be a game changer because one of the things that has always, I feel like differentiated people and there's people that can articulate what they want to know and get good search results. And these people have always been able to get good search results and there are a lot of people who cannot articulate what it is they want to find. They just put in inadequate search queries. So what this is doing is this is taking those visual people and helping them find stuff. Have you ever looked at something and been like that thing, that thingamabob and people are like hahaha, what's a thingamabob? It's like that thing, that thing that's right there that I don't know the name for. This helps you with that because now you just take a picture of that thing that you don't know the name for. The machine goes oh, I know exactly what that is because I'm smart. And then you go yeah, that thing right there that I don't know what to call it, how do I do it? And it will tell you. And I think that's going to make, I don't know, almost level the playing field for those people that are far more visual than they are word oriented, you know, and so I'm excited about this. I think it's going to make search a lot more beneficial and a better experience for more people rather than just the people who happen to be very good at name recall and articulating what it is they want.
- [06:51]
Alex
Yeah, kind of like going away from command prompt in a way to do things instead of being very specific, which I guess is this is our prediction, I guess is the growth of voice and visual. And whilst we've heard that voice search is on the up and we've heard it all the time. And when Alexa first came out it was. I saw those graphs of this time based on the current data of the last month. In the next year everything will be voice and no one will be typing again. And obviously that isn't, that isn't true.
- [07:19]
Carolyn
But you still have to know what it is you want to ask, though, even with voice search. And there are a lot of people who are just so visual that they know exactly what they want by looking at it, but they just, they couldn't tell you. They couldn't articulate the process to get to it. And this kind of bypasses that. And if you think about computers, where were the big leaps in computers prior to Windows coming out? Everything was very command prompt. And there are, there are tons of people who just do not want to deal with a command prompt. Right. And Windows really kind of democratized or leveled the playing field for those people that wanted to drag and drop. This is, this is that next step forward, that next giant leap, I think. And it's going to be, I think this is going to be easily and widely adopted quickly.
- [08:09]
Alex
Yeah. And I think it's interesting the way that people will use this behavior because I think they will adopt this way more than voice search. Because it is easy to have your phone on you. We've all done it. We've all been in a store and we've tried to find out what something is. But you have to start with tech search or open the Amazon app or some other app that you're using. But now that it's cool, I use this mug as a good example. If I took a picture of this, V1 would be, what is this? It's a mug. It's a metal mug by Bowdoin or however you pronounce it. But now with multisearch using that as an example, I should say, can I get a bigger version of this? And it'll tell me. It'll know what it is. It doesn't even need to tell me what it is. It just needs to find a bigger version of it. Because that is my search intent. It's changing that way. But that makes things in predictions and trends for this year become more important. Well, how do you classify content that way? And the fun. The best way I was. We were describing this is semantic search and intent. This is just in the same way as the mug. My intent is to find a bigger version of this mug. So adopting that in terms of content strategy and entities and therefore schema is even more important because Knowledge Graph is. This seems to be more dependent on Knowledge Graph now, even more so than it was, say, a year or two years ago. And having entities and being able to find content structure around that is going to Be really important. And I mean, I love how I found this Simpsons image from Moz. I don't know whoever made it, but they're amazing. But it is sourced in Moz. And this does show the entity of the Simpsons and how things are related in a really easy to understand way.
- [09:52]
Carolyn
So, like with your products, it's going to be really important that you've got your product schema set up correctly and that you're, you've got your commerce system set up correctly because you're going to want the search engines to know that this mug comes in three different sizes and it's all the same mug, it's just different sizes. So that's going to, that's going to play into how did you set up your store in the first place? Because if you make each one of the sizes a different product and you don't tie them together properly, you're not helping the search engines deliver that answer to the user who says, I want this mug, but I don't want it in the 24 ounce, I want it in the 36 ounce.
- [10:34]
Alex
So it's very, it's very interesting. But also, also with that, not only do you have to have semantics and entities all sorted and more optimized than ever, but this also goes, if I want to go back one slide, you know, this shows that image, images and video rich media for those products or anything you're describing is even more important. Because if you were going back again to the dog, if I, if, if I was selling those goggles and I didn't have an image of them, this search wouldn't ever find me. Right. But I may have great content in words around these goggles, but if I don't have an image, it may not identify it. So again, it goes into entities are important, but getting everything right, you know, don't.
- [11:17]
Carolyn
And that's almost the opposite. That's almost the opposite of the way it's been. The way it's been, has been. The way it's been, has been. Anyway, you've had the image and we've, all the SEOs have been saying, but you have to describe it in text. And now we're saying that in addition to the text, you have to make sure that you have the image. So it really is kind of a coming together of everything that we've been doing before and a more integrated understanding for the search engines of how things work.
- [11:46]
Alex
Yeah. Which is now goes again, entities also go hand in hand to. What do you. Why is this important for someone who's watching now and listening. In short, that means you need to get your content structure really knuckled down, build topical authorities and have a proper content strategy around that. So if I use my mug as an example, I now should think about everything to do with mugs that may be helpful to me. Finding a large mug or a mug that is very close to the one that I took a picture of, having pictures of them having videos, but talking about anything from the product itself to its uses, all of that kind of stuff will go hand in hand to building topical authority and building eat around mugs or cups.
- [12:29]
Carolyn
Useful things about anything useful you can think of, like going back to your mug. What cars do we know that the mug fits in the cup holder for? Do we know of any cars that the mug doesn't fit in? Just if I were a consumer, what kind of information might I be looking for around that mug? And then make sure you talk about that. And those are good. Those are topic seeds for building out additional content, first person experience. Those are useful items that are going to help you with your content, help you with your authority, help you with your expertise and help the user ultimately.
- [13:07]
Alex
Yeah. Which brings us to probably our last prediction and trend, which we're going to talk about a little bit later, is SGE and its wider adoption. So when I was writing this, my thoughts were, well, SG is going to be rolling out quite quite aggressively this quarter, maybe at least in the us but maybe it's not. We'll chat about that later. But one of the reasons that could be why is due to the fact that SGES is so much different, but because of that, organic rankings go down. So you kind of have to pay to be above the fold in any way, shape or form. And it's not just PC, it's anything.
- [13:46]
Carolyn
Even for your own brand terms, it's really shocking how far down that SGE is pushing those organic rankings and how different the SGE results are from the traditional organic rankings. So where you would expect to rank number one for your own brand term, that is no longer the case because SGE is just functioning differently.
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Alex
Okay, well give me, give the audience a working example, a hypothetical example of how this may apply to them.
- [14:17]
Carolyn
A hypothetical example that I may have heard from a friend, it's so you have to pay for position one now you have to pay to be above the fold. SGE is taking up a ton of room underneath that. And where you would have expected to be number one because someone is searching directly for your brand term, now you're not. It's the commonality I found between the first result and then the horizontal scrolling results was that they said the brand name in first, they said it first on the, in the title, they said it first in the headline, and they said it. That word was first in the body copy too. Whereas if it is your own brand, you tend not to say your own brand name that prominently and that much all over the place on your site, which means all of these people who are sometimes competitors who are talking about you or wrote an article about you, that article might outrank you for your own brand term, which is horrifying if you're a brand. The other problem is that because your organic listing has gotten pushed so far down, you're losing 50% of your traffic for that, for that brand term, and you're having to make that up by spending the money on the paid search. So I mean, that's great for Google, it sucks for brands. And I can't imagine that big brands that pay Google a lot of money are going to be particularly tolerant of that for an extended period of time. So I feel like there's some algorithm adjustments that need to happen. But because it's AI, because it's generative, it's not a function of changing the formula, it's a function of teaching it to do something else. And how do you teach it to do that thing without having unintended consequences? And everything kind of has unintended consequences. So it feels like we're, you know, it feels like we're wading into murky waters and we don't exactly know what we're about to step on.
- [16:24]
Alex
Which is exactly why we'll chat more about the news, why they might be pulling search generative experience back a little bit, or not as aggressive.
- [16:34]
Carolyn
Someone in the comments just said, how does that work with site authority? And wouldn't the brand site have more authority than a site that wrote an article about them? You would think, right? Except that's not how it's working, which is the weird part. So it really does seem to be relying a lot more on the text on the page rather than the pure authority of the site, which is what you expect in the organic rankings. The organic rankings themselves haven't changed radically, but these SGE results are almost rarely coming from the same set of results that you're getting from organic, which is why I think it's not quite ready for prime time. And there's going to either be a delay in rolling it out or there's going to be some kind of pivot, because this is clearly not. It's not good for brands and brands pay the bills.
- [17:26]
Alex
Exactly. And we can talk more about how SGE and AI's functionality inside search results affects us when we go through the AI news later. So that's mainly the trends and predictions. So let's go through the SEO news. The slow news month that actually turned out to be really really busy miscellaneous month that wasn't. It was. Well I started generating the slides for this like the 8th of Jan or no, no the 5th because I thought I'd get ahead of the month, see what was going on over Christmas. Well, it turns out that no one works over Christmas, including the people who write the news. So then on the 8th and 9th of Jan, everything came back. But let's go, let's go through them. So on the 4th so someone was working in the between days there was an article on Search Engine Land about Google starting to phase out third party cookies. So in short, third party cookies is a good great example of this is retargeting things like Facebook pixels any tracking that is not hosted on the server of which your website is on or goes to any other source in that matter. Now privacy is winning a little bit and Google is enforcing inside their browser first party cookies only. Now how does this affect everyone else? Things with like GA4 are okay for some countries for now, but that's Google going through some issues there. But one thing to note is that if you're using affiliate tracking or any other tracking that you may think that gathers data when that person is browsing on a website that is not yours, you have to think about what to do next because those platforms will either have a first party cookie update, so Facebook do have an updated pixel that you can use that will be more limited and less personalized, but at least you've got something. Or if you're an affiliate site and this is your main way of making income is through third party cookie data, you've got to think of a dramatic change quite fast that doesn't affect you because that stuff is starting to happen and roll out now. In short, is there anything. Did I say everything there Carolyn, or was there?
- [19:41]
Carolyn
I think you covered everything. I think the affiliate sites especially are getting hammered from 12 different directions right now. And I know that like with the helpful content update, affiliate sites have taken a big hit too. So I think maybe not necessarily SEO related, but affiliate businesses are in for a bumpy ride this year.
- [20:02]
Alex
Yeah, and we wish them luck though because whilst they are there to make money and that's Some of the point of affiliate sites, like, I do find them helpful, you know, not all of them, but I do find some of them helpful and they do make me find out about products, so I can't blame them. All right, so what else happened on the 8th of January, Google? Oh, go on. Were you going to say something then, Carolyn?
- [20:25]
Carolyn
No, I was, I was going to, I was waiting to chime in because I was really surprised to see that they it required clarification. I interrupted Alex while he was reading the headline Google Clarifies Primary Source of Snippets. This was an article in Search Engine Journal and apparently Google felt the need to clarify in their documentation that when you're, even though you've defined your meta description on your site, they might not always use the meta description that you've provided and that they wanted you to know that they're not making up a new meta description, they're taking it from a place on your page that fits the query better. And I knew that already. So I was surprised that I was surprised that they felt the need to clarify that, to be perfectly honest. But I guess there were people that didn't know that and Google wanted to make sure that everybody was clear. Seems a nitpicky thing to do, but.
- [21:28]
Alex
Unless they were getting a lot of questions, the same question somewhere else from a lot of beginners because it isn't obvious to a novice. Right. But it's so obvious to us that.
- [21:36]
Carolyn
You know, it felt obvious to me because I remember the things that I write. So when I see, when I see a meta description that's different than what I had on the page, I will recognize the piece that they took as something else that is on the page.
- [21:51]
Alex
Yeah.
- [21:52]
Carolyn
But usually if you click through, you can find exactly what they used. That snippet that they took. It is a snippet, it's a snippet of somewhere else on the page that they felt made a better meta description than the meta description you provided, which is going to happen a lot if you are very formulaic in how you generate your meta description. So if you have 500 pages and all 500 pages start out kind of the same in terms of the meta description, or they're just, they're all really similar. Google is probably going to say that this isn't unique enough or I bet I can do it better. And that's really all they're doing is they're trying to provide a better meta description.
- [22:29]
Alex
Yeah, good to have clarification. Right. So the next one, Google are getting Rid of Google websites. So some people in the audience may even have Google websites on the Google business profiles. They're going away. They'll be going, they'll be shutting down from the 1st of March, which is only a few weeks away. And yeah, it really is. And I didn't think that was a lot of time because my assumption is that they're very big novices, people who open these websites, you know, and that they won't know how to even deal with a transition in such a short period of time. Whereas for us it's easier. Right. We know how to get a new website if we needed to. But not only that, they're only allowing a redirect for 90 days and then they're just going to remove the redirects. I'm not sure why they do that. It's not like there's lots of money saving happening. If you were to have three, I don't know why, there must be a reason why they're only giving 90 days. But it's interesting. And then they'll just be 4xx pages after that.
- [23:34]
Carolyn
The only reason you would need a Google redirect to that page is if you were using the Google Sites or Google Websites domain instead of your own domain. So they're really kind of pushing people to get their own domains which to be perfectly frank, if you have a business, you should have your own domain. And I think the reason that they're getting away from that is people were. People were spamming that system because they wanted to piggyback on the authority that came inherently with that Google domain. So there was a lot of cheating going on and I think, I think they're trying to get rid of that.
- [24:12]
Alex
Okay, well, to answer Cheryl, who's listening, 4xx page is. It's either a 404 or a 410 or can be 4 and then 2 other digits. The reason I specifically said 4xx is because Google haven't confirmed whether it's going to be a 404 or a 410. My assumption is 404 because they said the term page not found whereas a 410 is a different response. A HTT HTTP response.
- [24:43]
Carolyn
They're header status codes and the 404 means it's not here, it's not found. 410 means I have obliterated it and nuked it from orbit and it will never come back. So we don't know if they're nuking it from orbit or just making it disappear, but either way it gone.
- [24:59]
Alex
Exactly. So yeah, I hope that Answers your question, Cheryl. Way to go with Q. Skipping Q and A as well, by the way.
- [25:06]
Carolyn
Ari.
- [25:07]
Alex
No, that's fine. No, I did that. So the next thing was Google Perspectives, which is quite a new thing, which is going off the first hand experience thing that Google are going on about for more getting us more involved in contributing towards first hand experience as well as consuming it. So it's unsurprising that nearly 75% are taken by Twitter, YouTube and Reddit. Right, that makes sense. But then we were talking about perspectives. What is a perspective in terms of SEO? Why should we care about it? Should we do anything differently to maybe get ourselves more exposure on perspectives? Because if we're a brand, we're not a perspective. We're not. We're our own perspective. So it might be interesting to what's your point of view on perspectives in this sense?
- [26:00]
Carolyn
So in this sense, to make sure that your first hand experience and perspective is getting seen, you almost definitely have to either be putting out full first hand experience content on YouTube, helpful firsthand experience on Reddit and getting onto Reddit could be an issue depending on how tied into your brand you are and if your account is new or not. Oh, what are perspectives? Perspective. When you do a Google query, especially a news related query, many times now there is a new carousel underneath the news called perspectives. And those would be instead of traditional news and news outlets, it's firsthand experience types of reports. So like in Reddit you would get a subreddit from whatever the topic happens to be. I think last time we talked about super automatic espresso makers. So rather than getting product reviews or news newspaper paid reviews which are, you know, kind of biased because they're. You pay to be in those. It would pop up some forum posts where real users in theory have used that product and talked about and shared their experiences with the product. So we really want to, Google's really trying to, I think, go to places that people trust more. And what this is is kind of an indictment of the trust that people have in what news sites, traditional news sites are offering. People don't necessarily trust the news anymore because there's so many opportunities for you to buy your way into the news and people know that the big brands are paying for those reviews. They're paying for the reviews to be not bad and they're paying for the links that are in those. Whereas in Reddit to a lesser extent, I would say YouTube, but definitely in Reddit and Quora and some of the forums you're getting for the most Part real people with real experiences sharing real useful information.
- [28:12]
Alex
A no agenda or no visible agenda, which is something we were talking about before when we're going through this is the problem that news publishers have that you've just described in SEO terms. If they can't, it's much harder for them to complete the T out of EEAT because they're deemed less trustworthy because the platform that they are on may have an agenda and therefore less of a perspective. So I hope that explains everything to Eric and others. But of course, with perspectives that can be abused, can't it? Because of course, when that happened, all of a sudden the subreddit SEO on Reddit got taken over by new mods who were from new accounts of less than a year and started deleting half of the community posts in there. So even though they're on a perspective friendly platform, whoever is behind it, and I don't think we found out who it is or what the agenda is yet. Yeah, it might be a crypto bro or two, but again, what's there? Why are they in there out of everywhere? Are they just going to affiliate somewhere to some Central European exchange or something?
- [29:22]
Carolyn
Yeah, probably.
- [29:24]
Alex
So it's interesting that part, but, but it also shows that these platforms, even though they may seem more objective, are still controlled in some way, maybe or edited by a subjective person or people.
- [29:38]
Carolyn
So everything is subjective. And I think Reddit is, Reddit especially is really going to have to jump out and get, get a handle on what's going on with their moderators and make sure that things aren't being abused or overtaken because they've really been given a gift by the Google gods in terms of this new visibility that they're getting. And if they want to maintain that and keep it, they're going to have to really get a grip on the spam and these kinds of shenanigans.
- [30:09]
Alex
Yeah. And to answer Monique's question very quickly, when it comes to geographical regions. So you may be in a country where Reddit isn't that popular. Two things. A, it may provide another perspective platform that is your version of Reddit in your country. The other thing is that it may provide more visibility to places like Reddit where they weren't as visible in the past where they are right now, or could be in the future.
- [30:36]
Carolyn
And if Reddit is showing up in your geographical region, but it's not popular yet, this is an opportunity for you to jump out and get in there first before everyone else gets in there, you know, get on the bandwagon before everyone else is on the bandwagon.
- [30:53]
Alex
Exactly. And Susan's point is good. You don't tend to have let. You don't tend to have less trust for comments made by people on Quora because they are a true firsthand experience and therefore a perspective. And you would think there's no agenda. So, yeah, the next thing that happened is Google dropped thousands of search quality raters in the latest cut. So they terminated a contract with Appen, which I'm sure it was worth like $82 million or something silly like that. Yeah. And it's crazy. Yeah, 82.8. Sorry, I was $800,000 off thousands of remote workers to be search quality raters. Is this a way. Is this AI taking people's jobs from a search engine? Funnily enough. And we're worried on the other side of things, it's an internal thing. Maybe we don't know the result yet because they do use other vendors like we mentioned and there's uncertainty there and they have. No one else has said that their contract was cancelled, that I've noticed. But this is the biggest one and everything could be done by AI, if not now, definitely in the future. But you know more about the search quality rater questions, don't you?
- [32:05]
Carolyn
I've seen the search quality rater questions and the questions that I have seen, the things they're given a checklist to go through and the types of questions that they're supposed to answer for Google are questions that could be answered by a machine. They're objective for the most part. They're not terribly subjective, which means you could program an LLM or a GPT to deal with those and not have to deal with the possibility that you've got a human who has maybe another agenda or they're taking kickbacks or they're having a bad day. So this type of task does seem like something that would be a good candidate for AI. And if it's going to save money and redirect those funds into something else, it's probably a good business decision at the very least on the part of the search engines.
- [32:58]
Alex
Yeah. Next up is. There was. There was a study from a German education, a German university, I think, saying that Google's getting worse as a search experience. But I'm a bit dubious on the data. It was very product specific and not so general because that's obviously such a small subset of queries. But what they did find was that there's a lot of web spam out there, which we kind of probably knew. But was harder to identify. But it does show that over time the results got better. But that happened in a time where they were getting rid of more affiliate knockoff sites, subdomains, parasite SEO, all of those kind of things that, where they were actually getting rid of a lot of web spam last year. And I would probably say that the last quarter of course is going to be a little bit better than the first three quarters. But if a Google spokesperson is telemashable, it doesn't reflect the overall quality and helpfulness of search. I kind of do agree, but then again, if I was a Google spokesperson, that's the classic reply, right? There's nothing else you can say other than we're improving stuff and we always will.
- [34:13]
Carolyn
I think it's a, it's a tug of war. You know, sometimes they're, they're going to be better and sometimes they're going to be worse and they're just constantly fighting against the onslaught of spam and every time they close a, every, every time you close up a hole in the fence, they, the spammers dig another, dig another hole or you know, cut some chains in the chain link. It's, it's the Google fans. That's what, that's what the way it's.
- [34:40]
Alex
Always been and always will be. So yeah, it's just one study but I, I get, I get what it means with all the spam. But of course, you know, we're all white hat here, aren't we?
- [34:50]
Carolyn
Of course, Absolutely.
- [34:52]
Alex
Absolutely. So the next One is on the 18th of Jan, Google is to change European search results to show comparison sites or maybe more comparison sites. So this mainly affects people in Europe essentially it might affect more territories as the law may pass through other, other territories. But in Europe there's the dma, the Digital Markets Act. In short, why should you care? It's good for you. Because now more third party sites and comparison sites are going to be inserts instead of Google Zone. So of course things like Google Flights is a good example. There'll be less of that and more Expedia, hotels.com, you know, airline specific results coming up. That's basically so that there's laws against Google taking too much monopoly, in short. But this is good, this is good for lots of sites, which is great.
- [35:49]
Carolyn
It's forcing Google almost to go back to their roots of being a search engine instead of an everything engine. And they really want to be an everything engine, but it's not, it is kind of monopolistic that they, the way they're doing it so yeah, it's probably good that they're being restrained a little bit.
- [36:06]
Alex
Yeah. Now we've got to get onto the AI news. But there was. This is how much other news happened this month. I'm just going to say them and then we're going to go on to AI because there's just too much happening. So FAQ rich results disappeared again. Big risk, big rip off. But they'll be back. They'll be back. Google said no FCO is perfect. That's obvious. You can never, you can never have perfect SEO, otherwise we wouldn't all be in the job the next thing. This is your thing. More Author byline is not a ranking factor.
- [36:40]
Carolyn
I know. Okay. Just because they say it's not a ranking factor, friends, does not mean it's not important. They use the bylines to help determine where the content on the page starts. So is it a true ranking factor? It's not truly a ranking factor, but it does affect how they read your stuff. Just like HTML structure. It's not truly a ranking factor. It's not specifically a ranking factor, but it affects how they read and understand your content, which does affect your rank. So when Google says stuff, you have to pay very close attention to how they phrase it. Is it a ranking factor? No. But does it still affect your rank?
- [37:20]
Alex
Yes, definitely and always. Why wouldn't you just miss that if it's not a factor anyway, it's natural. So yeah, Google sitemaps ping endpoint officially no longer working at all. Why does it matter? It doesn't much. There's a ping end point in Yoast SEO that's going to be removed, but it being there isn't a problem. It just goes to a dead end and that's it. 40% of Americans use TikTok as a search engine now, which is crazy, but it does show the way in which people use search, visual search specifically to find what they want. Why should we care? Maybe we should do more video production. If you're a brand that can anyway connect into an audience that TikTok are on or engage with, do it, you know, and maybe invest a bit of paid into there and see what happens. Google ranking. Oh, go on.
- [38:11]
Carolyn
Does that mean we have to dance to do TikTok?
- [38:13]
Alex
I'm not. I see. I'm on a train sometimes and I just pass and watch fully grown adults all dancing to a wall. I just, I'm never going to find that normal ever. The next thing Google, if you had opening times, your ranking may have got affected. So what happened next? SEOs tried to abuse it. People were open 24 hours a day. And that is now a bug that has been shut. But there was actually a bit of that happening. And lastly, Google's SEO starter guide is going to be cut in half, which is interesting. A bit of content restructuring, a bit of tidying up. But maybe they won't rank as well for SEO starter guides. Let's wait and see.
- [38:55]
Carolyn
I think they had their SEO starter guide spread across too many pages. When I was, when I was working for the Mouse, we had a situation where Wikipedia and other very deep single page content sites would frequently outrank like Marvel for their superhero backstories and things like that. And the difference was that at the house of Mouse, we would put every single little section about that superhero on a different URL, which made for a very broad and thin content base instead of one single deep page of content. And Google always prefers the deep content over this. So what I would tell them is we don't want cookie sheet content, we want like chili pot content. You want it deep and full of meat.
- [39:51]
Alex
I like that. Always good to make food related comparisons. Right? Okay, AI news, it's been busy ish. But I don't think it's been good for the technology that's trying to grow up around us. Let's talk about this other report that was made by authoritas.
- [40:10]
Carolyn
Well, we kind of talked about that already.
- [40:12]
Alex
I think we did, we did. But this has a little bit more detail. But it's interesting because authorities have to say it's going to be the biggest change. It's so dramatic that it may not be able to be done in the way that they want to yet. But we did discuss a lot of this. But it is a bit scary to know that 93.8% of generative links in that data set came from sources outside top ranking organic domains. Which makes it interesting because anyone can play the game now and get there. But is that the right thing to do?
- [40:47]
Carolyn
Well, it depends on who you're talking to. It's horrifying from a brand perspective and like I said, I don't think, I think they're going to have to do something to fix this because the brands are the ones that pay the bills. The brands are the ones that invest a lot of money in paid and they're not going to tolerate this kind of incursion onto into their territory by these non players who are just adjusting their keyword usage to leapfrog into those premium positions above the fold. I'd be interested to see how this plays out. But I have a hard time believing that it's not going to get adjusted because in its current state, I just don't feel like it's tenable.
- [41:31]
Alex
No. And even the content that it produces is now a legal issue. Right. We've got again New York Times taking open AI, and now there's a legal argument on what fair use is on content and transformative and what that means in terms of what, what the chat GPT and other LLMs doing to output that information that it's finding from New York Times. There is an argument to say it is New York Times content, but I mean the object, the objective person in me is trying to say, well, you did publish it, right? On the Internet.
- [42:08]
Carolyn
Well, so they published it. And news is not necessarily generating brand new information. News is collecting information that they got from other sources, other primary sources. They're the ones putting it together and they're transforming it and putting it out. So I feel like on the one hand, their argument is not the greatest argument, but on the other hand, if they filed the lawsuit in New York, which they probably did, New York juries tend to be far more, far more generous to New York plaintiffs than they are to Silicon Valley defendants. And I would expect this to be decided in favor of the New York Times. If the, if the case is being heard in New York, does that mean that it's. No, I don't know.
- [43:04]
Alex
All they'll do is they'll. If New York Times win, all open do is take the judgment, tell the LLM to read it and ensure that they don't go away from abiding by the law, which it should be able to do as a good LLM.
- [43:18]
Carolyn
Here, chatgpt read this article and then rewrite it to make sure that it doesn't look anything like the original article, but maintains all of the same facts. Okay. And then it will spit it out.
- [43:32]
Alex
Yeah. Be 33.7% transformative, and we're good, we're all good to go and we'll give you the result. So the influence on AI though, look at this graph. What can you see? Can you see all the dramatic changes?
- [43:46]
Carolyn
Well, hey, bing gained almost 1% market share. 1%. You know, almost 1%.
- [43:54]
Alex
I mean, there was a lot of talk in the last year about Bing Chat and people going, oh, they're finally embracing AI. I remember us talking a year ago before even Yost, talking about how Bing was surprising, that Bing really made the effort and now what's Google going to do? And they have to catch him up and now here we are. And it was as though Google kind of sat back and watched Bing make their faults and learnt from them whilst trying to build their own thing, but also not figuring out what they're doing themselves. It's crazy. It's a big responsibility for a lot of people who are actually involved in AI and they have to be innovative in everything they do in a place where it's central now to the output.
- [44:39]
Carolyn
Well, you know, Google's in a position where they're so far ahead of everyone else, so they can kind of sit back and let everybody else shoot their shot and then do whatever it is they were going to do anyway after everyone else has expended their ammo.
- [44:54]
Alex
But either way, whatever Bing did didn't do enough. I mean, I'm sure the stakeholders there who were quite annoyed with the predictions, the predict. I'd love to see the predicted graph from last year going, this is what Stat counter is going to show in January 2024. You watch Alex Moss and Carolyn Shelby will be talking about how, remember Google and now look, it didn't happen, unfortunately. But that's another issue is Google, we've been talking about the search generative experience, the problems, the dramatic shift in results and then they produce content that explain what they're doing with AI. But within that it says, we'll continue to offer search generative experience in labs as a test bed for bold new ideas. And Ross Hudgens did spot this on X and he made the very good point that Google don't just write something quickly, they choose their words and they choose them wisely.
- [45:55]
Carolyn
Everything they say.
- [45:57]
Alex
Yeah, and this is one thing, I mean, even the next sentence, which is our goal is to make AI helpful for everyone, not just early adopters. That's interesting because then that goes back to, you know, the circle for search, highlight for search, multi searches. That's mass adoption stuff, not sge, in my opinion, and clearly yours at the moment, in its current state. So maybe it won't happen. And if it does, they'll take one element out and then they'll put it into the other core products.
- [46:30]
Carolyn
There's going to be a lot more. There's going to be a lot of changes. I don't, I don't think what we're seeing now is what we're going to be seeing at the end of the year. So I think there's going to be a lot of fluctuation and volatility in all of the result types and the algorithms this year. This year, this year. I think is going to be pivotal.
- [46:49]
Alex
Yeah, I mean, everyone thought last year was fun, you know, like we did the 2023 stuff a month ago. That was busy.
- [46:56]
Carolyn
Last year was fun. Buckle up.
- [46:58]
Alex
Exactly. I can't wait to do it already and see what happens. But the last piece of AI news is Google using AI, but not in the search results. So you can breathe for a second. They've actually put them in the Chrome browser. Some people will be able to get it now. I don't know if it's available for everyone. I know I use Brave browser, so I've got to wait a little bit for this, but they've introduced three things. The first is reorganizing and organizing your tab groups, which may be good for me and my. The umpteen amount of tabs I've got open at the moment. The second one, probably good for someone more creative, but I don't know. I don't think it's groundbreaking personally. But you can select a theme inside the browser based on a search term and a color scheme, which is cool for, you know, if you want to, if you're in, if you're into that. The last one I really like, you know, that's. It helps you write something which is great for contact forms and speaker submissions, things like that. You know, any, any form that requires input and thought. This is where it can help.
- [48:04]
Carolyn
Or even if you just need help writing internal emails or Slack messages. Like I would sometimes go over to ChatGPT. Okay, wait, not me, a friend. A friend would do this and say chatgpt, how do I, how do I in HR compliant corporate speak say, oh my God, are you dumb? What are you doing? And then it would spit back something that was much more appropriate to say. And I would say, oh good, okay, here, copy and paste. But it's great.
- [48:33]
Alex
It's helping us. It is helping us. It will collect your tone of voice and over a bit of time it will be able to master what you're going to say anyway, which is great. So yeah, that's all the AI news. Lastly, WordPress news there wasn't on. That's how. That's how much it's at the tip of my tongue. Yoast News, two very quick updates. So the first one is last month we talked about how Organization Schema has been updated. Whilst everything in the plugin is all correct and valid, we've been doing a lot of testing and now we can tell you that in the next update of Premium and Local, everything else in the Organization Schema that was updated in late November is going to be in this plugin. And lastly, if you're French or your audience is French, you are in luck because we have improved the accuracy of word complexity assessments for the French language. So instead of saying exclusives, it'll give some other French thing that I'm not qualified to tell you about or a human. So I'm sure what it is, is great. It's very boring, very, very bomb. And that is everything from Yoast. Lastly, if you're around in Taiwan by any chance, on the 7th of March, both you and I will be at WordCamp Asia along with more than a handful of Yosters. So if you are there, come check us out and say hi. But as well as that, if anyone's in Munich, I'll be attending SMX Munich and neither of us will be attending cloudfest. But I know that will be Yoasters there. Definitely. I know Carol with her very big purple hat will be there helping to organize stuff.
- [50:19]
Carolyn
One thing that's not on there, I will be at Pubcon March 4th. Pubcon is March 4th through 6th in Las Vegas. So I will be there and then immediately jetting off to Taipei or WordCamp Asia.
- [50:35]
Alex
Lovely. I'm annoyed. I'm not going to PubCom myself, but we can't make them all you're doing. I'm doing smx. It's fine. That's what the world's for in our locations, right?
- [50:45]
Carolyn
Yep.
- [50:46]
Alex
And lastly, we're on again in a few weeks on the 27th of Feb, so you can join us then and I hope you have been informed well in the last 53 minutes. So Ninka, we've got questions. I'm sure I've seen loads.
- [51:03]
Ninke
We got a lot of questions and a lot of upvotes as well. So we have two really big upvoted questions. But I think we should quickly explain one more thing because we got a few questions about the Google site update and it's not quite sure like which sites are affected. So let me pop up. I think we can really be really short on that one, but without had two questions on that one and you already answered this in chat, but I'm not sure if everybody saw this. So this is the question, Holly, are these Google Business sites? We're not talking about Google sites, right. So maybe just a quick answer to which sites are affected.
- [51:48]
Carolyn
I believe it is Google site websites made with Google Business Profile is what I see. So the Google Business Profile websites will be shut down is the way the news that I'm reading describes It. So a site address ending with business site or N E, G, O CIO site. I'm not sure how to pronounce that. Those will be removed from the website field on your business profile. So the recommendation is that you look for a reliable web hosting company that also allows you to create a custom domain name for your new site and then redirect to that new domain name. Cool. Okay, we have an article on bluehost actually that talks about that and provides instructions. Is it okay if I drop the link in here?
- [52:41]
Alex
Already done it already, Carolyn.
- [52:43]
Carolyn
I did it already.
- [52:45]
Ninke
Alex is first. Okay, thanks so much for that. Okay, let's move to the most upvoted questions. 28 upvotes. So this is something that a lot of people are thinking of. The question is, what is the most important thing we can do to optimize our images so we can ensure they are found by voice and visual searches? This was a topic that was right at the beginning of the update.
- [53:09]
Alex
Okay. If you've got products, my advice is to get one of those product Lightbox things. I think they only cost about €50 or something like that. And take as many photos as you can. Overdo it with the photos.
- [53:24]
Carolyn
Your photos. Don't you stop photos.
- [53:26]
Alex
Never stop photos. Do it yourself. If I had this mug, the be. I like this mug now. I'm going to use this every month like you do the rotation. I want to see every single angle, the underneath, open it up, look at the inside. Even if it's. You don't think it's helpful, someone at some point in time will search randomly for the bottom of that mug and they'll find only you because you're the only person who's done it. So as many as possible that are, of course, descriptive, plain background. So it's focusing on mainly the product you want to do. I'm focusing mainly on a product kind of imagery, but that's the one thing that I connect to here. But everything else, just be as descriptive. Try and answer the question in that picture as much as you can. I mean, Carolyn was saying, like a picture is worth a thousand words. And the task is to find the words inside the picture and optimize for them.
- [54:19]
Carolyn
It's for certain products. Take a picture of the product with a measuring tape against it with different dimensions so that people can see how big it is. You can put it next to a banana for scale. You know, there's a lot of different things you can do to make your pictures better than the stock photos that are provided by the companies.
- [54:41]
Ninke
So maybe also do a quick search yourself before you start taking those pictures. Like what is available, what can I add to that and what new perspective can I offer would that be?
- [54:49]
Carolyn
And then just fill in all of the data around it that you have available to you to make sure that you're mentioning, you know, the brand name, the part number, the color, the size, things like that.
- [55:04]
Ninke
Cool, thanks for that. So the second most upvoted question is about focus in SEO. So the question is what should a mid sized business focus on for SEO? Is meta title H1, et cetera still important this year or should we focus more on answering the community questions?
- [55:27]
Carolyn
It's definitely still important. I mean that's table stakes though. You should have that done. That's not a thing that you have to constantly be tending to because it's somewhat set it and forget it. Once you've done that though, then you want to go be involved in the communities and make sure that you're being helpful and answering questions and referring people to helpful content that you've got on your website.
- [55:49]
Alex
And to add to that, maybe if we go back to what we were talking in the trends earlier, having good content structure to help with topical authority, that's where that, that's another thing. And making, you know, the, the chilli pot content and not the cookie tray content be detailed, helpful, but not too, too long at the same time. As you can see, Google Starter guide is getting halved. So being helpful doesn't mean being too detailed.
- [56:21]
Ninke
Okay, do it both. That's probably also the answer. The short version.
- [56:27]
Alex
Yeah.
- [56:29]
Ninke
Cool. I think we can do one more. There's one again about visualizing your products. But what if you sell software or what if you don't have a visual, appealing or even visible products? Maybe financial technology is one of the examples mentioned.
- [56:53]
Carolyn
I don't think those would spawn results because of the nature of the product. But you could still write articles where you're discussing, you know, top 10 ways to do X with this product or how to do alternatives to this particular product. I think there's, I think if you look at the questions that people ask around that type of product and answer those questions, I think that would be a good way to do it. I don't think the image based searches are necessarily going to feature prominently in the results for products that aren't physical and aren't super visual.
- [57:32]
Ninke
Maybe demo content to see like when thinking of purchasing maybe a software platform.
- [57:38]
Carolyn
Like how do I work with it? I think they're not maybe allowed to do some brands prevent you from doing screenshots. So I think if you're prevented from doing screenshots, everyone's prevented from doing screenshots. So I think, I think visual search just won't be as big of a feature in the results for those types of products.
- [58:00]
Ninke
Okay, cool. Let me see if we can do one quick one.
- [58:06]
Alex
Still, you've got to have an encore question.
- [58:11]
Ninke
Yeah, I think we had some questions about the cookie, the cookie update, the third party cookie update. Some people worry like what kind of websites will be affected. Like I think we had one but I wasn't sure about online certification programs. But also one that refers to leave a review. Can we say anything about those websites might be impacted with third party cookie laws changing?
- [58:40]
Alex
I don't think so because they're more of embeds. They're not, they're not tracking you around the Internet after you make a review. I would like to think it's not like TripAdvisor is going to follow you around because you made a review about some restaurant, but they will have other retargeting stuff going on that they're not going to be allowed to do. So they've got their own challenges. But from review sites, I mean that to me is kind of a perspective site. So if anything I wouldn't worry about reviews or review sites getting de ranked or penalized in any way or just not ranking as well because they're still going to be helpful and part of the first hand experience.
- [59:21]
Carolyn
I think it's less affecting rankings and more affecting tracking and advertisements. So it's not necessarily an SEO issue, it's more of a paid. Yeah.
- [59:32]
Ninke
So if that's your business model, getting revenue from referrals or whatever, you might be impacted no matter maybe the content of your site.
- [59:40]
Alex
Yeah.
- [59:41]
Ninke
Okay, cool. We're at two minutes past time so I think we should close off here. Alex, Carolyn, thanks for another great update. I think we were packed with AI updates and really helpful Google updates. So thanks for that, all the people joining today. Thanks for joining. Thanks for being here. We're super excited to see you again in February and see what that month brings in. SEO updates. So see you then and happy optimizing for now.