Hello everyone, and welcome to today’s SEO update.

I’m very excited to be your host today.

My name is Florie van Hummel, and before I’ll introduce our most amazing SEOs that we have at Yoast, I’ll first tell you a little bit about the program that we’re in.

We’re in Crowdcast, and in case you don’t know Crowdcast, there’s a couple of things that are just very good to know.

So you’ll find the chat at the right side of the screen, and pressing the question mark over there, you can directly find our Q&A section where you can also upvote other questions.

And generally speaking, the most upvoted questions get answered first, so make sure to upvote those questions and also ask questions yourself.

So recording.

Of course, that’s a question that always comes up.

Yes, there will be a recording available afterwards, and we will also send you some resources over email so you make sure that you can read up on everything and also watch this back.

And as I said, there’s a Q&A afterwards, so there should be room for questions, so make sure if you have questions to already ask them over there.

So without further ado, let me introduce our two SEOs of today.

First of all, Carolyn.

She’s been lighting up the digital marketing scene since ’94 and has been everywhere.

From SEO to ecommerce SEO, you can ask her anything.

I’m super excited to introduce you to our one and only female principal SEO at Yoast, Carolyn Shelby.

Get ready for some serious insights from Carolyn’s side.

Secondly, we have Alex, the man who’s always busy but never too busy to bring cookies to the office.

This is Alex Moss, and he’s our other principal SEO at Yoast and also the director of a UK-based agency, and he designed his own dog pack, fun fact.

Alex has also been an SEO for a very long time, so I think you’re on very, very capable hands today for today’s SEO update.

So today, Alex and Carolyn will talk about the announcements of Search GPT and Google’s reversal on third-party cookies, and I think there’s much more to cover today.

So Alex, Carolyn, enjoy and see you later.

Thanks, Florie.

Thank you very much.

I am super excited to be here today.

Let’s see, make sure I’ve got all my stuff.

There we go.

Am I sharing?

I’m sharing.

Wow, you’re sharing.

I think I’m sharing.

I can see it.

I can see that there’s four things on the list.

I made an emergency change to one of the slides, and it stopped.

All right, so let’s get going.

What are we going to discuss today?

The usual stuff.

We’ve got SEO news, AI news, WordPress news, and then we’ll do a Q&A.

And speaking of the Q&A, if you have any questions, please make sure that you use– it’s on my right.

I assume it’s on everybody else’s right, too.

We have a Q&A section.

Like Florie said, put your questions in there.

If you like other people’s questions, upvote them.

The ones with the most upvotes tend to get answered first.

Though if we have duplicates or questions that are very similar to each other, we’ll pick the one that’s easier to answer.

The really long-winded questions, especially if it’s an important question, I might answer on our blog.

I’ve done that in the past before.

Yeah, so let us get rocking and rolling.

I do want you to know that you can get the recording available if you don’t want to wait for the email or you miss the email.

You can go to yoa.st/update-july-2024 and that scheme works for all of the past updates, too.

So if you miss one for any reason and you want to go back and watch it again, that’s where you go to get that recording afterwards.

Also, this tends to be a news update type of thing.

If you’re looking for more how to get started in SEO, we have a How to start with SEO webinar that you can watch.

Unfortunately, today, it’s literally at the exact same time as this one is, so you’ve got to make a choice today.

But for August, it looks like August 13 is the next one.

They’re generally every other Tuesday.

It’s just this time that happened to fall on the same day as ours.

So now that all that housekeeping is out of the way, shall we get started with some SEO news?

We shall, because as usual, a lot’s happened, and it’s July.

So maybe they’re doing two months worth just to cover August, which usually nothing happens then, right?

And also to note, guys, the next one is not going to be till the beginning of October.

So this is the last one before the summer.

I forgot about that.

So yeah, we’re off in August.

We are.

That means it’s going to be super crammed on the September one that happens in October.

I don’t know.

We did that because the weeks don’t go right, do they?

So we’re at SEO Oktoberfest during that last week.

So like Oktoberfest in September, we’re doing it the other way around, doing September’s in October.

But let’s go on with this month, right?

A lot has happened since our last update.

Technically, we’ve got some from the end-ish of June, from the tail end of June.

And this is one of them that GA4, as I know you all know or should know by now unless you’re living under an analytical rock, is being deprecated.

UA has been deprecated in replacement of GA4.

And since July last year, was it?

Maybe the year before?

No, I think it was last year.

That’s when they started stopping tracking on UA.

And now they’re getting rid of it completely.

Nothing much to really cover other than if you need to back up your data, do it right now before it’s too late.

I don’t know.

I think it stopped July 1.

So I think if you haven’t backed it up by now, you’re SOL.

Really?

Because I’ve been getting emails still.

This morning, I received an email from Analytics made saying, make sure you do one more thing.

So if it’s gone already, you’re obviously too late.

If you haven’t done it already, maybe it was somewhat inaccessible from the 1st of July.

If you’re concerned about that data, I suggest you go right now– well, after the show.

Go after the show and check to see if there’s anything you need to download or do before that goes away because it is in the process of actively going away and you don’t want to miss that.

Yeah, yeah.

[INTERPOSING VOICES] Oh, I was just going to– I was just going to say, is there much worth of backing stuff up beyond the year because it was pre-COVID times, data’s different and whatnot.

But that’s up to you, the audience.

It depends.

I thought I was going to care and I actually didn’t care enough.

And the speakers nowadays that are saying ignore that stuff because it only ties you down to a different time as technology is changing so much.

But hey, that’s for another session, right?

We’re just doing the updates here.

All right, well, so next up in the news, Google has dropped continuous scroll on the desktop and then mobile will be coming.

If you’re not sure what continuous scroll is, that’s when you go to page one of Google and as you scroll down, more and more results keep popping up.

It doesn’t get to the bottom and then say you have to click to page two.

It just keeps going forever.

Personally, I’m very excited that this is happening.

I don’t know if excited’s the right word.

I’m happy, though, because continuous scroll is annoying.

And the reason continuous scroll is annoying is because it changes how you look at the results.

It sort of takes away the whole I’m on page one, I’m on page two.

You don’t actually know which page you’re on.

And you can’t pick and choose.

You can’t go back to it.

You can’t remember that you saw something on page three and then go back to page three and expect to find it again.

It’s complexity for the sake of complexity.

On your pages, on your website, continuous scroll is bad because the crawlers won’t ever see the things that aren’t immediately on the page initially.

So anything that loads subsequently just doesn’t exist.

So my recommendation would be maybe don’t use continuous scroll.

In certain situations, it’s probably great.

But in most situations, I think it is ultimately not great.

Yeah, and I’m a fan of this going away because this reminds me of how someone browses social media.

Very short snippets of content that may be unrelated to each other, where to me, the experience of searching on a search engine, for example, is you’re doing something specific in the one query.

So I want that more digestible.

And I feel like pagination does that.

So I’m hoping it won’t come back, which will be a good thing.

Yeah, I think people have this expectation that you’ll spend more time in Google doom scrolling like you do in Facebook.

And Google is not the place I want to doom scroll.

It’s just– it’s not where I want to waste my time.

I want to get my answer, and I want to get out and do my work.

But– Exactly.

It’s much better places to waste your time.

So what else is going on?

What else is going on?

Well, there was a conversation on X, formerly Twitter, about brand names in review content or content in general of products.

Danny Sullivan from Google basically said, try and include your brand name where possible.

And someone said that omitting could actually boost rankings.

Now, I may get the point of view that it could boost a ranking because you’re up against a brand.

And we were saying before, maybe having a Nike trainer, you’re up against Nike.

And if you were to just change that to trainer, black trainer, or whatever that is, it might be more of a chance of someone finding it.

Still kind of half disagree with that because you’re still up against everyone with black trainers, including Nike again.

But I always thought it’s relevant and helpful to put Nike in there anyway and may increase the visibility.

But you had a different take on this exchange, didn’t you?

You know, I read– I read the comment that triggered Danny’s response.

And I don’t think the guy who was originally commenting meant if you don’t include the brand names in your product reviews, they’ll rank higher.

I think what he meant was the reason this particular person’s reviews weren’t ranking higher is because he had useless third party content that didn’t add value.

And he was competing against a brand name that had lots of other content that was authoritative and useful.

So the odds that he was going to make it to page one were very low.

And that I would 100% agree with.

So I think Danny’s response was maybe– I don’t want to say misinterpreted.

I think the original comment that triggered the response wasn’t interpreted maybe correctly.

So I don’t think this guy was giving bad advice.

I think the advice, the takeaway from it should have been have more creative, useful content, not don’t use the brand name.

I think that’s where we were going with that one.

Yeah, yeah.

And hopefully this person will include the brand names.

I’m guessing from Nick that it’s Nike.

I don’t know how you pronounce it.

I say Nike.

How do you say Adidas?

I say Adidas, not Adidas.

So to be fair, as Alex was saying Nike trainers, I felt like I should jump in and say, what he means are Nike shoes.

Or Nike sneakers.

It’s very British of me how different that is, right?

Very British of you.

Well, one tip, localize, right?

Localize it.

I said Nike trainers.

You said Nike shoes.

And it’s the same thing, right?

It is the same thing.

So what else is– Moving on, one of the other exciting developments was that Google revealed their methods for measuring search quality, which is good for us to know.

Because we talk a lot about making sure you have quality content.

And how do you know if the content that you think is quality is what Google thinks is quality?

Part of making that determination is understanding how they’re calculating what’s good and what’s bad.

So what they’ve said is they said they assess search quality through user surveys, human evaluators.

And we know that they have search quality criteria that they distribute to their quality raters.

And we’ve seen those.

Those have been leaked.

If you’re interested in reading any of those, if you go Google– let’s see– quality rater guidelines or Google search quality rater guidelines, something of that combination, you should be able to find the most recent leak.

And there were tons of them.

So you’ll be able to get a hold of that document.

They also look at behavioral analysis.

Behavioral analysis is click-through rates.

What are you doing when you go to the page?

How long are you engaging?

So it’s user engagement.

And all of that stuff we know is being tracked.

So they’re using that to determine what’s quality and what’s not quality.

Improving search quality leads to more complex queries, which is making it harder for Google to measure what’s good and what’s bad.

But hopefully, people are getting better information.

So what they’re saying there is that as they’re getting better about surfacing good quality, people are getting better at being more specific about the information that they want, which is making it slightly harder for Google to gauge quality because you’re getting into smaller and smaller pools of data for them to evaluate.

And the smaller the pool is, it’s– how do you explain this?

It’s easier to be first chair in the orchestra when there’s only two violins competing, right?

So what ends up surfacing as high quality may not necessarily be high quality.

It’s just that it’s so niche that people need it, and they find it, and they’re basically asking for it by name.

Short-term search activity might not reflect true quality either, which is fair because if you’re looking at stats and analysis when you’ve got a short burst of activity that might be caused by something else, like something happens in the real world and then everybody goes and searches for it.

Just because something is happening for a very short burst isn’t necessarily an indication that it is overall of high quality.

It just meant that it managed to be at the right place at the right time during a peak query area when there wasn’t a lot of competition.

So long story short, you want to focus on sustained performance over a long period of time, and that is usually caused by user satisfaction rather than going for quick click-baity things.

Yeah, and as well as that, before we go on to the next topic, I think it’s– it was Cyrus Shepard, wasn’t it, who did the search quality and page quality scoring, and he did update it since the leak.

Is that who you were thinking of?

Might have been.

[INTERPOSING VOICES] I just put in the link on the chat, so anyone who wants to see that can do.

So yeah, that’s very interesting reading from Cyrus.

So yes, next topic was Google released the June spam updates.

It completely rolled out during June, so started on the 20th.

So I think last month we were talking about how it just happened, and on the 27th, it’s completed its rollout.

If something dramatic happened to your site, have a look and see what happened that week, see where the problems are, look in Search Console.

Other than that, there’s not too much impact it had on the web in general.

So I think that’s not really much beyond it happened, and have a look at your analytics, and if something did dip, this will be why.

And they are happening a lot now, so it’s not surprising that there was another rollout this month.

I think we’re going to get to the point where we can expect them every few weeks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So what’s happened next?

Rand Fishkin’s been busy.

Goodness, yeah.

So another big report, I know we had a big report in May with the leak.

So now we’ve got the 2024 zero click search study.

So Rand did a study, and they looked at September 2022 to May 2024, and they’re examining the effects of these zero click answers, and that’s going to now include the AI overviews in how that’s changing search behavior.

What the study showed was 59.7% of European Union Google searches are zero click.

And slightly less than that, 58.5% of the United States searches are zero click.

That means more than half of all the searches are triggering some kind of answer or AI overview or something that is hopefully giving you the thing that you want before you get to those search results, which in theory– well, the initial hypothesis, I guess.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been to science class.

The initial theory was that this is going to dramatically reduce clicks to things that aren’t ranking number one.

Things that ranked number one did get the vast majority of the clicks anyway, so how much is this really adversely affecting people is the question.

So the next thing we’ve got is the– this just shows the breakdown.

Basically, the gist is it’s affecting it.

It’s not ruining the internet.

I think if it were ruining the internet, we would have already discovered that it had ruined the internet and it hasn’t.

The AI overviews probably has a greater possibility of affecting and changing user behavior.

But one of the things they talked about in the study was that AI overviews is actually increasing user clicks, whereas the direct answers were decreasing user clicks.

I think that saying that AI overviews will ultimately increase user clicks is premature, because right now what we’ve got is it’s down to 7% of the queries are actually triggering these AI overviews.

And the AI overviews are still new, so we still play with them.

Plus, everyone knows that– well, at least most people have heard– that the AI overviews are frequently wrong or they give goofy information, like telling you to drink urine to get rid of kidney stones or put glue on your pizza.

And I think what’s happening is you read the AI overview and then you click through on the work cited to see if you can figure out where they got the goofy information from or to confirm whether or not the information is accurate and wasn’t summarized incorrectly.

So I think it’s dramatically premature to say that AI overviews is going to be better for search behavior than the direct answers would be.

I still think it’s worth it if you can get the direct answer.

If you can be the direct answer, by all means, I would do that.

Because whether or not you’re getting that click traffic, I think it’s good for branding.

And with the AI overviews, I think we should anticipate that the initial ‘this is fun, let’s play with it’ is going to change.

And I don’t think people will be clicking through as much as they are now, I guess is my TL;DR.

Yeah.

Yeah, and it’s interesting to say that people clicking.

With the urine kidney stones example, it’s interesting that people are clicking.

And I hope that the algorithm can become complex enough to understand that people are clicking not because they find it helpful, but because they’re trying to sanity check something that doesn’t make sense.

As though they’re clicking because of distrust rather than trust.

And that’s skewing some other data, making it seem as though it’s a helpful answer when it may be really unhelpful.

But I’m hoping, again, that someone in Google knows that psychological behavior of sanity checking facts to make sure that they make the right decision.

That may be informed in the next search that they do.

Yeah, I think it’s going to change as it matures.

Google’s getting better at not including goofy information in the AI overviews.

And I think it just needs to mature.

It’s just still too new, it’s a fun toy.

We’re all going to play with it.

And it’s probably all SEOs that are skewing the data anyway because we’re kicking the tires and we’re trying to reverse engineer what’s going on.

And we have to click through a lot to do that.

Are regular people doing that?

I don’t know.

My mom’s not.

Probably not.

Probably not, no.

But it is interesting to see how it’s being tested and used.

And at least it’s being tested instead of rolled out completely willy nilly, right?

True.

OK, so what’s the next thing that’s happened?

Google Search Console has been working in early July to fix performance delays.

Now, today, everything’s fixed.

So it’s now a non-issue.

However, we thought we’d include this because if anyone has been looking at Search Console on a daily basis as part of their job, they might have found that there was missing or skewed data.

So we can now tell you instead of having a mini heart attack, there was a reason for it.

And it wasn’t because your site was underperforming.

It was because Google had an issue which they resolved.

So hopefully, hopefully now, when you’re doing your monthly reports in the next couple of days, everything should be as it was as though nothing happened, which is wonderful.

One thing I’ve noticed is that if you are on Twitter or X, if you have a problem where you go into Search Console and there’s no data or the data is horrifically wrong and you are torn between having a heart attack or thinking that something is broken, if you go to X and look at the SEO chatter, someone else will have also noticed.

And they will go and they’ll say, oh my god, Search Console is broken.

It’s a nice, again, sanity check way of saying, okay, I don’t need to have a heart attack.

This is not a me problem.

This is a them problem, and it will get resolved eventually.

Yeah.

Danny Sullivan’s always a great person to follow.

I think he’s SearchLiaison.

And as well as that, you’ve got Search Central.

You’ll find them.

You’ll find them on X.

Go out and find them.

But yeah, do follow them.

And like Carolyn said, if you found it, it’s very likely that someone else has found it before you and reported about it.

Yep.

So another fun thing that’s happened is Cloudflare has launched a tool to combat AI bots.

Cloudflare is very good at defending sites that are under a denial of service attack, a DDoS attack.

I don’t know if you guys have heard of that.

But that’s a distributed denial of service attack where people have bots set up, bot farms, and they just bombard sites with junk data and junk traffic to cause the site to crash.

Cloudflare is known for being good at defending against that kind of stuff.

So the reason their tool to combat AI bots is unique and different from the blocks that other people have been coming out with is that Cloudflare says, we know that some of these AI bots disregard the robots.txt directives and go rogue and will crawl your site anyway.

We can figure out when the sites that are crawling your content are bots, and we can figure out when they’re crawling in violation of the robots.txt.

And then we can take steps at our level, at the Cloudflare level, to block that traffic.

So if you are desperately interested in making sure that you block all AI crawlers from accessing your content, you may want to look into this new Cloudflare tool because this is the thing they specialize in, and they’re now providing this tool to help you do that.

That being said, I’m still kind of on the fence about whether or not this is a good idea to block these crawlers.

I think if they want your content, they’re going to get it anyway.

And I don’t know that I want to keep my information out of the general knowledge pool because I don’t want someone else’s information to be what gets used instead of my information because I feel like I’m the expert on a particular topic.

Therefore, no one should get to have input into what’s going on.

Well, I mean, obviously they’re going to, but I want my voice to be heard as well.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

I mean, I find it weird.

I don’t see a reason other than if you own very specific content IP, which in my opinion, would be behind some kind of gateway or paywall anyway that wouldn’t be crawled.

I’m very open for the open web and open content for the web.

But that also to considerations here, Cloudflare are doing also ones that are a bit more aggressive that ignore robots.txt.

And even then, it might get through, like perplexity like we covered last week, just ignoring robots.txt and taking it anyway.

So it sounds that if you don’t want to be on AI, I don’t see why you wouldn’t.

You will want to be more visual and visible on AI anyway.

This is the way to do it, but try not to.

So next, yes, shipping.

Shipping and returns policies can be very, very daunting and very complex and very independent.

And if you’ve got thousands and thousands of products and you have three that have a different returns and shipping policy, it can be quite annoying.

Search Console would be nice enough to actually provide you an area inside Search Console itself where you can do this instead of relying on things like Schema, which is a good way of going.

And obviously, we do handle some of those things.

But some can get very, very complex.

And some people just want that control inside Search Console instead of being at the behest of the developer.

There are other things that help.

Don’t know, Carolyn, like Merchant Center visibility and connectivity there, which is also good, which of course helps visibility elsewhere on search engine.

In theory, if you fill out all of this extra stuff, it should help boost your visibility in the product feeds.

So if you’ve got– I know WooCommerce has an integration with the Google product feeds.

Just filling out all the extra information that they’re asking you for directly into Google does facilitate things.

Because you never know when they’re going to have a problem retrieving things from your site.

So if you’ve given them that information directly, you don’t have to worry about that anymore.

So it’s a little bit of extra work.

But I feel like it’s a few less things you have to be concerned about.

Yeah, definitely worth it.

I do it if I pay so much.

Yeah.

And what else is that?

Oh, Google now defaulting to not indexing content.

What’s this all about?

This was a think piece by Vincent Schmalbach.

I can’t– it’s a little small.

I can’t read it.

OK.

I disagree with the premise.

But this popped up in a couple of feeds that I saw.

And I wanted to make sure that we discuss this so that people don’t see the headline or read it and go, oh, well, someone said it, so it’s obviously true.

I think what he’s saying is that a long time ago, we used to be able to spin up WordPress sites, WordPress specifically.

And it didn’t matter what it was.

Google would index it immediately.

You’d be able to find it immediately in search.

And everything was wonderful.

And now he’s found that that’s not really the case and that sometimes these new WordPress sites never get indexed.

I don’t think this is a thing where Google is choosing to not index something because it’s new or because it doesn’t– just by default.

They are looking for genuinely unique content.

They are looking for authoritative content.

And I think that’s always been true.

I think you can still find any of these sites– they’re still indexing it.

They’re just not necessarily ranking.

And that could be any number of things, like there’s just more authoritative content out there.

No one’s searching for your content.

There’s a lot of factors that go into it.

I do not think Google is defaulting to not indexing content.

I think they index everything.

Whether or not they rank it is a different story.

I know this to be true because I’ve been doing some studies on the AI effects and things like that.

Part of that was I was looking for things that are only mentioned, let’s say, on Reddit.

Literally one place in the universe mentions this one made-up word.

Can I find it in Google?

And I can.

Now, is that because Reddit is an authoritative site?

Could be, but that user wasn’t particularly authoritative.

If I put that on a WordPress site that literally only contains this made-up word, I can still find it.

It was a made-up spun-up WordPress site.

So I think it’s more the uniqueness and how much competition there is.

I think 10 years ago, there were a lot less websites than there are now.

So the long story short here is if your business model is, I’m going to spin up brand new WordPress sites to sell stuff for affiliate marketing or something like that, and I’m just going to churn and burn these new sites to take advantage of that honeymoon period where things get indexed and rank really well right away because they’re new, the honeymoon period might be gone.

And that’s probably not a good business model anymore.

But the statement that Google’s defaulting to not indexing content I don’t think is accurate.

No, and also if it’s a small site or a new site, we’d be giving advice such as get your XML site map sorted.

Of course, done in Yoast, but also submit it in Search Console.

It’s like that if a tree falls in a forest, does anyone hear?

No, unless you tell someone about it.

You at least can point to that tree and say that tree fell to Google, right?

Am I just making Google a deforestation company?

I guess I’m sure they looked at it like that in some way by others.

You might not say that because I feel like we’ll be hearing from the lawyers soon.

No, no, they’re a great company.

It’s brilliant.

I love working with them and everything.

Let’s move on.

Google’s reversal of third party cookies.

What a hard decision Google had to make here, right?

Because they are again at the behest of other platforms whilst trying to make a conscious concerted decision on privacy, which as an end user, I get what they were trying to do.

However, it turns out that that task was very, very, very hard to do and now they’ve had to roll back on it.

However, that doesn’t mean that it won’t come back.

We could turn around in 2027, be on the SEO update or whatever it’s called because SEO will be dead by then.

But talking about privacy, third party cookies, and getting rid of them again.

Whatever foundational or groundwork you’ve done already, keep it, bookmark it because it might come in handy at a future date.

However, if you’ve already removed third party cookies because you got scared, you can put them back now because there’s nothing against doing it.

I mean, they’re still looked at a bit differently sometimes by some platforms.

But if it’s something that you need and you only took it away because the head of legal told you to, it might be a conversation you can have with them again.

At least legal departments can relax.

I feel sorry for the people that have been really stressing out about this for the past few years because when I first read about it, I could just imagine there’s like the simultaneous sigh of relief and then wanting to cry for all the hair that you’ve pulled out over the past three years, trying to figure out solutions to replacing these things that you’ve relied on without the aid of the third party cookies.

And now you don’t have to worry about it.

So yay, you don’t have to worry about it.

But you’re not going to get those hours and days back in your life where you were freaking out.

But Google does have to be reversing themselves.

Yeah, I do feel bad for the lawyers.

But I also understand that they were on retained time.

So I don’t feel bad for the lawyers.

Oh, no, it’s not the lawyers.

It’s the tech people.

It’s the marketing people that were trying to come up with technical solutions to mitigate this loss.

The lawyers get paid plenty.

They’re fine.

Yeah, they’re all fine.

They slept well that night.

I’m not worried about that.

But if you’d like to read this article, this is a blog post I wrote.

So if you go to the Yoast blog, you can read my lovely scribblings.

I’ve just pasted it into the chat there.

Oh, well, thank you very much.

Well, let’s move on to see what else was in the news this month.

Yeah, there was lots of other stuff, but not worthy of us chatting too much about it.

So what’s happened?

Google updates guided some EEA carousels beta.

So I’m not sure how much anyone’s been messing with carousels, but they’ve updated the guidelines just for the EEA only.

So if you’re based in the EEA, check it out and see what’s been updated.

We should clarify what EEA is, because I didn’t know.

I don’t know what it stands for, because I know when I got brought up, we weren’t in the EU, because I’m that old.

I think it’s the European Economic Area.

Yeah, but there’s also the EEC and the EC, and then there’s the EU.

Something else to look at– oh, thank you, Samah.

I was right.

I was right.

Thank you, Samah.

I was right.

I was right.

So it’s the European Economic Area.

If you are in the area, or you don’t know if you are, and you want to check whether you are, check it out.

And if you are, also read the guidance if carousels are something that you do.

The next thing is prompt injection has been added into Bing Webmaster Guidelines.

I must say much about that, unless you’re into prompt injection.

Google URL best practices has been updated by saying don’t use fragments to change page content.

That’s, in short, using the hash sign inside the URL to try and change the content.

For example, if you’ve got t-shirts and you can put a hash blue, you can use the page just to output blue t-shirts.

Don’t use that to start trying to make a new page about blue t-shirts as opposed to yellow t-shirts.

What else has happened?

Expanding translated results into more languages.

As someone who is only English speaking, this doesn’t affect me.

But you may want to have a look at the different languages that it does, just in case you are in that country or you serve people that do.

Google may allow publishers to exclude content from Google Discover.

Read it if you even are interested in doing that.

I don’t see a reason why anyone would want to be excluded from Discover unless there was some adult site or something that was against some regulation, at which point you probably won’t be included anyway.

But something to look at.

CWV, which is Core Web Vitals in case Samah isn’t quick enough.

And Google Page Experience ranking factors have been updated.

More information on that.

That’s kind of been relayed into Search Console.

But generally, people have better results from that.

Next up is Google confirms a ranking boost for country code domains.

This was reported by Roger, looking at something that Gary Illyes had said about if you’re .cz in the Czech Republic, then you may get high ranking if you’re .com in CZ, serving people in Czech Republic.

But then what happened a week after, Carolyn?

Well, then Matt Southern from the same publication said that Gary came out and said, oh, no, no.

There’s no boost.

And in fact, we’re thinking about lowering the SEO value of the country code top level domains.

So I was curious, why would there be such an about phase?

And I went back and read the original article.

The quote from Gary that was cited as being the proof that there is a rankings boost for the country codes.

As I read that, I feel like the quote from Gary doesn’t seem to support the conclusion of the article.

I think the conclusion in the article was perhaps an overreach.

And then they got published.

Gary said, oh, got to clear this up real quick, reached out, and they wrote what is effectively a retraction without being a retraction.

So the original quote– and I don’t have it in front of me– was something along the lines of, if you are in Korea, it is certainly probable that a .kr website will rank highest because it’s serving Korea.

The way I read that was the local content is– it’s the local content.

It’s not necessarily the TLD.

It’s the local content.

If you primarily serve that area, you will rank better because you have been identified as serving that area.

If you could have a .com that primarily serves Korea, and I think it will compete just fine.

So long story short, I think the headline is slightly misleading in that first iteration of that story.

And then the second story came out a week later to correct the record.

So he read Nike trainers, and he should have read Nike shoes.

Probably a little bit worse than that.

And what else has happened?

Oh, well, the other things that have happened, it looks like the Google URL shortener links will no longer be available.

And that was asked in one of our forums if that’s going to affect SEO, like if you’re using Google shortener links internally on your website.

And I will say, if you’re using Google shortener links internally on your website, then yes, that would affect SEO.

But also, you should absolutely not be using Google shorteners internally on your website.

They’re shorteners.

They’re meant to be used externally.

You should never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never use external link processing shorteners to link from one page to another within your own website.

Because that is causing people to go out to an external site and then back in.

A, there’s a redirect there, which means you’re losing pennies on the dollar in terms of the juice traveling from one link to another.

But also, you’re giving up some control of those links.

Like, that is just a patently bad idea.

I cannot stress how much.

It is a bad, bad idea, and you should not be doing that.

So ultimately, SEO-wise, this shouldn’t affect you unless you have important links running through there, which are obviously going to stop working at some point.

So no, Bitly is the same thing.

Do not use it internally.

It’s not meant to be used as internal links.

They’re for external links.

Bitly is safer right now because they’re not discontinuing it.

But if you were using the Google thing for sharing your links externally, it will stop working at some point.

So you’re going to need to fix those.

And if you want to reroute them through Bitly, 100% OK.

Because as far as we know, yes, external only across social.

Do not use them internally.

Very, very, very bad.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And one more thing.

If you have enough resource and hosting, you can get your own version of Bitly.

It’s called YOURLS, not YALL, as in you all.

It’s Y-O-U-R-L-S.

I’ll put this in.

There’s a plugin for WordPress you can get too called Pretty Links.

And I’m pretty sure Pretty Links will do custom short links with your domain in them, which, again, gives you more control over what’s going on.

And maybe I’m just a control freak.

I mean, that’s entirely possible.

But I like to maintain control over things that are important.

And to me, links are very important.

Yes.

There’s that.

Yeah.

All right.

Quickly moving on.

Barry Schwartz said that there was an SEO poll done that said 54% of SEOs saw positive effects from Google updates.

The converse of that is 46% of SEOs saw negative effects.

So that’s still like 50/50.

And most people I know have seen negative effects.

At least the only ones that I hear about.

So take that as you want to take it.

And feel free to go read up more on that if you have time.

I see that we’re running short on time.

So let’s try to buzz through the AI news kind of quickly here, Alex.

Yeah.

So something that you mentioned earlier– so this time last month, we reported that AI overviews had gone from 84% to 15%.

I predicted that it would go down.

And it has.

And now it’s 7%.

So looking back at those studies that we were talking about, about the zero click, it’s kind of the same thing in which the subset of testing is happening.

But 7% of queries is very, very low for something that they made a huge, huge song and dance about in May.

But it also means that they are treading lightly on something that they should be treading lightly on.

But I think it’s for the best.

And I assume in the coming months, it’ll go back up again as they perfect what AI overviews give on a search result.

It seems like they might be limiting it also to things that can be answered definitively or with science to back it up rather than things that are subjective.

Because if you note, it says that entertainment AI overviews went from 14% to 0%.

Entertainment is quite subjective.

So you don’t want it to appear that Google is saying, this movie is bad or this movie is great when that’s entirely subjective.

And example, Deadpool and Wolverine apparently has been panned by the critics, but everybody loves it.

So do you want Google saying that it’s awful?

No, of course not.

Because A, Google is a machine and who cares.

But B, everybody loves it and who cares what the critics say.

So I think things that are subjective are probably best avoided by AI.

And I’m glad Google is agreeing with me on that.

Yeah, yeah.

What happened next?

Claude, if anyone’s used Claude, they have released an AI chat bot for Android, but not iPhone.

Sorry, Apple users.

I’ve not been using it much myself.

I know there’s quite a few out there.

I know that Claude has been a good thing, but it’s more on the creative side.

And I’m not too creative, so I’ve not needed it in that way.

But if you are creative, it’s very, very good.

Maybe I do need it more.

But I’ve heard very, very good things about Claude in general.

So if you haven’t tried it, try it out.

Because my advice is if you’re using all of these AI platforms like ChatGPT, don’t just use that one for now.

Just use Perplexity, use Claude.

What’s the other one?

Jarvis, is it?

And there’s another one that’s someone’s name as well.

So check them all out.

But Claude is very good and it’s worth having a mess about with if you’re an Android user.

Absolutely.

So it looks like Bing has updated their AI search.

And they believe this will make site owners happy because their new layout is featuring a table of contents and lots of links and organic search results to encourage people to click through.

The layout anticipates related questions.

It presents all the results on one page for easy exploration and discovery.

And Bing is hoping that this has a positive effect on click-throughs.

Cool. 17th of July was big, potentially disruptive.

Sam Altman, if you haven’t heard of him, he’s the OpenAI guy who basically made ChatGPT.

They’ve made– well, they’re bringing out a prototype for SearchGPT, which in a nutshell will probably compete with Google’s native search.

And it will be very interesting to see.

There is a blog post about it where they give you some videos and show you.

You can join the wait list if you’re on a personal account.

And as well as that, they’ve had some– it seems to be already case studies and quotes.

I found it quite interesting that the two quotes on the blog post were both from news publications.

There’s someone from NYT and someone from News Corp.

So they’re getting the publication buy-in, which they never got from Google, who seem to be a bit more concerned about Google than OpenAI in terms of how they’re presented and what they do with their content and how they cite the content.

But it’s going to be very interesting when this comes out, because let’s face it, normal folk are going to use this as well because they now have the trust in ChatGPT and have been using it for a year, that this is something I think a lot of people will at least pilot.

Yeah, one thing I would say is that Google actually does have a history of going to the news organizations to get them to buy into something to push the rest of us into doing it.

That’s what they did with AMP.

They went around and they had a dog and pony show that they did to get everybody on board with AMP.

And then they rolled it out to everyone else, because if the big guys are using it, then everybody else should use it too.

So it’s a good strategy that they’re using here.

I find it interesting that they’re going to give publishers control over the appearance in search.

So you might be able to have different colors and different– I think that’s visually going to make it more cluttered, but it is more like advertising too.

So I’m interested to see what they do with it.

It’s exciting to have something new and disruptive in search, because I think it has been pretty– it’s been Google-dominated for a very long time.

So it’ll be interesting to see someone else come into the market that’s got some new ideas.

And hopefully, it will be enough to make a difference.

So let’s wrap it up here with a couple of bits of WordPress news.

The WordPress Plugin supply chain attack was escalating through the month– the end of June into the beginning of July.

If you have a– let’s see, like PowerPress Podcasting was one of the plugins that was affected.

What it does is it injects bad code into your site to create unauthorized admin accounts, which compromises security.

You have to check for rogue accounts.

The quickest way to determine if you’ve been hacked, other than, oh my god, something’s clearly wrong, I’ve been hacked, go into the user accounts and look for accounts that don’t belong there.

That will be your first clue that you’ve had a problem.

So do look into this.

If you don’t have a good security plugin, I strongly recommend you get a security plugin.

I’m not affiliated with Wordfence, but I use them.

And I’ve been quite happy with them.

I know Alex, you said Security and Limit Login Attempts are two plugins that you like.

Yeah, yeah.

And of course, Cloudflare has its own stuff as well.

Even though it’s not directly– always directly connected to some of the issues that have been happening in the supply chain attacks, that’s another layer of security that people can have.

But yeah, Wordfence, Security, Limit Login Attempts, either one or a combination of those three dependent on your setup is the best way to go.

Yeah, please do make sure that you’re getting that taken care of.

Yeah.

And lastly, WordPress releases 6.6.1 for the inevitable security patch of a 6.6.

If you’ve got 6.6, get it off.

Get it upgraded 6.6.1, because I think there were some big issues that potentially were security issues.

But they’ve all been fixed, and they’ve all been patched up.

And that was released only within days.

Yeah, I was surprised at how quick that came through.

Because I know I did the big update, and then I woke up the next morning and it was like, we’ve updated your WordPress site.

And I’m like, no, you didn’t.

I did that yesterday.

And then I looked, boom, it was new.

Yeah, you know you have to if they’re that quick.

So yeah, that’s all the news.

Done.

Please, please, please stay up to date with those updates.

And if you are interested in seeing us or talking to us, we have some upcoming events and appearances that you still have time to make plans to attend, because they’re in September and October.

So I will be at WordCamp US 17th through the 20th of September.

Alex and– let’s see, Alex and Chaya– and Chaya. –are going to be going to the Global Search Awards, where we’ve been shortlisted for SEO tools of all different kinds of categories.

Kimberly will be at RIMC in Iceland, which sounds super fun.

I’ve never been to Reykjavik, but I’ve seen pictures, and it looks awesome.

Amazing.

It is amazing.

And then in Brighton, I’ll be there.

I’ll be talking there.

This is BrightonSEO in Brighton in the UK, not in San Diego in the US.

But yeah, beginning of October, we’ll be there.

We’ll be sponsoring.

We’ve got a stand and everything.

So please do find us if you’re in Brighton.

And then a couple of weeks later, you’re iat PubCon in Vegas.

I’m in Las Vegas.

I’m speaking at PubCon.

So I will for sure be there.

And I will be giving at least one talk.

I think they told me probably two.

And I will be happy to chat with anyone who is interested.

Plus, I’ll probably have a lot of swag with me.

So if you want a sticker or some other goodies, come find me.

All right.

So the next SEO update is not going to be until Tuesday, October 1, because the end of September, which is when we would normally have the next one, Alex and I will be at SEO Oktoberfest, and we will be unable to broadcast.

So we’re pushing it back into October, which I know is weird.

We’re probably going to have two in October.

But that just means you get twice Carolyn and Alex for the price of one.

It’s what you want, really, isn’t it?

Absolutely.

All right.

Let us get to the Q&A.

Yes, there are a lot of questions and only so little time.

So let’s dive in.

We have one question that’s definitely upvoted a lot.

That’s from Abigail.

How important are backlinks nowadays, and what advice do you have on them?

They’re very important.

And they’re probably more important than everyone was pretending they were, especially now that– you remember the Google leak that we talked about the last couple of times.

So we know that they’re tracking those things.

We know that they’re looking at them.

And we know that site authority is a thing.

It’s a score.

And it’s directly affected by your backlink profile.

So backlinks are important.

And to get good backlinks, yeah, you need to have good content.

You need content that’s worthy of being cited.

And you should try to get people to link back to your site that are relevant, contextually relevant to your topic.

So if you’re a local store, you would want other local places to link to you.

If you’re an ecommerce shop that you have a local service area, sign up for the Chamber of Commerce.

They’ll link back to you.

Sponsor a little league team.

Sponsor a bowling team.

See if you can get something in the high school newspaper.

High school newspapers fall over themselves for advertisers.

And it’s cheap.

For press releases, for news that’s related to the community, reach out and see what you can do to get those links, because they are very important.

Yeah, I would double down and say they’re even more important than they probably were a few years ago when people were saying it was the most important thing.

If I go back to my– if a tree falls in the woods, does anyone hear it?

And I was saying, I’m telling Google that the tree’s over there.

In that scenario, I’m the link.

Without that link, no one’s going to know that there’s even a tree there, let alone that it fell down.

All right.

And make sure you link to your site from your– make a LinkedIn profile.

Make an X profile.

Make profiles on the socials and link back to your site.

If for nothing else, no one else can grab your name.

But do make sure that you’re– link liberally and link often back to your site from wherever and whenever.

All right.

And before you swap to the next one, or as you’re swapping to the next one, Thomas, it doesn’t make sense to disavow backlinks that are spammy anymore, because you don’t need to anymore, because the systems are getting that sophisticated, that disavows aren’t really a thing.

Even John Mueller says, don’t do it.

All right.

Let’s move to the next one, since we still have a couple of minutes left.

Can the end of continuous scroll jeopardize the ranking of websites that are not on first page and could be found otherwise?

What do you suggest that content creators can do to adapt to this new or old scenario?

I get what you mean.

You were not on page one before, you’re not on page one now.

Yeah.

Well, the theory is if it’s continuous scroll, you’re always on page one.

But you’re not.

You still have to be scrolling further and further.

If you’re on page five, you’re not on page one.

I have to do that on page one to get to you, not that.

So ignore the infinite scroll now taking away some visibility from you, because it psychologically wasn’t there in the first place.

If someone was willing to sit there and scroll for 10 minutes on the same page to see what else is there, they’ll keep clicking through.

So I think any anticipated loss is going to be negligible, if any.

Okay.

So the next question is from Brooke, and she asks, would zero-click search be most likely a reason for steady traffic decline just happening this year?

It could be if you had a relatively well-ranking keyword phrase that was driving traffic.

It could also be a general decline in rankings from the helpful content update, which I think is what most people got hit with.

I would say identify why your rankings have been declining by seeing what keywords are not driving as much traffic as they used to.

And you can probably find– if you don’t have Semrush, you can probably back into that information in Google Search Console.

Okay.

I see nothing from Alex, so nothing to add here.

Nothing to add there.

All right.

Our next question is from Ethan, and he asks, our team doesn’t use Cloudflare for site protection, but we use Wordfence.

The issue that we run into with Wordfence is that it generates hundreds of non-indexable URLs, and Google Search Console is not happy with this.

We have found ways to reduce the non-indexable link log, but would love to see it as zero.

Have you experienced this before?

Well, Carolyn, as you’re a Wordfence user– I don’t know that I’ve seen this before.

I would have to try to reproduce the problem to tell you how to fix it, but I feel like it’s fixable.

So maybe that’s something I’ll investigate for a blog post.

But it’s not something that I can answer off the top of my head, but it seems like something that there would be a solution to, because it would be a problem for a lot of people, not just you.

Yeah.

Cloudflare may know that.

Cloudflare themselves may have some– they may be– because it’s quite not complex.

There’s a lot going on inside Cloudflare, and there may be some setting.

They don’t use Cloudflare, though.

Oh, they don’t use– oh, they use Wordfence.

Sorry.

Yeah, there may be something– well, Wordfans is also quite complex as well.

There’s lots and lots of settings, and you may have something that you think is doing something right, and it’s actually conflicting with something else, that kind of thing.

So Wordfence may be able to help you there specifically.

Yeah, and I also see that there’s a comment from Jeroen, that might help as well.

So go to check that out.

All right, I see we’re almost at the end of our webinar.

So let’s do one last question.

Oh, I see we actually have one that’s voted most.

Totally agree on the continuous scroll on sites that are more hassle than benefits, but what do you recommend for allowing proper crawling and indexing on paginated category/PLPs?

Good schema, paginated schema, that kind of thing to do it.

I mean, I’m maybe old school and an SEO in that I don’t like continuous scroll on sites.

For reasons you said before, Carolyn, but also as a techie, I like to know that there is a next page, next page, last page, and everything’s paginated.

That’s the way it’s done, and it can still be done from a development point of view, that you can still tell search engines that, that’s happening, while still offering the user infinite scroll.

Okay.

If you have paginated category pages, I do not canonical subsequent pages back to page one, because that causes everything that gets pushed onto page two or lower to no longer be seen as continuing to exist by Google.

So on news sites, especially, where you get tons and tons of content, anything that gets pushed off onto page two when page two is canonical back to the top basically disappears and really starts decaying in the rankings quicker than they would otherwise.

I just make sure that those paginated URLs are unique and that you’ve got some unique content on it, and I let it crawl.

It does take some discipline to make sure that you don’t have stories, identical stories, appearing in too many multiple categories.

Like if you have the same five articles are all in category A and category B, then category A’s aggregation page and category B’s aggregation page are going to be identical.

So that takes some discipline on your part.

But from a technical programming point of view, I let the search engines crawl everything.

So this was such an extensive answer.

I think this almost might be a new blog post for you, Carolyn.

So as we’re at the end of our webinar right now, the only thing that I really want to do is thank you, Alex.

Thank you, Carolyn.

But also thanks, everyone that attended for your great questions, the interaction in the chat.

And of course, make sure to sign up for our next SEO update.

You can see the link here below.

It’s a little while, but we’ll have enough news by then, I think, that we can cover almost two hours.

So I hope to see you all there, and see you next time.

Thanks.

Thanks, all.

So let’s get this show on the road.

For today we have our amazing Carolyn Shelby, who is a principal SEO at Yoast, and she will be presenting the news together with Alex Moss, our other amazing principal SEO at Yoast.

And now I’m going to quickly leave the stage and invite the two of them to share their screen so that we can do a full restart of the webinar, because we were on our way, you just didn’t see it before.

Cool, thanks Taco.

Ready Carolyn?

I am, I didn’t realize that it stopped sharing, so we should be good to go now.

All right, I’m going to go quickly because we have 13 minutes to make up, so this is like a flight, we’re going to punch it a little.

We’re going to discuss the usual.

You’ve heard this before, but it’s SEO news, AI news, WordPress news, Yoast news, and then we’ll have time for Q&A if we can get this done fast enough.

As always, there will be a recording available afterwards.

If you have questions, on the right there is a section for Q&A, please put your questions there.

And friends, if you see questions you like, upvote them so that we answer them.

If you need to learn more about today’s topics, we will have a list of all of the links we use to generate this deck at yoa.st/update-june-2024, and that’s where you will also be able to find the recording afterwards if for some reason you do not receive the link via email.

If you find that you need some basics or some fundamentals, feel free to join our How to Start with SEO Bi-Weekly Webinars.

The next one is July 1st, starts at 4 p.m.

Central European Time or 10 a.m.

Eastern American Time.

Now, let’s get going.

All right, after our last presentation, let’s see, Search Engine Roundtable released a collection of embarrassing Google AI overviews.

If you recall from last time, we talked about how the AI overview rollout was not going well.

AI was telling people to do unhealthy things, put glue on their pizza, drink urine to get rid of kidney stones, all kinds of weird things.

So much so that there was backlash and everyone was mocking Google and Google was on an apology towards sort of reassure investors that, you know, the world wasn’t ending.

But then the leaks happened.

So let’s chronologically visit what’s happened since we last spoke.

Directory of embarrassing Google AI overviews.

Have you looked at these?

I have looked at some of them.

They were laughable.

But that was me on a maybe more skilled professional level.

Like, how are these results even coming out?

Then I think about, you know, my mom who knows nothing about technology and may ask Google a question and take the answer as gospel.

Right.

And, you know, when you want to drink your own, when it says drink your own urine, do X, Y or Z or, you know, all of these health hazards can actually become a problem.

Right.

I think for the medical things, I sincerely hope that most people would look at the drink the urine thing and go, you know, I feel like that’s maybe not accurate.

What is more concerning, though, is that it’s getting it’s getting sentiment and information from all over the place, including from places like Reddit.

And it will repeat narratives if it doesn’t have a counter narrative to to add into its calculations.

It will repeat the narrative that it finds as though it is fact.

And those things for brands in particular, I would be concerned about.

That being said, I know that we’re going to mention some other slides where there’s news reports about Google scaling back how much the AI is showing up and making improvements to it.

So I don’t know that we need to spend a ton of time on this in particular.

But if the audience would be interested in perusing the directory of hilarious mistakes, we will provide a link for you later so that you can go find that.

And I’m sorry, Alex, I’m not trying to rush you, but we got to rush.

No, no, we got to rush.

I mean, it’s a lot happening in AI, isn’t that?

Well, yeah.

So on the 27th then, because there was this backlash, Google updated their documents with how you can show web only results if you do not want to see the AI overviews.

The thing I find strange about this is if you don’t want to look at that AI overview, you can just scroll past it.

But apparently we need to add some buttons because that’s what Google does.

So if you go all the way over to the more option, you can select web and it will just show you the regular web results and you can filter those out.

And then if you have problems with the AI overviews, like, you know, it just advised me to do something dangerous or I completely disagree with the narrative that you’re presenting as fact.

How dare you?

You can go click on that, learn more, and it will let you give the appropriate feedback that they may or may not take into consideration.

But at least you’ve done your due diligence and you’ve complained.

Look how easy it is to navigate there.

It’s like saying if you read if you read clause 27 B subsection one, appendix 78, you will find this really, really important life changing term that’s really important.

But we put it in the back end of some notebook that’s in an archive in Minneapolis somewhere and you can only access it by pigeon.

And it’s just it’s going to go even worse.

Right.

Yeah, I still think that if you’re if you don’t want to see the what the AI overviews you can just scroll past them just like if you don’t want to if you don’t want someone to listen to someone on YouTube, like don’t listen to them on YouTube.

It’s if you don’t like somebody on the radio, turn the radio off.

Exactly.

But here we have it.

There was a programmer who needed something to do and now we have this wonderful new feature to skip that.

So after that, like immediately after that happened on also on the 27th coincidentally, the Google search internal engineering documentation was leaked and this is this was a very big deal for a few weeks and now it’s kind of not a big deal anymore.

I think because people have sort of figured out that it’s not it’s not the recipe.

It’s the ingredients for the recipe, but it’s not the recipe.

Exactly.

There’s nothing in this document that is telling you exactly what proportions or which ingredients are included.

So it’s just kind of an inventory of everything that’s in Google’s pantry.

It’s it’s things that they’re keeping on hand in case they want to add that into the recipe, but it doesn’t actually give you the recipe.

We don’t know how much of the click data they’re using.

We don’t know how much we don’t know how much of what they add into the recipe, but that doesn’t mean that at some point they’re not going to use this thing over here or this thing over here.

So it’s interesting, especially from someone who analyzes the algorithm to see what kinds of things they’re tracking.

The thing that I found the most interesting is they are absolutely definitely keeping track of things associated with your domain forever.

So there is really a permanent record.

If you’re American and you went to grade school here, then you would be familiar with the permanent school record.

So if you if you eat glue in kindergarten, it may haunt you in fifth grade kind of thing.

But that again that also implies that maybe there’s a there was a law back then that got you something on your permanent record that isn’t important today, like it was 20 years ago.

Do you know what I mean?

Well, like bad links.

Remember, it was a thing where people would go and you’d spam comment forums or comment spam in the forums and things like that.

And you would build all of these really gross links.

And then all of a sudden, those links were bad, even though for a long time those links were fine.

So they know that you did that in the past, whether or not it haunts you in the future, I guess is an entirely different story.

Yeah, felt like it was like smoking in the 60s.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, you knew it was bad for you, but people still did it.

Some people ignored the fact that it was unhealthy because they were addicted to it, you know, and didn’t think it was bad practice.

There was a point in time when they thought smoking was healthy though, and those people still got sick.

So even if something was healthy at one point, it could become bad for you later.

And conversely, just because something was considered bad for you in the beginning doesn’t mean it’s going to become good for you later.

It’s interesting to see, I think if you’re interested in reading all of this, what bits of data they’re collecting, and then just keep that in mind.

Don’t cut corners because if you cut corners, you might accidentally be not optimizing something that does turn out to be important later.

I guess is the gist of it.

So Google first immediately after that, sorry, said that they weren’t going to comment on the potentially damaging leak of this massive in program information.

However, Google then two days later said they are going to validate the leak and they’re going to answer questions about it.

So this was a quickly evolving situation.

Yeah, and it was very interesting to see what was what people how people different SEOs reacted to the leak itself.

There were some people who went straight on the well, I’m now going to concentrate on this because the leak implies x, y and z.

And other people have gone, well, doesn’t change anything really kind of a is validated some new, it’s be kind of validated conspiracy theories that may have been there that were denied or even rebuked by Google.

I think that’s what concerned other people right is that Google said one thing, and actually something else happened.

If you go back to your pantry, and you’re, I don’t know, let’s call it Big Mac sauce or something.

You don’t know if vinegar is in there, you know that vinegar is in the pantry, but you don’t know if vinegar is actually being used in the sauce, right?

It doesn’t mean that it is means that it’s there.

And whether they want to use it, like you say with the permanent record, maybe in 10 years time vinegar, all of a sudden becomes a more important part of the recipe because different the different palette that people have on their search experience changes.

And I think when people got upset and said, Oh, this confirms Google’s been lying to us because they are using click data and they said that they weren’t using click data in the in the ranking algorithm.

We don’t know, like vinegar, vinegar is used to make mayonnaise right maybe the recipe calls for mayonnaise.

Answering the question is vinegar in the recipe with no is not inaccurate, because they didn’t ask you, do you use vinegar to make any of the ingredients that are used in the recipe.

So, I don’t think technically Google ever lied to us I think they’ve always been very careful about how they answer questions.

And naturally, they don’t want to tell you exactly what the algorithm is because people will game it.

And this is why we can’t have nice things.

But it’s, yeah, I don’t, I don’t think this was the, the terraforming earth reforming thing that people all thought it was going to be.

And then recently after that, Google announced that the AI overviews that everyone was very upset about prior to the leak are in fact here to stay but there were going to be some improvements and they even named it after an SEO named Lily Ray, who’s been doing a lot of work researching the overviews tracking sites that were being abused using it or being or being wronged by the AI overviews and then referring those things to Google so Google could investigate.

So it’s really it’s kind of cool to see that they are in fact listening to people and and taking outside feedback and information using that to make decisions.

Yeah.

And then the next slide was quite cool observation from Mark Williams-Cook, a fellow SEO, who actually noticed inside the documentation itself, which was created by Dixon Jones he made it so to answer the question Laurie, I don’t have the link on me but I’ll make sure it’s in the replay thing in the email of Dixon Jones is searchable documentation, but in here anyway.

There’s actually an attribute called tweeted by Lily Ray.

So, she’s named in here, which I think says a lot about her in terms of influence, where actually indicates if she’s pulled something out as negative or incorrect to actually forward it to spam brain for further scoring and analysis.

Now I thought it was good because Lily Ray is, she does remind me of a good Samaritan, and I know that she’s been getting a lot of heat from some, some followers and SEO fellow fellows out there but I agree with what she’s doing, you know she’s just pulling out abuse and closing the gap.

And the only heat that she may be getting off people is they realizing that that job of, let’s face it black hat SEO and bad results.

They’re doing it on purpose they know they’re doing it and they’re actively doing it and she’s calling them out.

Yeah, it’s kind of hard to be like how dare you expose me for beating my wife, you know.

But yeah no she’s a she’s a good egg, and it’s proven and stuff that she does to the point that it’s something to consider by the platform itself.

Yeah, so congratulations to Lily, this is awesome bragging rights for her.

Moving on news that is not AI related and Google leak related thankfully on June 3, which was my birthday by the way, mobile first indexing transition was announced that it would be fully complete as of July 5 so starting on July 5 all websites are only going to be crawled with the Googlebot smartphone crawler, which completes their transition to the mobile first index.

Realistically your takeaway from this is.

Oh gee that’s interesting, because honestly when was the last time you encountered a website that didn’t work on mobile.

I don’t know I’m sure there’s maybe a handful out there.

I mean I also think on a global level there are like countries that aren’t as technologically developed things like that, that may find it harder.

And we were trying to find a good mobile tester, they, they deprecate Google deprecated the mobile validator and it’s, I would say now if you want to check, pick up your phone and go on the website and see if it’s mobile-friendly.

Also make sure that it’s crawled by Google mobile bot, which you can do through search console, you can check through PageSpeed Insights as well usual performance thing and looking in the bigger details there.

And of course looking you Core Web Vital reports stuff in Search Console that will show you a poor mobile experience, that’s more on performance base rather than friendliness and crawlability.

I think from a WordPress point of view, the biggest risk you’re going to run with mobile indexing is that for some reason your theme has a bunch of different templates for menus that work either on desktop or just on mobile.

And maybe you forgot to fill in a menu that shows up on mobile.

So if you go to your website on your phone, and the menu doesn’t contain all the links that you expected to contain, or it doesn’t contain any links at all, God forbid, then you do have a problem and that is going to impact Google’s ability to crawl your site, because if those links don’t exist on the mobile version of your site, then they do not exist, period.

So maybe, you know, maybe it is a good idea just, just for the sake of peace of mind, open up your phone, go to the website, just make sure you can crawl around it as you expect you would be able to.

And that should pretty much reassure you that you’re going to be okay when this fully closes up on on July 5.

Yeah, plus another point to the audience if you haven’t got a mobile friendly site now, get one, you know, they’re not it’s not a huge cost unless of course you some massive legacy enterprise company but that point I would suggest that you have moved from mobile friendly site by now.

And if not, and the boss doesn’t want it leave that team.

So moving on.

Google’s issued a statement about click through rate which is what CTR is and the Helpful Content Update which is HCU.

They clarified that rankings aren’t based solely on clicks or user reactions which I think is kind of a tie in to the Google leak where everyone was all of a sudden, oh, they’re tracking this it must all be related.

So, again, just because they track it doesn’t mean that rankings are based just on that or even largely on that it just means that they’re tracking it.

I thought the users voting with their feet comment related to AI Overviews though was interesting users voting with their feet means that if you don’t like it, you’ll just leave and use a different product.

And I find it intellectually dishonest to be to be perfectly frank that they would say that because Google, Google knows their products are so enmeshed with everything we do we can’t just stop using Google.

Most users the vast majority users are not just going to uninstall Google from their phone.

They’re not going to change the default route or the default search engine from their from their client, they’re not going to stop using Chrome, like you can’t just turn it off.

It’s not that easy and I think to to rely on users leaving as an indication that it’s not good is is willful blindness.

Yeah, that’s true.

I was we were also discussing about CTR even as any part of a signal and the meta description, which is famously not a ranking factor.

But if, but if it’s there to improve CTR, if you’re on the SERP and CTR can be a consideration, then one could say that indirectly meta descriptions are something that would go into a ranking consideration, right.

I’m going to use the word consideration widely because of the signal system thing.

But it’s still interesting to know that they do think about a lot.

It’s just how much they think how much they weigh, how much they take weight on each of these variables, which we don’t know on the leaks.

So it’s still interesting to see.

But I guess the message for everyone here would be make sure that you’re not just automating things too much and make sure that even though meta descriptions aren’t a ranking factor, kind of act like they are for the user.

They are your shop window.

That’s your opportunity to get to win that click.

It’s a little free advertisement.

Make it enticing and write for the user.

Be helpful.

Generating content for SEO is not why.

No, you don’t just generate content to attract the search engines you generate helpful content that’s going to benefit someone, because if it doesn’t benefit anyone, what is the point of it existing.

Exactly.

Yeah, what else has happened the next day.

Yes, I’ll take this Google structured data update may boost merchant sales.

So, from a technical point of view, what Google have done is they’ve said that a shop owner can have an organization wide return policy.

So let’s say all of your products have a 28 day return policy.

Now, what they’ve done is they’ve said well you don’t need to say that on the page of every single product inside the structured data, what we’re going to do is we’re going to let you only mention it once on the homepage, and that will that will take effect for your whole website.

And that means that it will save space on source code, essentially it’s good for the environment, I would say, in saving bytes, which may not seem like a lot but when you add that to every single product that’s being sold at every given time.

That’s a lot of bytes that are being generated.

Furthermore, there was a conversation between me and a few other structured data nerds on Twitter, including Jarno and Ryan from Shopify and someone else I forget.

And we were asking questions about well actually what if you’re, you’re a shop that’s got 28 day returns policy but actually these three products have a 60 day return policy and Google actually about 10 days later, reaffirmed some of the text around that so ensure if those three products do have 60 day returns policies that you can override it on the product level.

So, that’s interesting to know that they’re doing that.

As far as Yoast is concerned.

One thing to know is that even though it’s, it’s they’ve only just added this support now and it’s not in our products yet, it will be, but also know that that doesn’t, the fact that it’s not in today doesn’t mean that nothing is working, it just means that the version one is running and this is version two, which is more optimized and will be in wherever it needs to be soon.

Well I think it’s great that they’re taking that feedback and I also think it’s great that they’re trying to be, you know, sustainable and environmentally friendly because I, I think we all appreciate that.

Yeah.

The other thing Google’s done that’s, you know, attempting to be helpful to everyone is they’re saying now that you can recover from that Helpful Content Update damage, which, to be fair, there were some websites that were severely damaged by that.

Hopefully, with the next core update.

The important thing to know here though is they said, if the sites that were damaged make sufficient improvements.

So, if you’re just sitting on your hands waiting for Google to magically come back and restore your, your traffic I don’t think you’re going to find much satisfaction with the next core update.

But if you’ve been doing the work, you may be rewarded, but there’s no guarantees.

Maybe I feel like it’s that you know, ten loose variations of a word, we may be able to think about possibly considering potentially giving you a little bit of authority back like it’s, it’s like a promise within a promise within a promise it’s like a Chinese whisper promise right.

They actually went to training once where they told us that if you stack your qualifiers.

The only qualifier that the people remember is the one immediately preceding the promise.

But for legal reasons, all the other qualifiers get you off the hook so you can say, 30% of the time this works 100% of the time.

And they’ll remember 100% of the time but you’ve told them that it only works 30% of the time.

I love that.

I love it.

But it’s the first time they’ve used the term HCU and recovery in the same sentence.

And that’s promising.

I mean they’re addressing it and they know that they know that there were some sites that were just devastated by this so hopefully, hopefully those sites that suffered the problems have been addressing the situation, and will be restored soon.

I see people in the audience so like their sites have been decimated I’m going to assume that maybe HCU related so hopefully that might be a little bit of solace for you guys, and less of a headache for Barry Adams, I can see his sanity is being lost by the updates as well.

Google’s also answered some, this seems to me to be kind of a low level question but they felt compelled to make a comment on it.

On June 14th, Google announced that the H1s and title tags don’t need to necessarily match but you should do whatever makes sense from a user’s perspective, which I totally agree with.

Avoid boilerplate text in your title elements, I think that’s that’s fair to you and you know those new AI features that we have in our product can help you avoid the repeaty, everything looks the same except this one particular keyword is different kind of situations, that’s helpful.

I would personally note that on new sites, you are supposed to have the H1 and the title tag match but the vast majority of people don’t have to worry about that so it is interesting that they felt compelled to talk about it.

Alright, a week later.

This is something you might want to cover.

Yeah, so structured data can be output in various different ways.

JavaScript is one way.

However, Google’s now telling you not to in an ideal world and just give out JSON-LD and in code in the HTML source itself, the flat code.

That’s something that I would have always said is best practice, regardless of what Google would have said, and regardless of whether I was working in Yoast.

One thing to know is that there is no JavaScript in any of Yoast’s schema output at all so already best practice there so thumbs up.

There’s additional work to do for the same results.

So basically the takeaway here is if you know you’re using a plugin on your site that injects JavaScript or inject schema anytime the word injected is used.

I’m going to go with they’re doing it with JavaScript on the client side rather than on the server side.

If you know if any of those words mean things to you, you probably want to go check on that.

But if those words mean nothing to you.

I would wager you don’t have anything like that installed and this probably isn’t a concern for you.

Yeah.

In other news, do you want to do the rundown.

Yeah, I would love to do that.

Also, Kevin Indig, he wrote a David versus Goliath part two, how algorithm updates have become the biggest risk in SEO.

Well, every update I would say is a risk to some SEO that’s not doing the best of jobs.

So I would love to do that.

Product variant markup now generates rich results.

That’s good to know.

Jarno who’s one of the schema structured data nerds who I mentioned earlier is like king nerd I would say.

Not what I wouldn’t even describe as nerd.

He’s king in schema, he just knows all.

So do read that if product variants are of interest to you.

So that’s a bunch of stuff.

Another couple of things about schema and why it’s more important to use those things but we’re already doing best practice in the product.

And lastly, five days ago, Google started doing an updated spam update in their algorithm.

It says it rolls out up to a week, but it hasn’t finished yet and we’re five days in.

So there’s still a couple of days for that to complete.

There hasn’t been too many reports on the changes about them though.

We haven’t really done anything so hopefully this wasn’t too big of a disruption in the force.

Let’s move on to AI news because I know we want to still have time for questions and we’re getting low on time.

Aleyda Solis offered up a method for tracking AI Overviews and the traffic impact.

There’s some tools available.

I looked at the tools, they’re a little manual in terms of there’s a lot of manual labor involved in doing this.

None of this is really automatic yet, but also AI Overviews haven’t rolled out everywhere.

So I think if you’re in the US, you like spreadsheets and you’re interested in tracking AI Overviews because you’re worried about them, this would be something reasonable for you to go read.

If you’re only interested in AI Overviews for the lullz and the popcorn right now, then just stay tuned.

Once this is fully baked and fully deployed, there will be tools to track it.

I don’t see how the internet could function if we don’t have a means of tracking this.

I just don’t think we’re there yet.

So if you’re interested in this, then please go ahead and check the topics and sources.

There’s a link to it.

If you’re not interested, then stay tuned and we’ll move to other things that do interest you.

Have you been seeing AI Overviews in England yet?

No, not me personally.

I do know that Gemini as an app can now be downloaded on my Android phone.

That happened while I was on holiday, which was around your birthday because mine was about three days before that.

So I remember being out of the country and I couldn’t download it on my phone when I was out of the country.

But then as soon as I came back in the country I could.

I’ve used it a little bit, but it’s nothing like AI Overviews on the SERPs that I’ve not been getting at all on desktop.

So in the US, at least, Google AI Overviews are now only showing for about 15% of the queries instead of 84.

We think this is a result of the fact that they were saying some strange things.

So it seems like they’re ratcheting it back to safer categories, safer terms.

We do know that they are showing for a lot of healthcare queries though.

So if you say, you know, I have the sniffles and I have a fever and my throat itches, what’s wrong with me?

It will attempt to answer it.

Whether or not it advises you to drink urine, I can’t promise.

But we do know that Google is clearly making adjustments and continuing to refine the process as it’s moving, as the train’s in motion.

And I don’t think they’re going to completely roll it back.

They’ve also issued a stance on AI translations and content drafting tools.

And I think this is actually useful for our customers in particular.

Did you, have you read this article?

Not in full, no.

However, I looked at these bullet points and I thought, well, this is not obvious stuff, but this is stuff that I would want to do as an SEO anyway.

Right.

I mean, I would assume without even clicking into it, I could tell the crux of the story would be don’t copy paste and then publish.

Do something about it.

Make sure you’re moderating and approving it, which I would have done AI or non AI.

Right.

I would have, unless I was speaking to, unless I was using a human translator whose native tongue is that language and is also fluent in English, that I can completely trust that person’s work.

I think there would be a scenario where I would just copy and paste anything.

Unless, of course, I was thinking about the search engine, which you’re not supposed to do.

So, again, hence why this should be common practice anyway, or best practice.

Yeah, AI is good, but AI might miss nuances or colloquialisms.

There’s always going to be, I think, it’s going to be difficult for AI to catch all of the nuances that native speakers would have when they say things.

Even between American and British, I know that there’s phrases that you guys use that sound wrong to my ear, like up and down the country.

When you’re describing something that’s happening all over the country, you’ll say up and down the country.

We don’t say up and down the country in the US because we’re wider than we are tall.

So we say, you know, coast to coast or all across the country.

We never speak vertically because mostly we don’t care about Canada.

I’m kidding.

Canadians, I’m kidding.

It was a joke.

In my head, I was wondering what a country that’s like a 45 degree line angle would say.

Up and down to the right.

Yeah, that’s a weird one.

I don’t know how they’d handle that.

But the point is there’s little things like that that I don’t know that a translator would catch because it would translate it.

Those are words.

Those are words and it’s logical to use those words in that order.

It’s just not logical to use those words in that order if you’re speaking to an American audience.

Yeah.

Cool.

So we’ve got some cool stuff there.

This one is fun because it has a bad word in it.

I don’t know if we’re supposed to say bad words.

I don’t know if we are allowed to say perplexity is a bullshit machine.

But you just did so it’s okay.

If I can say the title, why not?

But this this kind of article would say so.

Let’s let’s explain why.

Perplexity is an AI and it is according to Wired, crawling and including sites that explicitly have said that they do not want to be crawled and included in AI LLMs or used to train your AI.

And Wired has evidence and I think it’s fairly strong evidence that they have in fact been crawled and it is being used and they’re mad about it.

So this is this is interesting for a number of reasons.

Reason number one is if I were a lawyer, I think I could make the argument that you can’t really prove that we crawled your content and we’re just we’re just spinning your article or rephrasing your article to answer the question because there’s only so many ways you could answer a question.

So think about any question.

There’s only so many ways you can answer it succinctly and accurately and there’s only so many different words that you can use to assemble that sentence.

And there’s a specific order in which that sentence needs to be assembled.

So that narrows down the likelihood that it’s going to be written in the same way that you’ve written yours to you know, odds are pretty high.

That being said, Wired is saying not only did you answer the question the way we answered the question, but you used two of the same words that we used just not next to each other.

And they were specific words disingenuous and I think I forget what the deceptive disingenuous and deceptive were the two words that they used.

There were other words they could have that AI could have used besides disingenuous and deceptive because those words have synonyms and those are not the only slash best words to describe that situation.

Wired has a point.

I think lawyers could make an argument, maybe not successfully, that perplexity did or did not violate these rules.

But a lot of this goes down to it’s not actually illegal to disregard a robots.txt.

Robots.txt is not enshrined in law.

It is a recommendation, it is a request.

It is not.

It’s not a law and it’s not illegal.

So does that mean that everything that we write is available to the AIs?

I think it does.

And I don’t know that there’s anything we can do about that.

Not a law yet.

Maybe there should be a law.

But then who gets to decide that law and it…

In what country and all of that and I don’t know.

I mean you just look at things like consent and the consent polls and stuff and not being out of analytics is just still crazy now years on, right?

Yeah.

But that’s for another day, hey?

We are at 10.

And we only have a couple of slides left before Q&A, which I think we did well on time, didn’t we?

Yeah.

So let’s go through this one kind of quick.

This is WordPress news.

So there was a test.

Core Web Vitals were checked.

The TLDR is that everybody declined in performance except for Duda.

And of the decliners, WordPress declined the least.

So of the losers, I don’t know if losers is a bad word, WordPress was the winner of the losers.

The winner of the losers bracket.

Is that a soccer thing?

Yeah.

I mean, I can start.

The point is things are getting…

Things are declining.

As things get more complex, they perform slower.

But Duda as a CMS seems to be doing better than the others.

So take that however you like it.

I don’t think this means everyone’s going to be abandoning WordPress and droves.

And actually, where would you go because everyone else did worse.

So, hooray for WordPress.

The next big announcement was Automattic, which is the company that owns WordPress effectively, created WordPress.

It has a new agency program, which is going to help people monetize, especially WordPress development agencies or people that specialize in developing websites.

It’s going to help them monetize WordPress better, which should hopefully help the gospel of WordPress spread throughout the land.

Cool.

And as well as Automattic, I mean, within the same time, we have Bluehost offering the same thing, don’t we?

Bluehost is offering a new agency program also for WordPress agencies.

So if you’re interested in if you are an agency and you’re looking for excuses to promote a specific hosting company, you can check this out and it will tell you all about it.

I think Bluehost had one other thing that they announced.

They did.

They announced an AI WordPress website creator, which I believe is supposed to create a full functioning publishable website in minutes based on answering questions.

So that’s also kind of cool, especially if you’re running an agency and, you know, if you have a fixed project price and you can finish that project in 10 minutes, that dramatically increases your hourly rate when you do the math on that.

So always in favor of that.

You helped them with, was this the one you helped them with or did you help them with the agency offering?

Agency offering stuff.

This website creator, I’ve seen a video demonstration of it, which was pretty cool because I’m quite skeptical on stuff like that in general until I actually see it happening and got to explore the code that it produced.

And it wasn’t not good, which is a good thing.

You had to use the double negative there, right?

But it worked well.

So, yeah.

And that’s all of our WordPress news.

It is.

So we’ve got one announcement for Yoast.

Do you want to take this?

Because I know you were instrumental in the application.

Yes, we have been shortlisted as a finalist in the Global Search Awards of 2024.

Woo, us.

I know.

For the best global search software tool.

So with any luck, we’ll be a winner of that and we’ll let you know in September’s edition about the results.

Or we just if we don’t win, we just won’t share and we’ll forget all about it.

Yeah, we just want to talk about it.

All right.

That’s it.

Yes.

Other than that, I guess it’s the next SEO update, which is on the 30th of July or July 30th, however you want to take that.

And you can sign up with a link that will be sent to you in tomorrow’s digest email.

Yes, or you can click the link below because the green button is now the link to the sign up for the next SEO update.

Amazing.

Amazing.

So we made we kind of made it considering we were 12, 13 minutes behind.

I think we’re doing good.

It depends what the Q&A is like, though.

What do we think?

It’s going to be busy.

We have quite a few questions.

For those who haven’t posted their question yet, you can still do it.

Go over to the Q&A section.

That’s the little speech bubble with the question mark in it on the right side of your screen.

I’m not sure which one’s right because I know this thing is mirrored.

Head over there, upvote your favorite questions and definitely post your own question there if you have one.

The most upvoted question is something that we briefly touched on earlier.

But I think you may have some valuable insights here because James says my traffic has been so low following the Google core updates in the last six to eight months.

How are we supposed to recover from this?

And are there any Yoast unique tips and tricks we can use to help us?

So I would say there’s a couple things.

If you have helpful content and you’re positive that your content is unique and useful to people, if you’re doing everything right and you cannot find anything that you are, any areas in which you are wanting, the problem might be that the links that you had coming into your site that helped create your domain authority, if they got hit and they’re not valuable anymore, that decreases your value.

And that might not be something you can directly control, but you can seek out new linking opportunities to help rebuild that authority.

So if there’s any, I mean, you have to do a very objective evaluation of your own site.

And if you are positive, there’s nothing that you’ve done that is wrong or could be done better.

Then you have to start looking outside of you.

And I think it’s probable that if you look in your backlink profile, some of the sites that were linking to you may have also been hit.

And then that’s going to decrease the value that’s flowing into you.

That would be my guess.

I would also add, whilst you’ve still got time to do comparisons, just quickly go back in Search Console, because they only do comparisons six months to six months.

So knowing that the HCU of last year happened in mid September, you’ve only got up until mid September to compare with the data before you got hit.

So have a look at that.

Even though you have 16 months in total, you can’t have those comparison, handy comparison tables.

So every day that passes, now that data is getting less helpful to you.

And by the time it’s the end of September, it will be of no use.

All right.

And Carolyn, I heard you say find new backlinks.

Does that mean go to a website and buy a bunch of them?

Absolutely not.

That is wrong.

And I would never encourage that because that is wrong.

No, Taco.

No.

I knew the answer.

I just wanted on record for everyone who’s watching.

Yeah, don’t buy any shady links whatsoever.

Especially not one where they’re promising you we can get you a thousand backlinks in a month.

The more they’re promising, the less likely they are to be valuable.

Any backlinks, quality backlinks are hard to acquire.

And anyone that’s promising you a quick fix is trying to sell you a bridge.

All right.

I do like that in the comments, people are fully agreeing with my statement.

No, they’re not.

All right.

So we have Giuseppe who asked something similar.

How much will it take for Google to reevaluate things?

We touched on that before, of course, as well in the next core update because this might be the moment to do this.

No other way to speed this up?

There’s no fast track.

There’s nothing like that.

There’s no queue skipping.

You could try taking out your site map and then resubmitting your site map.

I mean, if you’re desperate and you want to just try something, that is sort of like pushing the elevator button multiple times.

I don’t know that it’s going to make it move any faster, but you might feel better if you do it.

All right.

Maybe placebo effect, but it might feel nice.

On a different topic, we touched on the mobile indexing in one of the articles.

And Brooks asking, so if a link doesn’t exist on mobile, it doesn’t exist to Google.

Does that mean that when we hide things on mobile for UX, like sidebars, it will hurt Google’s understanding of cornerstone content without all the inner linking exposed on mobile?

Yes.

That’s the most concise answer you can get, right?

That was a well-formed question and I can answer it in one word.

Yes, it will hurt.

If you need Google to be aware of those links, they have to be exposed.

All right.

So that means making your mobile pages longer or being smarter about it.

How would you solve it?

Usually in mobile, the menus will come out from the side.

So if you can access the link, if you can make the link visible, then Google can see it.

But if you’ve hidden it such that it is inaccessible and does not physically exist on that mobile page, then that’s bad.

So a lot of the themes I see have like a little hamburger menu, and if you click it, it pops out.

And then all of your links will be there.

So if that’s the case, you’re fine.

But if it literally does not exist, then that’s bad.

All right.

That’s a very clear answer, as was the yes.

All right.

I think we have time for one or two more questions.

Let’s see.

This has been upvoted quite a bit as well.

It’s from Dabney asking, my site’s been around for over 25 years, but our initial descriptions are nondescript.

What do I gain and lose by changing them to more descriptive ones?

Like meta descriptions?

I was going to assume.

So if Dabney, you’re here in the chat still, do clarify.

But we’ll answer as assuming it’s a meta description if you don’t answer.

I would say if they’re not descriptive, make them more descriptive and relevant.

Increase that potential for CTR.

What you lose is a lack of visitors and what you gain is potential increased visitors.

I’m not saying that it’s a ranking factor because, like we said, even in this session, it isn’t.

But CTR is potentially also tracked.

And increasing that will increase visibility, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, the snowball effects of brand authority and domain authority.

I think if you’re going from something that is vague and useless to something that is useless, there is low risk of damaging things.

I mean, I’m not comfortable saying the risk of damage is ever zero, but I would say that the risk of damage is incredibly low.

All right.

Thank you very much for that.

Dabney, if you’re still around and you want to clarify in the chat, please do so.

Then let’s scroll through the question because quite a few popped up and I think we have one interesting one that you might have interesting insights on.

And that’s by Umair.

During a hosting switch, the website address was accidentally changed from using www to without using the www.

This caused all of our internal links to become external links.

We are gradually fixing them back.

But how much will it affect our websites back links and online presence?

So first of all, this should be a quick fix because you can go into the back end in the database and do a global search and replace and fix all of your URLs.

So I hope everything is fixed.

You should have good 301s though in place to catch the non.

Catch the dub.

I’m confused about where you’re at right now.

You should always go back to using www is what Umair said.

OK, just to be on the safe side, make sure that you have 301s in that catch the non dub dub dub traffic and do a 301 rewrite to with the dub dub dub.

And then make sure that all of your internal links are correct.

And like I said, you can do that on the back end with a search and global search and replace in the database itself.

That’s a good answer.

Search and replace.

Make sure a competent dev does search and replace and does it on staging before they publish anything. .htaccess rules.

That would be good.

That catches anything that’s non dub dub dub sends it to dub dub dub.

I think you’re all set after that to be fair.

Sorry, there’s nothing more that you can do after that point.

All right.

Thank you very much for that.

That was the last question for today.

Again, a big thank you to our audience for sticking with us despite the initial problems that we had with the stream.

You’ve been amazing and super supportive.

Carolyn, Alex, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom again.

And I know that you’ll be back next month with more fantastic news from the field of SEO.

Thanks, everyone.

And happy optimizing.

Bye.

Welcome to this month’s SEO update by Yoast.

If you like the tune — and Niels, you’re spoiling it in the chat already — it is available on Spotify.

So go find Yoast SEO, and you can find our song on Spotify since this week.

So that’s quite awesome.

But today, we’re not going to talk about songs.

We’re going to talk about SEO.

And before we do that, there’s a few practical things that you need to know.

Over on the side — I always forget on which side — there’s a chat.

So you can interact with us.

And we always love to hear where you’re coming from.

So please do share, if you’re joining us today, what’s your location?

Because from all over the world, it’s fantastic to have you.

If you have any questions, there’s a Q&A section.

Right there, you can ask your questions.

And the end of this webinar will have a Q&A section.

This will be repeated after.

But most importantly, this whole webinar will be recorded and we’ll share the recording with you after the webinar.

So you don’t have to hurt your hand writing everything down right now.

If you miss something, that’s OK.

The recording will be shared later on.

So you’re probably like, hey, is that guy alone?

Well, no, I’m not.

There are two SEO experts that are going to talk you through all of the news of this month.

So let me introduce them.

But first, hi, my name is Taco and I’ll be your host today.

But before we dive into this month’s news, let me introduce today’s experts.

We start with the ever amazing– and let me move her to the screen– Carolyn.

Carolyn is principal SEO at Yoast.

She has a longstanding background in digital marketing and SEO and has always been focused on news publishing online.

And she is joined today by someone who’s also famous by now from this webinar and probably many other things.

And that’s Alex.

And Alex is a man with many talents.

He’s building a pet brand.

He’s the husband of the owner of a UK-based agency named FireCask.

And most importantly, he’s also principal SEO at Yoast.

And together, they form the dream team that will bring you this month’s SEO news.

So without further ado, please put your hands together for these amazing experts next to me.

Thanks so much for the intro, as always, Taco.

And hello, Carolyn.

How are you?

I’m good.

How are you?

Good, good.

I’m excited to go through this month because we’ve got quite the agenda, haven’t we?

But you know who we are, guys.

I’m Alex.

I’m a principal SEO.

And Carolyn from the US is also a principal SEO.

Indeed.

So now that you know who we are, we should probably get into it because we’ve only got an hour.

And I know you guys have a lot of questions at the end.

And we want to have time for that.

So what are we going to be discussing today?

As per usual, SEO news, AI news, and to be honest, they kind of overlap a lot today.

Little WordPress news, a little bit of Yoast news, and then we’ll do the Q&A.

The recording is always available afterwards.

So if you miss it, if you have to leave, if the dog decides to throw up on the carpet and you have to run away from the computer, you can still watch the replay afterwards.

Don’t forget, there are questions that you can do in the sidebar.

So if you have a question, put it in the Q&A area.

I know we keep saying that, but it’s easier for us to answer questions if you pop it into the Q&A than if you just put it in the chat.

So keep that in mind.

And this is why, because we can upvote them and we can keep track of the questions that are asked.

If you want to learn more about today’s topics, you can go to yoa.st/update-may-2024.

That is where you will see our webinar for today’s link.

And afterwards, that will be where you can find a link to the replay.

If you are new to SEO and you would be interested in joining one of our beginner SEO webinars, they happen every week.

So bi-weekly, the next one is June 6th, and it starts at 10 a.m.

Central European time, which is not 10 a.m. in the U.S. and the math is eluding me at this point.

So I will let you figure out the time zone difference yourself, but again, we do have replays of that.

All right, Alex, are you ready? – I’m ready, I’m ready.

Are you? – Let’s do the SEO news ’cause it was a lot this month.

So after our last update, this was still in April, but we’re gonna count it.

Google’s John Mueller went on websites, there went on.

He was doing a press junket basically, where he was talking about website recovery after the core updates.

He says that Google, okay, it says it confirms.

He’s claiming Google doesn’t hold grudges against sites that were impacted by the update, but he is acknowledging that recovery is not going to be quick.

Recovery is not only not going to be quick, but it is difficult to ascertain exactly what needs to be done.

He says recovery timelines vary, which, I don’t know if you remember the royal debate with recollections may vary, but that sounds like, that sounds like it’s been word-smithed a little.

And significant effects could mean multiple cycles to take into, you know, take effect.

He also said the following day, or two days later, that the helpful content update recoveries could take much longer than others too.

My interpretation of this is that there’s been so many complaints and so much uproar from big companies, and big companies pay Google’s bills ultimately, that they need to go out and calm everyone down.

And this is an attempt to calm people down.

I don’t know that they’re going to roll it back though.

I don’t think they can at this point. – No, I don’t know who it was, if it was John or someone else inside Google who said we are not rolling it back.

And that was a few months ago.

And you know that that isn’t just one person tweeting their personal view.

That tweet will have been checked to make sure that that tweet can be posted by at least 10 people.

So it must be a very conscious decision that it’s, and it’s now in core as well, helpful content’s now in core, which means it’s part of the main secret sauce.

So no, part of it’s like it’s doubling down, but I like it, it varies.

It’s like our version of it depends.

Timelines can vary.

We should start using that now. – Timelines can vary.

That just sounds like an AI, an AI smoothed version of it depends. – Maybe it will. – The other thing I see here is in both articles in different publications, meaning they’re saying this in multiple places, Google is reaffirming it doesn’t hold grudges.

I don’t think Google ever held grudges, but what I think Google does do is, and I don’t know if you guys have this in Europe or in Britain, but we have, when you’re in grade school, the concept of a permanent record.

And in your permanent record, they know everything you’ve ever done from the time you enter school until the time you leave.

And while I don’t think Google holds grudges, I think the things that are in your permanent record color how they treat and evaluate your site later on.

For example, if you are a known paste eater when you are in kindergarten, and then you fail a test when you’re in fifth grade, the teacher’s going to say, well, Johnny did eat a lot of paste in kindergarten, so I’m going to say he just definitely failed that test.

Whereas if you’re little Patty perfect, and you’ve never missed a day of school, you never eat glue, you never beat anybody up on the playground, did anything wrong at all, and you fail a test in fifth grade, the teacher will look back on your glistening record and say, oh my goodness, something must be wrong with Patty.

We need to get her, we need to find out if she’s okay, we need to let her retake that test, we’re going to reevaluate, because clearly something’s amiss.

So while I don’t think they hold grudges, I do think that they evaluate your past actions in light of your current performance.

And if you’re known to be a bad actor, they will come down and you like the fiery fist of God.

And if you’re known to be a generally good player, they’ll say, you know what, maybe this was a glitch, we’re going to come back and reevaluate in a couple days, see if they fix the problem.

One might even reach out to them and say, hey, did you know there’s a problem?

They’ll treat you differently based on your record, which is not the same as holding grudges.

So it’s not that they’re lying here, it’s just that they’re being very semantically careful with how they phrase things. – Yeah, as though it’s more anomalous behavior rather than pattern of behavior. – Yeah, which is why I think maybe, I know we’ll get into this later, I think newspapers in particular are going to have a difficult time with the site reputation situation.

And we can address that when we get to it.

Can you tell me about the structured data stuff? – I can, so Google have been on a mission to update the documentation, they’ve been doing it and each month and we’ve been telling you, I think it started with things like review snippets and FAQ snippets and then they started telling where things would appear in which SERPs and this one is growing the product structured data documentation, not restructuring.

I mean, maybe it technically is restructuring but it’s more elaboration on the same thing.

Whilst once one page is now three pages, they can go more long form and it’s got a bit more information that’s a bit easier for the beginner to understand as well as more useful documentation for developers as well.

What you need to know is you need to do nothing in terms of stuff on your site or there’s no updates of Yoast that’s specific to this.

And it’s all kind of all the rules and documentation are there already and it’s just elaborating on it really.

It’s just filling out their encyclopedia that bit more or maybe it’s making you, hey, look over here, that stuff over there isn’t happening, look at this, we’ve done this documentation, check it out. – I really feel like they’ve got so much dumpster fire happening that they’re telling the other teams, hey, the AI team, they need a little cover, let’s look busy so that we can give the people the old razzle dazzle and distract them a little bit from the flaming pile of poo that is happening over in this corner. – So yeah, that was part of the documentation.

But yeah, this is another– – Speaking of the flaming pile of poo. – Is it a flaming pile of poo?

I mean, it’s still excretion from a human, right?

This story. – Yeah.

So the Google AI now is recommending that you drink urine to pass kidney stones more quickly.

I’m gonna say that that’s questionable medical advice.

This is just a, this is the prime example that’s been making the rounds on acts of the AI giving people really goofy results and how on earth did they think this was ready for prime time? – You see, you do wonder because these aren’t hard tests that are being done, right?

You would have thought there was a bit more testing around it.

I know that it’s being, well, not, it’s not fully rolled out.

So for example, I’m not getting any AI overviews here in the UK, but you are, you’re getting a lot of AI overviews in the US.

And maybe that’s the test to see, you know, here’s one very large country in our primary, you know, business location that maybe we’ll try here and see how it works.

Or someone really, really was adamant inside one of the European headquarters not to roll it out and let maybe the American team take a bit of the fall for what’s happening without them going, “Look, we warned you and we treaded lightly.” – It could be, I don’t know.

There’s a couple of different ways to look at that, but this is definitely, this is definitely a big issue for them.

I half wonder if they’re localizing the pool of data that they’re learning from and reporting from to specific geographical regions.

And the US is just so vast that we have a much larger pool of commentary and data to pull from.

Maybe they can’t differentiate it.

You know, there’s a lot of reasons why they didn’t roll it out everywhere, but this is just, I don’t know if I’d call this teething problems.

This is an algorithm issue that they’re going to have to resolve because this is manipulatable and Google doesn’t like things that can be manipulated. – Yeah, I mean, I’ve also, as we go on to the next story, I’ve added a link to a directory of embarrassing Google AI overview answers where you can see that this isn’t the only problem.

I mean, we laugh about this, but this is actually data ’cause someone will do that, right?

Based on the direct advice of a search results page without doing any further research.

There’s a scenario where that will happen.

And this is not just this one term.

It’s amongst multiple terms, multiple niches and verticals and query bases.

It’s so wide that again, like we say, how is this not red flagged at any point beforehand?

I don’t know. – So here’s a thing that I’ve been kind of researching this week.

If you have a topic that has a lot of data around it, it’s going to be more difficult to influence the AI than if you have a topic that isn’t as broadly discussed.

If you have a topic or a subject that isn’t broadly discussed, but there also isn’t a lot, there isn’t enough data or enough mentions of it out on the internet to contradict a narrative that maybe you don’t like.

I found that if you have a Reddit presence, even if you don’t have a great deal of authority or longevity behind your Reddit account, you can post things on Reddit.

Google will find it and read it pretty quickly.

And if there’s nothing, if there’s no contradicting points or contradicting viewpoints or opinions also in Reddit, it will repeat back what you say pretty much as fact.

So I know people used to do this a lot with Twitter to get things indexed more quickly, but I would say that if you don’t have a brand presence on Reddit, you might want to consider throwing one up there real quick.

And do make sure that you manage it and stay on top of it, because if you can control the narrative there and do it in a non-ham-fisted manner, I would expect to see some positive AI results.

So AI is only bad if it’s saying things that you don’t like. – Yeah, that’s also true.

That is true.

So well, away from AI for one slide at least, Google are actually putting their foot down on other things such as big sites with abuse policy, reputation abuse policy.

You might have a nice insight from your days of news publications. – Yeah, I spent, you know, the better part of a decade at Tribune Publishing and LA Times was one of our papers.

And the way the newspapers make money is they would rent out subdomains of their sites.

So you have latimes.com, but you’d have coupons.latimes.com or directory, which was a business directory that people would sell links in.

And they were, let’s make, I don’t work there anymore.

The company that I worked for that owned them at the time doesn’t exist anymore, so I can say this.

They were absolutely selling links.

They were subdomains that were for thinly veiled affiliate sites that were purporting to be doing reviews.

But again, they were affiliate sites.

So they had affiliate sites, they were selling links on these directories.

They had the coupon sites.

They were selling their reputation because these companies knew that if they came in and they rented a subdomain from a big newspaper, they would have instant authority and instant ranking.

And it was, I don’t know why they’re surprised that this happened.

This was a strategic business decision on the part of these newspapers to continue making money while there was money to be made, nevermind the fact that it was going to come crashing down at some point because they needed to make the money.

And the business model that old school news publications operate on never really made a good transition to the digital world.

And the digital news landscape is not conducive to original old school news business models.

You can’t make money and you can’t sustain your giant newsroom and your giant building and all of your giant expense accounts with what you can do in digital news.

So I don’t feel sorry for them because this has been 10, 15 years in the making.

So they were told, they knew it was coming.

They didn’t care.

They wanted to make the money while there was money to be made.

And now they’re just going to have to figure out what to do. – Well, it’s like the same people who did scaled link building before Panda and Penguin came out.

Don’t complain when you know you’re abusing the algorithm and what it’s looking for.

So it’s also going to be interesting to see what the news niche in general is going to do if it can’t rely on its organic visibility as much and do the things that it’s doing.

It’s gonna be much harder for them, maybe in a good way, you know, it’ll cease bad journalism or not cease.

It will make it much harder for bad journalism to really pull forward into the wider online visibility. – Well, the thing is they were for the most part pretty good about keeping that wall between editorial and, you know, evil capitalism intact.

So they wouldn’t cross pollute the results, especially like in their site maps, but they are losing a significant revenue source by losing out on the ability to rent out these subdomains.

And I think it’s gonna result in layoffs and contracting businesses.

I don’t know how they’re, it could adversely affect journalism because they can’t afford to pay the writers anymore.

You know, this is gonna be big for the news industry and I don’t know that news as we’ve known it for the past, you know, 50 years is going to survive into this new age. – I’m going to be interested to find out what happens in the next year.

But yeah, kind of related to output of what you see in SERPs.

Eric Schmidt came out of nowhere-ish ’cause you don’t really see him much anymore, do you? – No. – And he came out telling us that everything’s kind of gonna be okay.

Yes, things are gonna stop linking to sources, maybe in Gemini and they may still show links in answers, but really, like I just found it is a bit very odd that he’s talking about stuff that’s happening right now when he’s probably not in any of, he’s not inputting at all any of those moments, but. – I think he’s out doing damage controls so that he doesn’t lose money.

I did some checking.

He owns 1% of Alphabet and 1% of $307 billion is a lot.

And I think he doesn’t want his investment and his net worth to get flushed down the toilet.

So I think he’s out doing damage control on behalf of the board. – It’s gonna be interesting to see if he does any more publicity about it, especially, you know, after more recent news, which we’ll touch on later.

Touch on later, there’s still more to come.

So what happened after that two days later?

There was search volatility. – That’s what it looks like.

I haven’t heard anything really about it after that, but there’s been so much happening.

It’s possible that it was still churning, but we’ve all been distracted by all the other nonsense that’s happening.

I mean, it’s not nonsense.

It’s just so much chaos.

And I think it’s easy to kind of forget that there’s ranking changes happening, but the increase in Reddit pages, the thin discussions, it’s all contributing to people’s frustration, which is contributing to big companies winding to Google and pushing back on Google, Google getting spooked about their market share and their stock prices, and then running around doing this apology tour that they’re on. – It does seem like an apology tour because Sundar, the same day, is having an interview with Bloomberg.

And from watching parts of it, I didn’t watch the full thing.

I’ve watched quite a bit of it.

It just seemed, I was saying before, it seemed like it was an interview personification of the GIF or JIF of that dog saying, “Everything’s fine,” with fire around them.

And there are so many concerns, and all they’ve kind of said is, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, we acknowledge that there are issues with essentially that core product for the mass market, but it’s all fine, everything.

We’ll sort it out.

Don’t worry about it.”

But also, if you’re a publisher, maybe worry a bit more. – I just, everything he says, I just wanna respond with, “But you told people to drink pee.”

Everything he says, it’s like, yes, but, you told people to drink urine.

So, I don’t know.

Good luck to him.

I wish him the best on his apology tour.

In other news, speaking of, let’s give them the razzle dazzle and distract them a little bit, they’ve now written AI overviews into their documentation, which in theory means it’s not going away. – Yeah, another bit of documentation that’s been, look over there, look.

We can read about it now, about what’s happening, but it’s interesting that obviously it doesn’t go into, hey, these answers may not be full proof and they’ve been generated by an LLM that doesn’t know enough quite yet.

But here’s the answer anyway.

It’s gonna be interesting to see what they’re actually gonna do in the next couple of months with all of these, the link that I shared before of all the wrong answers and potentially incorrect answers or just stupid information.

But again, it’s here to stay if they’re giving the documentation.

So it’s gonna be, what can they do with it?

They’re gonna have to do another version very, very soon, I think, before people really start to lose confidence in searching with them at all.

‘Cause that can be dangerous if even 0.5% go. – Yeah, how many people are gonna turn it off?

Because they’ve got those new tools that will let you just completely disable the AI overviews so that you never have to look at them.

So I don’t even know if this will be a net gain for Google in terms of the introductions.

Another thing that they’re doing to distract us from the AI debacle is they’ve added two new crawlers, Google Other Image and Google Other Video.

I don’t know if this is going to make a big difference in the lives of particularly Yoast users just because it’s not something you necessarily need to be blocking.

I can see some edge cases where you might wanna block it, but I think this is a, oh, this is cute, yay.

But this is a non-story. – Yeah, I mean, if this wasn’t announced, would anyone have noticed?

If a new robot is created in the forest, does anyone know? – No, no, that is, yeah, this is just, you know, hey, let’s distract them because searchers want to turn off the AI overviews.

People don’t like it, people are complaining.

Tools have been developed to shut the thing off so you don’t have to look at it.

That is a fascinating commentary on the public’s reaction, I think, to this tool that people are so upset about it, they want a tool to shut it off. – Yeah, and usually in previous things that get updated, I’m usually supportive of those changes.

I think the thing that most people can probably relate to is when Facebook updated their whole UX, it like all the did everything about the profile page, the newsfeed, and people are like, how dare they do that?

I’m going to leave Facebook and no one left Facebook and they stayed and everyone got used to it, right?

And I guess that could happen here, but the start is so bad that it’s gonna be really, really hard to win everyone’s trust over when it’s not a human-produced, potentially human-produced answer.

Creating more trust in humans unless in the technology that’s going in the search results. – It was, this has just been so widely panned.

It’s almost people stay with it now to mock it because it’s funny to mock.

They’re deliberately asking it weird questions so that they can get those nice screenshots to share in social media and go viral.

God bless, I hope they figure it out. – Yeah. (laughs) – Back to the, we’re going to distract people from AI.

Google’s now hinting at improving site rankings in the next update.

And I think this kind of ties back to the whole, how long is it going to take to recover from the HCU?

How long is it going to take to recover from the algorithm updates?

Because I don’t, we talked about this earlier.

I don’t, I’ve heard that people have recovered, but I can’t think of a specific example where there’s been a significant recovery, can you? – No, I think there was like whispers of one, but I remember now going in the thread, they never actually shared the URL, which means to me that is it real, you know, because there’s no real data to look at and compare and replicate in another platform like Semrush or anything.

So yeah, and if there’s still only one, that might be for, it may have been a recovery of some other sort that had nothing to do with HCU, that again, none of us have context over.

So at the moment, it does feel like Google is saying, “Look, I know that like we reduced your visibility by 95%, but like wait a little longer, maybe you’ll lose just 90.”

I don’t know, it just doesn’t feel like a great consolation prize to wait longer for another update. – But I have to go out of business for a little bit longer.

We promise something might get better maybe. – Yeah, and when will it happen?

I don’t know, we can’t say. – I mean, the guidance is valuable, the guidance is accurate, demonstrate a genuine commitment to helpful high quality content.

But how do you demonstrate genuine commitment?

That seems a little subjective. – Yeah, just a little.

And with, not just subjective personality and tone of voice, but niche and everything.

There’s too many subjectivity variables to go into it, which is a bigger problem for them to have.

But yeah.

So what’s happened in the last, yeah, we skipped a week because not a lot happened, right?

Everyone was just too busy, making screenshots of bad AI overviews.

And then yesterday, Mike King and Rand Fishkin published together two different posts that compliment each other.

But in short, there’s been the biggest leak outside of the DOJ case, is it, of Google.

And it’s so new that we don’t want to put any bullet points on, because it’s a lot of reading.

While Carolyn continues to talk in a second, I’m going to post them, I’m going to paste the two links, but there’s a lot of reading.

Mike King, his content, I know from his posts as well, are very, very complex and it’s a 40 to 45 minute read.

And there’s a lot to dig in.

And it’s also going to be interesting to see how Google responds to this, because in short, there’s a lot of things that’s implied in these leaks that completely contradict things that spokespeople have said in the past, both far as away as a few years ago, all the way up to slides that we’ve covered in the last, in this, in this Act 1, I think it’s the first couple of slides, that one John Mueller said, have already been contradicted in this leak. – Do you mean that they might not be 100% clear and accurate in their statements to the public? – I don’t know, because up till today, I thought that Google basically told the truth about everything they said, and were very, very transparent with everyone about everything that they do, so. – Did you really? – No, I don’t know, but if I said that, would AI have known that I was sarcastic? – No, because I don’t think AI is very good at picking up on sarcasm. – No, especially when it’s British, right? – Oh, yeah, because nobody can understand when you guys are being sarcastic. – Not even humans have figured that out yet.

But it is, it’s gonna be very, very, I think this is gonna have ripple effects. – Yeah. – It’s definitely the biggest thing I think has happened in several years, and is only making, it makes the last month of the bad PR month that we’ve been describing, that was nothing compared to what they’re about to have to face now, and I would not like to be in the search team today. – Maybe next month we can have a slide on Google’s very, very bad, horrible, awful month. – I know, maybe, I don’t know.

We’ll see what the, and I’m also interested to see who starts taking other search engines more seriously, you know, and giving up Google for Lens or something like that, and just checking, ’cause I know more people are doing that, giving up search engines for ChatGPT, or other chat-based AI platforms, but this is maybe people might have an exodus, knowing that they’ve been telling website owners the incorrect stuff, which means they’re not gonna get support off that lot, and now you’ve got AI overviews, so you’ve not got public support either. – I don’t know, so look at the number, the ratio of young people to old people is shifting in favor of the old people, right?

So the world’s population is just getting older.

Old people are the people that have kept AOL in business, ’cause AOL, FYI, still in business.

My mom still has an AOL email account.

Like, I think it’s really hard to break these patterns and this level of comfort we have with technology, so maybe the kids coming up can get us off of, you know, the Google addiction, and get us onto two different search engines, but I think that’s going to be a slow transition, just giving how entrenched they are with the majority of their user base. – It’s very interesting.

I can’t wait for the next month, and I’m gonna be off for a couple of weeks as well, so I’m gonna have to show– – You’re gonna have to work while you’re on holiday. – I know, I want to though. – All right, well let’s stop talking about AI and start talking about AI. – Yes, pure AI. – On May 2nd, I kept this slide for a reason, so on May 2nd, everyone was hyperventilating because OpenAI and ChatGPT were going to have a big press conference the day before Google I/O, and everyone was like, they are definitely, definitely going to announce a search engine.

They have registered search.ChatGPT or search.openai.com.

It’s active, it’s a thing, it is absolutely happening, and then OpenAI said B-I-N-G, no, and they did not.

So, and I’ve been waiting all week to sing that song.

And also I like Grumpy Cat.

I think that was a huge letdown because everyone was genuinely excited for the, you know, at the idea of a Google killer, you know, OpenAI, they’ve got the Google killer and it’s gonna come out, and then it didn’t, and it was just very, you know, it was depressing.

It really kind of set a down tone for going into Google I/O. – Yeah, it’s, it is interesting, it was also interesting, the, that anticipation, you said people were excited that there was another option.

And I think that’s another thing that Google maybe should be scared about, that there was so much anticipation simply from someone opening up the subdomain search.ChatGPT.com that it created media attention, not just within SEOs and AI people, but actually in the wider, in the wider world, and that excitement, again, that would scare me if I was a Google. – What if that was an accident?

What if that wasn’t even intentional? – Tell me more. – I know, like what if, what if, people create subdomains and like register things all the time.

What if that was just some guy who’s been working on something in the back room and they keep him, you know, his office is behind the boiler in the basement and he’s got his red stapler, and he set that up ’cause it was a project he was working on and no one’s ever gonna find it anyway.

And then, oops, someone found it.

And then it just blew up and got away from him.

I just, it would be funny if, funny and sad and ironic if that’s what ultimately happened. – I would assume that that person now may be working for the marketing team in a higher, in a higher managerial position going, this guy, they know. – This guy knows how to make stuff happen.

So moving on, on May 3rd, this was at Google I/O actually.

So the day after.

Apparently AI answers cost 80% less to generate.

And again, I’m gonna say, who cares?

That’s nice.

I don’t think it really affects anyone. – Yeah, it’s a great CSR post.

The PR firm can dish out.

That’s great. – This is a message to the shareholders.

That’s what this is. – It is. – This is 100% for the shareholders. – And again, the skeptic in me says, wait a minute.

So it was four times as expensive last month.

Why did you do that for this amount of time?

But that’s what happened.

And again, in three months time, they’ll say it’s 80% less again.

And part of us doesn’t really care anymore about the cost of what it costs Google to do these things.

It’s not even correct or perfect anyway. – They’re talking about how much money they’re saving because they can’t talk about how much money they’re making.

And this is a message for the shareholders. – Yeah, yeah.

Interesting how it’s all being pieced together. – In other AI news, Gemini stopped linking to most of their sources.

They used to have inline links.

Now the citations do not have links.

And we’ve got examples here.

So here you can see on the left, the blue links inline with the citations.

On the right, no longer linking to the citations.

I don’t know if this is a good idea for them.

I think maybe it’s not, but I personally use the documentation.

In the SG experience inline on the web browser, they’ll show you websites that they got the information from at the bottom.

So there’ll be like your answer right here.

And then you’ve got little boxes that show the websites where they got the information from.

I use that to kind of judge whether or not this information is likely to be valid.

So if all of the information they’re citing comes from Reddit, I’m gonna go, eh, maybe, maybe not depending.

Like if they said to drink two liters of urine and then said that they got the information from the National Institutes of Health, that might lend some credence to it.

So if they’ve stopped linking to sources, I think that’s a negative user experience. – Yeah, that is the equivalent to me taking away the link and then comparing it to the urine answer is the equivalent of me telling you to drink urine.

And then when you say who said that, that’s that my mate at the pub told me that he’s got a mate who’s a doctor and they said it’s fine.

And there’s no more checks, no more due diligence on that.

But it’s also interesting that none of the other AI-based search platforms are taking links away.

Like you look at perplexity and they actually double down on the source information, which is again, I think something Google should be like learning from, right, but let’s see. – I think, yeah, who knows?

It’s all changing so fast.

There have been some good analysis done of how the SGEs impacting organic search traffic.

And it was, this one was actually divided up by different verticals.

I think Bart Goralewicz wrote this.

So it’s in Search Engine Journal.

We’ll have a link to it if anyone’s interested in reading it.

But it’s looking at the effect on the SGE across organic traffic.

Just looking for triggers and patterns.

It’s showing how different sectors suffer or don’t suffer.

And I think it’s useful to know, especially if you are in one of these affected sectors. – Yeah, I’d also love to see over the next months and years, I’m sure we can talk to Bart about it, is maybe having a timeline of what that figure is in four weeks time, eight weeks time, and see how it goes up and down.

Because some may stay steady, right?

So you look at somewhere like real estate will stay at 82% maybe.

But actually they’ll realize that beauty, they heavy handed 94% and maybe switch that down a bit.

We’ll see what they do.

But it’s very interesting to see how they are attacking, is that the right word?

Attacking different verticals in the SERPs and seeing how they work with it, especially because we know that not all of them are 100% proof correct answers as well. – Well, let’s move on to some WordPress news.

This should go quickly and then hopefully we’ll have extra time for Q&A.

WordPress 6.5 enhances SEO with last mod support.

I don’t think this is a terribly huge deal.

The less modified element in the site maps is not even something that Google says they use anymore.

So yay that they included it, but I don’t know that this is a big deal.

It’s supposed to improve crawl efficiency and Gary said yay and thank them for doing this.

The more exciting news is WordPress turned 21 on May 25th.

I don’t know if anyone noticed, but we should all have some cake to celebrate our favorite CMS. – We should.

I actually had it, it’s my birthday coming up soon.

I actually had a blue and white cake that looked not too dissimilar to that.

I’ll have to share it. – You’ll share it with WordPress?

I don’t know, I’d be worried that they would, you don’t wanna share your birthday with famous people. – No, no, no, but it was on Saturday and it was a pre.

My birthday’s yet to come.

It’s on this Friday, so not yet.

Not official. – Oh yeah, Axel did point out as well.

I was going to say before you turn to the next one that Fabrice at Bing also kind of gave the last mod a thumbs up.

So cheers Axel, very observant. – Well maybe they are gonna start using it again.

That would be interesting to know if they’re adding that back in.

‘Cause I know there was a time when they explicitly said they’re not looking at last mod.

So if that’s coming back, that would be relevant and useful to know. – You know what Axel, we’ll reach out to Fabrice and try and get a comment for next month for you.

So we actually have a definitive answer from the horse’s mouth then. – That would be cool, thank you.

All right, let’s quickly blow through the Yoast news.

Our Yoast SEO for Shopify, the latest update has a brand new dashboard feature.

So if you are a Yoast SEO for Shopify user, there is a pre-made priority list of things that you need to work on for your SEO and you can kind of check through it and make sure that you’ve got all of your bases covered.

If you have not yet updated, please go out and do that and you will see all of these on new updates.

The other thing that there’s not a lot to say about the update, but if you are a Yoast SEO free or Premium or Video SEO plugin user, there was an update that just went out this morning.

So if you have not yet updated, you might wanna log in and run those updates to get the new changes.

Not a ton of new functionality, it’s not a big release, but it did come out today.

So I wanted to make sure I mentioned it.

Our next SEO update is going to be Tuesday, June 25th.

So again, the last Tuesday of the month, Alex and I will be back and so will Taco. – Yeah. – I know we have a lot of questions.

So let us get to the questions. – Yes, let’s go. – Sounds like a plan.

Let me get these out of the way and then your face is a little bigger and then I’m not as relevant, so I’ll be on the side.

Alrighty, so we indeed do have a lot of questions.

If you have a question that you haven’t posted yet to the Q&A section, or if you haven’t upvoted questions because you were paying so much attention to Alex and Carolyn, then now’s the time to do so because we will almost go through them by popular order.

I say almost because I always pick a few that I like best. – I have a question first, Taco.

Are you gonna be at WordCamp Europe?

That’s my question. – Yeah, most definitely, yes.

So there will be a big WordPress event happening in Turin, in Italy, on the 13th, 14th and 15th of June.

So that’s in a few weeks and a large Yoast crew will be there.

So if you want to meet some of us in person, then make sure that you head over to Turin to Turin for WordCamp Europe.

And don’t forget if you’re in the city at that time on June 14th to join our Pride event that we’re organizing that evening.

Enough self-promotion.

Let’s get to some questions.

I think we have a unique situation where we have multiple questions that are uploaded over 10 times. – Yeah. – Steve’s question is the one we’ll be starting with.

While I appreciate you dunking on Google and the gallows humor, thank you.

Really appreciate that as well.

What do you suggest for those of us who depend on Google rankings in our business and have bought Yoast products to help us do SEO well? – Do you want to go with that, Carolyn? – I can.

So the Yoast products help you do SEO in a fundamentally sound manner.

They’re not necessarily going to help you with your off-page SEO.

These are complicated nuanced answers.

It seems that the AI narratives, especially if you don’t like the AI narrative, is influenced strongly by the authority level of the people’s, the authority level of the narratives that Google’s finding.

So if there is no predominant narrative about something on the internet, it’s very easy to influence that by creating a narrative on an authoritative site like Reddit.

So if you had a thing that doesn’t exist anywhere in the universe except a mention on Reddit, that mention will be what the AI repeats back as fact, basically.

If there are a lot of competing, high authority, high EEAT narratives, then Google’s going to start having some trouble determining what’s fact and what’s not, and it isn’t really good yet at offering a statement and then saying that it’s disputed or it’s not factual.

AI likes to present things as though they were fact.

So what can you do about that?

I would make sure that you are paying attention to all of the things that go into making you an authoritative entity.

Do you have a Wikipedia presence, which I understand most people don’t?

If you can get into Wikipedia and become a Wikipedia presence, that is like instant entity status.

If you cannot do that, do other things to make yourself an entity and then constantly reinforce the thing that you are authoritative about, and the plugin will help you do that.

If you have the opportunity to go to the places where the narrative is happening that you don’t like and offer authoritative sounding contradictions to that narrative in the same location, the AI will learn and see that there are conflicting opinions about that, and then at the very least, you’re going to disrupt its ability to present that counter-narrative as fact.

I know this feels like it’s getting very complicated to explain.

The point is, you have to make sure that you are an authoritative entity on the thing that you want to be known for, and that is what’s going to color the AI results. – Yeah, and I’ve pasted in a small link about semantic links and entities from our blog, just in there to help you start out with understanding entity SEO.

There’s also another great post, not on Yoast, but Inlinks by Dixon Jones.

I think I’ve got that here in my, I do, in my clipboard.

Amazing, there it is.

That’s great, more information for you there.

Hopefully that, I’m hoping we answered, Steve.

Although we don’t dunk on Google, it’s very interesting to see that the monopoly is harder for them now.

So it’s interesting that whilst we all think that we’re relying on Google, we’re not just relying on Google, and the things that we do in Yoast SEO are for the greater good of all, search engines and best practice. – I think the reason Google being in what looks like a bit of a panic makes it more interesting and more news is because they haven’t done this before.

And I kind of likened it to the way the royal family used to never complain, never explain.

They’re doing a lot of explaining all of a sudden, and they never used to do that.

And that’s what makes it interesting and newsworthy because it is so different and such a departure from past behaviors. – All right, that’s a very long answer, but also- – It was a complicated question. – Yes, well, the good news is we have more of those.

So the audience is really putting you to the test today.

We have a few more that are in a similar fashion as the one you just answered, but this is quite different from Jania Dal.

They ask, is Google ranking sites with a significant YouTube presence more prominently? – More prominently maybe. – I haven’t noticed that, but I would wager that a significant YouTube presence, depending on your definition of significant, would play into the authority of the entity.

And when the authority of the entity is higher, then that information is going to be trusted more. – And also remember that YouTube’s owned by Google.

It’s another Google-owned platform that they will of course use to their benefit in the same way that even though Reddit isn’t Google, that’s the same way that they’re doing all of that stuff at the moment and clearly giving it more weight.

So if you can produce videos on YouTube and have more presence, do it and connect it as well as you can, of course, using our products and any other structured data that you can that may not be there. – And Google wants to keep it in the family ’cause what are the competitors to Google?

There’s Instagram Reels and that’s owned by Facebook.

There’s TikTok, which is not owned by Google or Facebook.

If it’s a Google-owned property, I feel like they’re going to be slightly biased, maybe not tremendously biased, but at least slightly biased, partially because they have deeper and easier access into all of the metadata and other details of that content that they might not necessarily have access to at Instagram or TikTok where they don’t have a business relationship with those companies. – All right, thank you very much.

So speaking about competition, is Microsoft’s Copilot doing better than the new Google AI, Emily asks? – Depends what better is.

Is that financial?

Is it user experience?

It seems that the answers that are being given out by Copilot are a bit more correlating to the correct answer. – Or maybe just less. – It’s better about not making goofs that are mockable. – I also feel like they’re trying less, but accomplishing more at the same time.

Like Google’s issues that have been happening, I feel like maybe because of a bit too much red tape that they may have under the hood of how it’s looking at information.

And weirdly, Copilot might not be thinking about that as much and therefore giving a wider range of information and learning from it as well.

But yeah, I would personally, my experiences with Copilot have been better than what I’ve seen with Google related products so far. – That being said, if your definition of doing better is taking market share from Google, I don’t know that that’s happening either.

So they might just be stepping back and waiting to see what happens as Google kind of Leroy Jenkins its way into AI.

Let them tank.

And I don’t mean tank in the die kind of way.

I mean tank in the Dungeons and Dragons.

It’s the big guy that can absorb all the damage kind of way.

That was, I’m sorry. – All right, I hope that answered Emily. – Let’s see.

We have a very interesting question from Sandra as well.

Sandra asked the past year I’ve invested in keywords and content.

As technical SEO often can require side improvements.

I have left that behind in the past, a bit in the past year.

As Mueller now speaks about site improvements, would you recommend investing our time and budget in technical SEO or a new site, technical SEO or a new site over content and keywords? – Oh, I wouldn’t go as far as to say get a new site.

I would say, yeah, have it audited.

Have your site, have a technical audit.

See if there’s anything glaring out there.

And there are improvements to make, but depending on the outcome of the audit, that may define what needs to be changed to change a site. – Well, I mean, you can have a new site without changing, without changing the URLs.

So if what you’re talking about is taking, I like to think of it as a cake, right?

So your content and your keywords are frosting and decoration.

The technical part is the cakey part.

So what, if you can, if you have a lot of technical problems, that means your cake tastes bad.

And all the frosting in the universe is just going to mask the fact that your cake tastes bad.

If a new site to you means I’m going to like surgically remove the frosting, put in a different piece of cake and then put the frosting back on, that might be okay.

I wouldn’t go through, I wouldn’t get a new domain.

I wouldn’t change the URLs.

Those kinds of things will screw up whatever search authority you do have.

So if you can preserve that and maybe just swap out the technical underpinnings to make them better, that would probably be worth it.

The reason content and keywords are great, if there’s something technical that is preventing Google from easily crawling your site, it’s not going to see all that great work that you’re doing, which is why technical can be very important.

If there’s something technically wrong with the site, it won’t matter how good the content is and it won’t matter that you’ve got great keywords because it’s just, it’s not, that technical problem is stopping Google from seeing the full benefit of all the great work that you’ve been doing.

And this is why technical can be very, very worth the investment. – So that means that you first have to determine whether the technical problems are preventing Google from visiting your site or understanding your website. – Yeah. – Yeah. – Before, so basically the answer is it depends. – Get a lot of– – It depends on the outcome. – Yes to auditing, but from the audit, it depends what to do next.

But yeah, Carolyn’s right, you know, I’ve been involved in loads of sites that I wouldn’t call a new site.

It’s just a theme update and a theme change and content– – And you can reflect on it too when it’s still not quite likely a new site. – Exactly, exactly.

So yeah, definitely look into getting a site audited. – All right, thank you very much.

We have a few minutes left and there’s a lot of good questions.

So let’s do a good one first and then we have a little bit of a fun question as well to end our day today.

So Laura asks, what is the impact on paid Google ads with the new generative search? – There isn’t an answer yet, is there?

I mean, I know that they’re going to show ads in these answers, which I guess is their main model and it’ll probably get more aggressive as time moves forward.

But from where I’m standing, and again, Carolyn, you’re exposed to more of this, it seems like it’ll be a trickle into more aggression rather than bam, here’s a bunch of ads and this is what you should be doing towards it. – The only thing I’ve noticed, and I don’t do a lot with paid search, but as a user, I’ve noticed that there’ll be like three ads now above the AI overview and there’ll be three ads below it and I don’t think about the effect on paid as much as I do on organic.

I know the effect on organic is, organic is pushed so far down the page that I don’t know that normal people are going to bother scrolling that far down to get to the organic results.

So I think if I had to guess, I would say that makes paid more important because if you need to get above the AI overview, the only way you’re going to do that is by paying for an ad. – That seems great to Google. – Obviously not what we want to hear doing SEO, but yeah, it’s a clear answer. – Look, on the other part, Taco, it makes SEO more valuable because there’s less to fight against below that scroll, even though like Carolyn said, not everyone scrolls, right?

But when you do and you want to do any form of research, the 10 links that we see may now be two or three, which means that fights even more important. – The building of your brand and the establishing yourself as an authority on your topic is going to be maybe less, less readily visible, but more important because now instead of fighting just for position on the page, you’re fighting for control of the narrative and that narrative is going to be reflected in the AI overview. – All right, as we’re coming up on time, we have the one fun question that we saw.

It was the first question asked when we opened this webinar and Larry Hilton asked, what does the title principle SEO actually mean?

We’re in a back channel chat, wondering as well. – I didn’t know.

So we obviously both interviewed for a position at the same time.

And from my experience, it was just a title that was in our contracts when it was sent to that, “All right, that’s it.”

Didn’t look into it too much and didn’t think about it, but probably the easiest and most conservative answer is probably a hierarchy thing.

And we may be at the top level of the SEO knowledge gap of team building.

What do you think, Carolyn? – I had to do some research on that because I actually had to explain it for some other reasons.

Apparently principle means that you are at the top of the individual contributor chain.

So if you know the difference between a role that manages people and a role that doesn’t manage people is just an individual contributor.

We are individual contributors, but we’re at the highest level of individual contributors. – Oh, that sounds really nice.

Go us. – Got that from an AI overview. (laughing) – It totally makes sense because I mean, you are the SEO experts at Yoast.

So I think with that, we can go to the closing for today’s webinar.

We’ve come up on the full hour.

There’s one thing I would like to ask you.

If you’re joining us here live, I just posted the link to a tweet in the chat and it would be fantastic if you learned something from the webinar today to share that in a reply to that tweet.

So if you’re listening to this on your favorite podcast platform, it’s slightly harder because reading out Twitter links is virtually impossible, but we’ll post it to the show notes.

Do reply to our tweet, let us know what you learned and we’ll take that into next month as well to bring more of your favorite content.

Alex, thank you very much for sharing your wisdom today.

Carolyn, thank you so much for keeping Alex in check and sharing even more wisdom.

And I love to see you all next month.

Thanks for joining.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to a new Yoast SEO update.

It’s very good to see that you’re all here.

And before I introduce you to our awesome experts, let me introduce myself.

My name is Florie van Hummel, and I’m your host for today.

And today, we’re hosting this in Crowdcast.

And in case you don’t know this program, there’s a couple of things that are good to know.

So first of all, you find the chat at this side of your screen.

And if you press on that question mark, you’ll go to the Q&A section, where you can also upload questions of others.

What’s very good to know is that, yes, we are recording this.

And you can find the recording afterwards on our website.

And after we went through all the news that’s relevant for you, there’s room for questions.

So as I said, make sure to use that Q&A button on the side.

All right, let me introduce you to our two heroes of today.

First of all, meet Carolyn.

She’s been lighting up the digital marketing scene since ’94 and has been everywhere.

From news SEO to e-commerce SEO, you can ask her anything.

I’m super excited to introduce you to our one and only female principal SEO at Yoast, Carolyn Shelby.

Get ready for some serious insights.

Secondly, the man who is always busy, but never too busy, to bring cookies when he’s coming to the office, Alex Moss.

Alex is our other principal SEO at Yoast and is also a director of a UK-based agency.

And he designed his own dog bag.

Alex has also been an SEO for a very long time, so buckle up for an informative SEO update.

In today’s update, Alex and Carolyn will talk about advice for people that are affected by the helpful content updates, the renaming of Woo back to WooCommerce, and much, much more.

So without further ado, let’s get started.

Thanks for having us, Florie.

Enjoy asking you at the Q&A.

Yes, he’s in.

Good job on your first trip as a host.

So welcome to everyone.

I think we need to get my slides in the window.

Yeah, we’re in that.

I can see them.

OK.

If you guys have any questions today, please feel free to ask.

I think Florie already directed you over to the sidebar, but do ask questions.

Do upvote the questions that you like.

That helps us decide which ones we’re going to answer.

And I think we’re ready to get started.

First, before we get started, I want to remind everyone that if you need to learn more about today’s topics, you can go to yoa.st/update-april-2024.

This changes, obviously, for every update that we do, but this is where you’re going to be able to find the recording afterwards if you need it.

We also have how to start with SEO bi-weekly webinars.

That means every other week.

The next one is coming up on May 7.

It starts at 4 PM European Central Time, which is not Central Time in the US.

But if you have more questions or you want to just get signed up ahead of time so that you are pre-signed up, you can follow that QR code, and it will take you where you need to go.

All right, SEO news.

You ready, Alex?

I am ready, always ready.

OK, all right, because I feel like I’ve not had enough coffee today, but I will muddle through.

Let’s do it.

We’ll do it.

All right, so first thing, Google’s offering advice for those affected by the helpful content update.

This was issued on, I think, March 23, maybe 25.

I can’t see the date. 25, yeah.

Over a month ago now already.

So this is now over a month ago.

Well, so this– we cover the news that happened since the last update.

And this must have come out right after the last update, which is why it’s still from March.

But basically, what Google’s saying now is that they’re using a variety of innovative signals and approaches to show more helpful results.

Danny Sullivan specifically is advising people to self-assess their pages.

So what he’s saying is, don’t just whine that you’ve lost traffic.

Look at your content.

Do some critical thinking about your own content.

And be objective in that criticism.

And then make sure you’re iteratively correcting what needs to be corrected.

I know everyone has a tendency to think their baby is the prettiest.

But what Google’s advising is to look at your own content with a dispassionate eye to make sure that you’re providing value.

I like that.

It was just a formal way of saying, your baby is fugly.

Reassess your baby.

Make it look prettier.

Put some nice sunglasses on it.

And maybe more people will like it.

Yeah, yeah.

And it’s always hard to admit that your baby may not be the prettiest baby on the planet, because we all want to think that our baby is beautiful.

But when it comes to the helpful content update, if you find that you suffered after that update rolled out, you do need to take a look at your content and make sure that it’s not only useful, but offering something unique.

Because if you’re saying the same thing that everyone else has said, or something that’s common sense, why should Google promote your content over someone else’s?

And I think that’s really the lens you have to look through.

Yeah.

And I mean, if you go back to the baby thing, weirdly, it does– I mean, I’m a father of a two-year-old.

And I remember that when they’re first born, you get all of these other parents that are telling you how to do something the way that they did it.

But the way that they present that is that that’s the right way of doing it.

And it is different for each person.

But one thing that I can relate to this is that it’s not unique.

Did you know that putting them in a dark room helps them sleep longer than if they were under direct sunlight?

You know what I mean?

Some of it is just common sense.

So that should make sense with content that you’re making.

Don’t make something that’s so obvious that it’s unoriginal, because you just won’t get noticed.

Because it’s not helpful, essentially.

If you’re adding something to it, you can.

Put your baby in a dark room.

And I find also that playing soothing music helps with that kind of thing.

It’s OK to repeat information that everyone else knows.

But you do need to add– you need to add your own twist to it.

You need to add some additional value.

Are you adding value to the academic discourse?

And I think that’s really what they’re talking about.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But it’s good that, at least, they’re being transparent with ways that you can do those things.

But it’s also obvious advice.

Very true.

There was another– Google’s really doubling down on this.

So the helpful content system has changed.

Google’s now saying that, rather than looking at the totality of the content on your site and basing their judgments on, I guess, the percentage of helpful content versus unhelpful content on your site, they are looking at individual sites now in– I won’t say in a vacuum.

But they’ll evaluate single pieces of content on its own merit, rather than painting a broad brush and punishing all of your content.

If you do happen to have one piece of content that’s valuable, they don’t want to punish that one piece of content because all the rest of your content sucks.

So that’s good.

That is a nice thing to do.

I feel like I have that with my ideas, that I’ve got a lot of terrible ideas, but I do have to go through them to get to that good idea.

Every now and then, what is it?

A blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I have idea spam.

But then you get rid of it.

You just purge the bad ideas, and then you have just the good ones at the end, which is a content version of what Google wants to see.

Or you rewrite the bad ideas to make them better.

Yeah.

But yes, all of these bullet points, they’re all things that we’ve been saying for the last months and even years.

It’s the same ethics.

Just be unique, be helpful, make sure you instill trust, and everything else should organically follow.

But yeah, Marie has quite a lengthy post about the way in which the helpful content system has changed, which people should give a read, which of course we’ll share inside the chat and on the post after this is out.

Absolutely.

There will be links to all of these articles in the post afterwards.

So if you want to read it for yourself, which we strongly encourage that you do, you’ll be able to find all of those.

All right.

Let’s move on to the SGE.

There was a study done that reveals a potential disruption for brands and SEO.

And I think we talked about this last time, the SGE box, which most of you can’t see unless you’re in the US.

They are rolling out the test to the UK now.

But even in the UK, not everyone can see it.

When you do see it, you will find that the Search Generative Experience box displaces the top of the search results by about 1,200 pixels on average, which is enough to shove the regular organic results completely down below the fold.

Of the links that they pull for the carousel that is SGE, more than half of them are not from the top organic search results.

So this results in– if you search for a brand, you might get answers in the SGE about the brand, but not from the brand’s website.

They could all be from other websites talking about that brand rather than the brand talking about itself.

And this is going to be very upsetting for product marketers and people from big brands.

It’s really interesting that, right?

Because it’s as though it comes to that perspectives angle as well, a perspective on a brand even that may bring out a more relevant result than what the brand thinks of themselves.

So it may be more objective and therefore more relevant to add in there, which is interesting, right?

Because you’ll cite different sources to cite yourself.

So if we use Yoast as an example, there may be a non-Yoast website talking about Yoast, about us that may be a better angle than how we would define ourselves on our own website, right?

I don’t know that that’s necessarily– I don’t know that that was their goal.

I do know that it seems that they’re favoring long form text content that has– when I did a study of a brand, the brand did not come up in their own carousel, which was disconcerting.

But if I looked at every single article that did come up in that carousel, it was long form text.

And the first word in the title and the headline and repeated a number of times in subheadings and within the text was that brand name.

Now, what do big brands not do on their websites normally?

They don’t talk about themselves.

On their home page, most people have gotten away from having the first word on your home page or in your title be your brand name.

Because a lot of brand markers go, well, they can see our logo.

They know it’s our page.

They came to our site.

They’re not remembering that the search engines aren’t looking at the content in situ.

They’re not looking at it in the context that you see it.

They’re looking at it sort of in the vacuum of space.

So you need to be really obvious about what you’re writing.

I think to get into that carousel form your brand, if you had a very robust about page where you did long form content and had the name of your company first and the name of your company in the H1 and then long form article, not a lot of images or you can have images but make sure you’ve got a lot of text.

Write something to compete with whatever is showing up first and make sure that you’ve linked to it prominently from your footer and probably off of your home page, possibly off of your top nav to give it the juice that it needs.

I think then you can overpower these other brands, these other sites that have written about you because it will be your authority plus you’re satisfying all of the desires of the SGE, which is a lot of content.

Does that make sense?

It does, but now I’m thinking what that mean as an piece of advice to the audience, which you then say maybe on your about page instead of saying about us, you say about Yoast.

So you’re mentioning yourself in the third person.

I would say Yoast colon about us or Yoast colon and then our slogan.

I would make sure that our name is prominent.

What?

Is that natural?

That feels unnatural as though we’re injecting a branded keyword in just for the sake of the search engine, which in turn is something they’re telling us not to do.

But I think it’s perfectly natural because I’m telling people what the page is about rather than being ham fisted and ambiguous by saying about us.

Yeah, I’m just thinking of the way I write my own company website now and again.

I don’t say about the company name.

I’d say about us because you’re already on the site.

Because you’re already on the site and you’re not thinking about that page in a vacuum.

That’s why.

Yeah, well, hopefully that answers Steve’s question of how do you counteract and does this using your own brand name not sound not human.

But like you say, there is definitely arguments say that it is human, right?

I think you can justify it.

I don’t think that’s an unjustifiable position.

Cool.

I hope that answers your question, Meg.

All right.

There was an– let’s see, Gary Illyes said at PubCon that over focusing on links could be a waste of time.

He also said that– you know, Gary– what is over focusing mean?

Gary said– Gary said very specifically that links are not in the top three of ranking factors.

To me, when I hear that because I’m accustomed to dissecting things that people say, when you say it’s not in the top three, that means it’s number four.

Like we know that there are– we know that there are hundreds of ranking factors.

And if it was not in the top 20, wouldn’t he have said it’s not in the top 20?

Why would he say it’s not in the top three if it wasn’t number four?

I think that they’re still– I think they’re still quite important.

And I could cite it a number of cases where I could prove it.

I think they’re pretty important.

But no one should ever obsessively pursue links because links can’t overcome everything.

No, they can’t.

And again, you were right.

What does over focusing mean?

Because if you’re a small business that does something very, very specific, then you probably won’t need to focus too much on links at all or citations or acquiring mentions elsewhere on the web.

Whereas in a very competitive niche, such as payday loans, which I know that not a lot of people in this audience may be doing, but they’re in a world of a search engine resort where I would– I’d be astonished if you could get an SEO who’s in that niche to come on here and say how they made a success of building a site without focusing on links.

So then I look at over focusing.

What is over?

You still need to focus on them, right?

Because otherwise, you will have no visibility.

That’s like saying, try and market something without word of mouth.

It’s very hard to do that.

It’s still possible, but without people talking about your products or service, it won’t spread and the visibility won’t be there.

And therefore, you need to kind of think about links, but not obsess about them.

Yeah, don’t obsess.

There’s a question in the comments, do the links have to be in context rather than an image in order to be counted?

You can absolutely count linked images as links, but to be useful, they need to have alt text that has good anchor text in it, because that alt text becomes what would be the anchor text in a text link.

So hope that’s helpful, but you should definitely continue building links.

Don’t ignore them and don’t– but also don’t buy them or spend tons of money on them, unless, of course, you’re in one of those niches that require it, obviously.

Yes, of course.

And also, with images and alt text, remember you did mention context there, John.

That’s important.

A picture of, I don’t know, a view of mountains may be being used in one post to describe, I don’t know, getting offline and going in the great outdoors.

And another one may be talking about altitude sickness.

And they’ll still use the picture of mountains maybe to describe that element of the post, but that alt text will describe not only what may be in the image if you want it to be, but also describe the context in which you’re using it.

Yeah, it always has to be in context.

Yeah.

Gary also shared that this article, basically, the gist of it is he says that crawl budget is largely a myth and that Google is shifting their focus to URLs are more deserving of crawling.

So therefore, you don’t need to worry about crawl budget.

I would– Alex, you pointed out when we were talking earlier that the word largely in crawl budget is largely a myth sort of negates the it’s a myth thing because it’s either a myth or it’s not.

Yeah, and we know that Google choose every word wisely, especially spokespeople like Gary, especially when you’re in writing as well and not on a panel being asked questions on the spot.

This will have been read three times at least.

It’ll be self-assessed to make sure it’s helpful.

So the word largely, that was all that sprung out to me.

It was in much larger form in my brain.

And I was saying, well, if it’s largely a myth, that means that there’s a small minority that isn’t.

And therefore, something is still useful in a crawl budget.

Why would we ever talk about it?

Why would it even be there if it wasn’t useful for some situation?

Did you see the Princess Bride?

It’s like mostly dead.

You’re either dead or you’re not.

If you’re mostly dead, that means you’re alive a little bit.

So there is still a crawl budget.

But because this was confusing and I think the way they said deserving content will get crawled more often, I think that was a little vague.

So I wrote this slide.

What does this even mean, because I find myself asking that a lot, right?

I think when Gary says that deserving content is going to be crawled more often based on search demand, what he means is the frequency of the crawl is related to the popularity, which is usually volume plus velocity, of a search topic.

So if it’s summer and you sell beach towels, the search demand for beach towels is going to be great.

So they’re going to crawl content that they know contains information about beach towels a lot more frequently during that time while the demand is great.

And in the middle of winter, they’re not going to bother crawling your beach towel site because it’s the middle of winter and people don’t want beach towels.

Exactly.

So basically the message is you should have two businesses, one that peaks in the summer and one that peaks in the winter.

Some businesses legitimately don’t have seasonality, but they do have topics that are sometimes more popular than others.

I think it’s rare to have a site that is going to have in demand topical information 100% of the time.

And you could have stuff that becomes popular randomly.

Like what if you sell vitamins and all of a sudden someone announces that vitamin D is definitely going to help you not catch the latest strain of whatever.

Suddenly there will be a surge in popularity and demand for the term vitamin D supplements.

You happen to have vitamin D supplement stuff.

Google knows that you have vitamin D supplement content.

So you’re going to start getting crawled much more often because Google knows that you’ve got that information.

So what this means is you need to also monitor trends.

And if something relevant to your niche– niche, niche, whatever– spikes in popularity all of a sudden, for whatever reason, make sure that you go in and you update your content.

Which is the best way.

Yeah.

We’ve been doing that with the March Core updates just finished, which we’ll chat about soon, obviously.

But we had to go in there and update something quite on the fly to ensure that it’s up to date.

But hopefully that works with everyone.

And of course, we’ve got crawl optimization in Premium for anyone that does want to use things where they need to.

Yeah.

All of this means that you should not do crawl optimization.

You should absolutely do it.

And if you need more information about optimizing your crawl budget, we have a whole article which is on our blog about crawl optimization.

And then the Yoast SEO Premium users do have access to a crawl optimization tool.

So you can get information on that.

And I do not think it means don’t worry about crawl budget.

I think most people don’t need to worry about it.

But big sites do.

Yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

And there’s a button below here, by the way, that goes to that blog on how to optimize crawl budget.

So do leave that on producers in the back end for a little bit while we talk about the next slide.

OK.

What’s– what happened next?

Microsoft.

Why don’t you take this one?

Because I know you’ve been following this and I have opinions.

Yeah.

So Fabrice Canel was talking about how people don’t realize or SEOs don’t realize the actual level of Bing search usage and that it’s higher than what people think.

And it does go beyond what we just think.

Because we’re so in tuned with Google, because it is the monopoly.

And we can say that it is the monopoly because of that graph that’s right there.

And if we do look really closely and squint our eyes a bit, you’ll see that the gap is going from this to that.

So although there was a little shift, right?

So 2% seems like a lot.

But in reality, 97 out of every 100 searches are still going to be on Google.

So I like Fabrice’s optimism.

But the reality is that it’s still 97%.

But again, it depends what kind of business you are.

Because if you are a business who, say, caters to a demographic that are not technologically minded or maybe they’re older, set in their ways of lack of change, you will have this whole audience of people who have had a Windows machine.

They’ll never go on Mac because that’s what they’ve had since the ’90s.

That’s different.

They’re not doing that.

And with that, they’ll come on.

They won’t know what Firefox is or Brave or any browser.

They’ll just use the default that’s on, which is Edge.

And of course, with that comes Bing as default.

So there’s this whole subset of audiences that people do kind of forget.

And people should use Webmaster Tools inside Bing as well.

Because it does have not differing data.

It has complementary data.

And we shouldn’t just rely on what Google Search Console is telling us in short, and all the other third parties.

We should take as much data as we can from as many data sets that we can.

I would say that if you have a site that sells things, so you’re reliant on conversions, rather than looking at how much traffic you get from Bing versus Google, look at how many conversions you get from Bing versus Google.

And go where the money is.

If people are more likely to– people coming in from Bing are more likely to spend money on your site, go after increasing the number of people that come in from Bing.

Because that’s– I am definitely in the camp of, wow, 2%.

That’s 2%.

That means Google’s still got 98%, 97%.

So what, 2% Bing, 1% Yahoo, 97% saw Google?

That makes it sound like everything is Google’s domain.

But when you start looking at raw numbers, if Google’s doing 8.5 billion searches per day, 2% of, let’s say, 10 billion total is still– it’s still a lot. 2% of 8 billion total is still a lot.

So if your money comes from selling 100 units every month, you could get those 100 units from Bing.

You could get those 100 units from Yahoo.

It doesn’t have to be coming from Google.

So know where your money is coming from, and then go where the money is.

Yeah, and lastly on that, I mean, if I can give someone a 97% statistic, 97% of SEOs are not even going to consider Bing as a strategy, whereas whoever’s listening now can take that 2% of what no one else is thinking about in that niche and optimize as well for Bing and do things that Bing are telling you to do and diagnose those problems.

And you’ll find that 100% of 2% is still something, right?

Yep, absolutely.

Well, in other news– and this is kind of a branding thing– WooCommerce migrated to woo.com as a branding exercise.

They are now reverting to woocommerce.com, because as you can see from the chart, I don’t think the migration was done quite right.

And then I also don’t think that they necessarily gave it enough time to stick.

But as most brand marketers do, if something doesn’t pop right away, they panic and they revert.

So that’s kind of what happened.

However, maybe it was a good thing, because everyone’s talking about it.

They probably picked up a bunch of links.

And– yeah, someone’s made a benefit from a bad thing in a way.

And whilst I don’t know what happened economically for woo as a result of that, if it did, that will have had a knock-on effect with marketplace sellers, things like that.

But it is interesting, because you look at the graph from Sistrix here and in the blues, woo, and it does go up initially.

So for that first month, I bet everyone was like, this is great.

Things are going down.

It’s not gone up as usual, but never quite does get back to where it was if you’re doing a migration, not immediately anyway.

But then when it came down, I can imagine people did panic.

And the way it’s gone back up, but nowhere near to the level that it was once at the peak– where was that?

December.

I would have panicked, but I maybe would have gone into a deeper assessment, because I’m thinking long term as well.

If I do want to stay as woo.com over WooCommerce, then maybe I would have tried a little longer.

But again, we don’t know what was under the hood.

There may have been an impact that was far greater than wasting it out.

And even if they did say it was because of the March update, I guarantee you it was not because of the March update.

If they’re popping back so hard after reverting, it was not because of the content on the site.

It was because there was something borked with the migration.

So I– Yeah.

Remember this, Ben.

The March migrate– no content changed, and the March update didn’t happen in December last year.

I think people are blaming their tools, not maybe the process in which it was done.

And it wasn’t done 100%.

So for example, content, word content, like page, blog post, did go from WooCommerce to Woo.

But images were all WooCommerce.com.

And that never changed over.

And I didn’t look into whether there was an image at both Woo.com and WooCommerce, and there was duplicate, or whether they just didn’t move over, but something wasn’t playing ball.

But now they’re back, and it’s grown quite well.

But I don’t know.

It’s gone down in that last week from maybe the end of the March update.

So maybe we’ll have a look.

And in a month, if it’s still worth talking about the impacts of this, then definitely we will.

Yeah.

People like to blame updates when they don’t know what happened, because everyone’s like, oh, yeah, that’s obviously what happened.

The New York Times had a drop because they screwed something up technically back when RankBrain came out.

And everyone’s like, oh, it’s RankBrain.

It’s RankBrain.

It was not.

It was not.

And everyone just kept repeating it.

So that was annoying.

Yeah, I won’t rant.

So OK.

So our good friend Gary, again, explained how Google processes queries and ranks content.

And I was happy with this, because this is basically the same stuff that I’ve been saying since– I looked at a deck that I did from 2015 or 2013.

2013.

Said all the same stuff.

So I’m happy to see that they are confirming it.

The main goal of ranking is to push websites that are high quality, trustworthy, relevant.

OK.

Avoid stop words where possible.

OK.

Content is the most important factor when ranking.

OK.

Quality is defined as the uniqueness of the content.

Amen.

I’m happy with this.

Yeah.

This is probably the shortest slide we’re going to go through, because you can’t get more concise and obvious than all of these things.

And again, it backs up everything that Gary– Gary’s had a busy month in April.

He has.

He’s been off on one.

But yeah, this is the same stuff.

Just make sure– the last bullet points may basically the takeaway is the uniqueness.

And that’s what everyone should be focusing on.

If you’re doing a post that you know someone’s done before, then don’t do it.

Think of something more unique and creative.

Go back to the drawing board.

If you have a question about stop words, you can actually Google stop words.

What are they?

And there will be a number of lists that you can look at.

The gist is you want to minimize the number of meaningless words that you use in sentences so that the words that are left have meaning and value.

So valueless words would be– I don’t remember what part of speech they are.

Oh, no.

We’re not content writers.

Apparently, I’m not an English student either.

We’ll move on to the next slide, but we’ll circle back on that one because I had something intelligent to say, and it has fled my brain.

It’ll come two minutes after we’ve stopped, of course.

So why don’t you take this one?

Because I am so over dealing with the March update.

Yeah, well, the March update went through March and all the way through April, nearly.

It stopped on the 19th of April, but they didn’t tell us until a week later during Brighton SEO, which is something I know they always like doing.

Interesting, though.

Don’t want to cover it too much because it’s just finished and it’s dangerous for us to say what data has been collected, what analysis has been done.

But I would definitely say this time next month, when we’re on May’s talking about what happened in May, there’ll be a lot more discussion about this.

But they do claim that unhelpful or spammy content, which they’ve kind of bowled into the same thing, unhelpful and spam is the same thing, but they’ve reduced it by 45%.

But again, we’ve made sure we put an asterisk in here because they’ve not backed it up with any actual data.

So they’re saying they exceeded the stated goal of the update, which I think was 40%.

I feel like someone in an office just say, just say 45.

And we’ve done better than we said we would.

I think that the newsreaders like to say, Google has claimed without proof that they’ve reduced it by 45%.

From an anonymous source.

So it must be true, right?

But again, everything we’ve been saying in all the previous slides has kind of been coming up to this.

Make it unique, make it helpful, make sure you’re just not writing stuff for the search engines, and you should be all right.

But that being said, I know that there are genuine publishers who have, from their opinion, have the most helpful content, whether or not if another person’s opinion or their algorithm’s opinion is up for debate.

I know that a lot of large publishers are in the middle of dying a death right now.

And there already have been publications that have gone into complete ceasing trading since September, which is kind of a shame because there is still spam also showing up.

So it’s still a bit volatile at the moment.

But I foresee the next three months still being a little bit volatile.

But for some reason, I see Q4 calming down a bit as they master what the effects of all these updates have really been.

And if you feel that you have been hard done to, there’s a form that you can fill in with an example.

What’s the keyword that you were ranking for that you’re not?

And you can report things to give feedback back to Google.

And maybe that will help it in a future update.

Maybe.

I worry about the whole feedback thing.

I feel like that’s what bosses tell you.

It’s like, oh, my office door’s always open for feedback.

No, it’s not.

So long as it’s positive.

So long as it’s not problematic.

All right.

Just as a refresher, this was last month’s Google core and spam updates were all outside.

We told you then it was going to take about a month.

It took longer than a month.

But urging patience and waiting before deciding on what changes to make is still valid.

The three new spam policies that they were going after, just in case you’re wondering why you got hit, expired domain abuse, which they’ve always kind of said was a bad thing to do.

But I guess now they’re trying to really knuckle down on that.

Scaled content abuse, which is where you’re just churning out content mill/AI content to become an authority on something overnight, which is– Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Can’t become an expert overnight.

And site reputation abuse, which is where you’re kind of piggybacking on another site’s authority with a subdomain.

So a subdomain or even a subdirectory would be like renting from the Chicago Tribune coupons.chicagotribune.com.

And then you’re piggybacking on their authority.

Those sites have been annihilated, which I’m secretly happy about.

So there’s that.

It is spam.

It wasn’t helpful.

Well, it wasn’t helpful, and they were buying the authority.

And I find that dirty.

Yeah, although it’s not been in the news, I’m sure, I read, was it Forbes that have completely blocked now their coupon subdomain in preparation for this kind of stuff?

As they should have, because they’re renting out that subdomain.

Somebody’s making money on it, and so are they.

Yeah, and now it will stop, thankfully.

Yeah.

Cool.

So also in the news– Abash is out– Google responds to claims where search results can be harmful and dangerous.

Google, in short, saying that nothing is harmful and dangerous.

Of course, they would say that because they can’t admit that.

So Google, don’t disallow internal footer links.

So whilst we say that internal linking is very good practice, again, don’t try and abuse it by not following things to your contact page and your terms and conditions and your privacy.

It knows, the algorithm knows what that page is for and what the intent is.

So don’t try and game it too much.

Bing tests removing the cache link from search results.

I find that interesting mainly because Google’s taken it away.

Maybe it’s just storage, or there’s no use for it, or as much as there was anymore.

Maybe it’s just people like us, like you and me, and technical people who just want to see an older version.

But that’s what archive.org is for.

But again, funnily enough, Google whacked them.

Didn’t they?

They’ve not got as much visibility whatsoever that they used to, which is interesting.

Google have also dropped video carousel markup.

They say it just wasn’t used that much and interacted with.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use the markup.

Don’t get rid of the markup because it can be used elsewhere, not just in search, but elsewhere in Google’s app suite and things like Bing.

And lastly, Google– oh, you were going to say?

Go on, Carolyn.

Were you going to say anything about video?

But they drop markup for lots of things, and they bring it back.

So just because it’s gone now doesn’t mean it’s gone forever.

No, no, exactly.

And lastly, Google delays third-party cookie phase out until maybe 2025.

Absolutely unsurprising for me because they keep warning you, but no one takes it seriously until they actually put their foot down.

And I realized that they said, what was it, Q4 this year?

And then everyone still went, Jonathan?

Yeah.

Why?

Why is that happening?

So no news is good news, I guess.

I guess.

Well, let’s move on to AI news because I think we’ve got a little bit there.

ChatGPT is making links more prominent.

I know you had an opinion about this.

Yeah, I find it weird that you’re in a conundrum.

We have to pay to see ads?

Is it an ad now?

It’s a citation, but we’re paying to see the source of something.

Personally, I believe you shouldn’t have to pay to see the source or understand what the source of the answer is because ChatGPT is getting that source from somewhere.

And naturally, it should cite it.

But then again, you made a good point that at that point, they’re getting traffic if someone wants to go in.

So there can be an argument either way.

What I find interesting here personally also is the results, the way in which it’s done, it kind of looks like a reverse SERP.

So the end, it ends with a blue link, which is just the brand name.

But maybe the title of where that’s going is actually what’s bold in the bullet point or kind of optimized to be bullet point form.

So it’s like they are still using websites to bring in content to then reproduce for the answer.

And it’s nice to see that they are citing things.

I just find it weird that you should have to pay for it.

It should be all or nothing.

I think the logic might be we think that if you need to have the links in here and you need to have it presented in a way that you can copy and paste it out into something else, that you’re probably using this for your job.

And if you’re using it for your job, you’re getting paid.

So if you’re getting paid for this work product, we would also like to get paid for this work product.

So I feel like that’s what’s going on.

But who knows?

Yeah, we’ll see.

What else has happened?

Google’s rolling out SGE tests in the UK.

So you, my friend, should be getting access to the SGE soon.

Should?

Soon?

I don’t know.

No one I know in the UK has said I’ve got SGE access now.

Not one person.

So I’ve not got it.

And therefore, I can’t see it.

I’ve been obviously using desktop Google search every day.

I use it on my mobile.

I’ve not seen anything.

And that’s both with my Yoast Google Apps account and my personal Gmail, which I’ve had forever.

So wait and see.

And I’m sure we’ll do more screenshots.

Because I think it’ll be interesting to also compare the US and what the UK show you on SGE as well.

But Sistrix have claimed that there is some data in the wild.

If you go onto Sistrix’s blog, there may be a post.

But I think Steve Payne only posted about it yesterday and said there’s a little bit trickling in.

So again, I’ll speak to Steve.

And maybe in the next update, we’ll have some cool SGE UK versus US data to look at.

Interesting.

And I think what’s going to remain the same between the two is the advice on the long form content.

Because I don’t see SGE as the way they’ve written it, the way it appears to be looking for content.

I think that long form is going to trump just individual brand power in most cases.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Google CEO has said that they’re not talking about having AI replace the search engines completely.

They’re really into having it improve search.

But they don’t want it to replace search.

And I don’t know if that’s strictly because that’s how they make their money or they’re worried about it affecting– adversely affecting revenue.

But it’s interesting that that’s where they’re going with it.

Yeah.

And we didn’t want to cover this too much for the audience because it’s a really interesting post that I’ve now put in the chat.

People should read it and actually read for themselves everything that was said in the interview and go into detail.

But I like the last point here.

So AI is not going to replace the search.

It’s not going to be a replacement.

And this guy knows that.

He’s got this long term strategy of looking at the future of search.

And I think if he’s saying that now, then I think for at least three years that statement won’t change, you would think.

Three years feels like a long time right now.

So hopefully– It does.

It does.

In ChatGPT land anyway, or AI in general.

That’s true.

Well, rolling on, Brave announces AI search engine and shares insights for SEO.

So Brave is a new search engine that’s almost– it’s like SGE, but that’s all it is, is like SGE.

And they say that they’re doing 10 billion search queries per year, which makes them the largest.

I don’t know if you remember what I said earlier, but I think it’s interesting to note that Brave’s doing 10 billion searches a year and Google is doing 8.5 billion searches per day.

So some context.

It is interesting.

But it’s good to know, like Brave, if anyone doesn’t know that they’ve been a browser for a bit.

They go around privacy and stuff like that.

It’s built off Chromium as well.

But they’re doing a lot more.

And it’s also interesting to know that there’s another browser called Arc that are doing a lot of AI assisted search experiences where they’re trying to remove the element of the SERP as a middleman for your experience by taking you directly to where you need to be.

So that, I think, is going to be really interesting for the future.

And even for Google, because they’ve got Chrome.

So they may start doing things where you don’t see a SERP in Chrome and that they might go this way and just deal with Gemini straight off the bat.

But that’s something maybe in the next year.

I don’t know.

We’ll see.

Well, the interesting thing I thought was their advice is to help sites rank better in Brave.

They’re saying use schema.org.

So all of that extra markup is going to help things perform better in Brave.

And Brave is said to be kind of like SGE, right?

So maybe you could test things in Brave with the hopes that that will then translate to SGE, even though SGE is run by Gemini.

Yeah.

Once you know Brave are advocates of schema and structured data as are we, it’s, of course, ingrained in both the free and additional parts in the Premium products as well.

But it’s really nice to see that schema’s going to still play an important part in the way in which data is retrieved, even for any kind of search experience.

Absolutely.

Let’s move on to some WordPress news.

WordPress 6.5 Regina was released.

I’ve been playing with it a little bit.

It’s– I don’t see any major differences personally.

But I hear people are happy with it.

Yeah, there’s been a lot of performance updates.

Things like the font library, it’s not going to be in your face as part of the experience.

But I think in time, it will just– things like developing and creating new themes and elements within themes of blocks and things like that are just going to be much easier to do, both to build out and for the end user to use.

So I’ve been using a lot more full site editing.

And I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

But I get, like Gutenberg, at the beginning of Gutenberg, I saw the potential in the long term of how full site editing could really change the way that even themes are made.

So yeah, it’s going to be interesting.

But yeah, even though, of course, it was 6.5, there was always– there’s always a security issue or some other bug that someone finds within 24 hours.

So not long after 6.5 was released, we’ve got 6.5.2, which gets rid of an x-axis vulnerability.

And I think there was something else that was much lower down.

But that was closed very quickly.

And now that’s a much more stable release.

So do you make sure you update?

Speaking of updates, let’s go to Yoast news.

We had two updates in April.

We had 22.5 and 22.6.

22.5, it was general maintenance.

It was a little bit bigger than 22.6.

The big difference, though, is that we changed the guidance and advice for taxonomy pages.

So it’s going to be, I guess, easier to get the green light on your taxonomy pages.

We had been advising a lot more text on those taxonomy pages.

And we’ve reduced the amount of text that we’re recommending for that paragraph above the actual results or the aggregated content for those pages.

So I think you’ll like it.

If you haven’t updated, please make sure you do.

And then in Premium, there was a bug fix.

The table of contents block was sometimes working.

And that’s been fixed.

So yay for that.

And then in 22.6, there was a streamlining of the way the data is stored for the metadata for individual users, which reduces the size of the database, makes things faster, especially when it’s generating author site maps.

So that should help your content, especially your author content, get indexed faster.

Also, WordPress is changing the minimum requirements for PHP.

So we, Yoast, are going to drop support for PHP lower than 7.4 beginning on November 1.

So you have time to make those updates.

But you’ll need to check with your hosting provider to make sure that you’re not using a version of PHP that is less than 7.4.

I think 8.2, I think.

It’s over 8.

Over 8 is pretty much what most sites are on.

If you have not updated your PHP in a very long time, you may want to ask someone about that.

Because eventually, WordPress will stop working.

Our plugin will stop working if you’re on 7.3 or lower.

And then finally, we have a new AI for SEO course in Yoast SEO academy.

So if you have not yet visited Yoast SEO academy, I encourage you to do so.

If you’re a Premium member, you already have total access to all of the training courses.

So please, please, please go check out AI for SEO in the Yoast SEO academy.

Yeah.

Big props to Anne, by the way, who devised all of that and produced it.

Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah.

And then finally, we’re going to be at these upcoming events.

We’ve got two events coming up, one in the US and one in Europe.

In Chicago, if you’re in the Midwest, on June 6, there is called the Conference Pop-Up.

In Chicago, I believe you can Google for SEO Conference Pop-Up Chicago 2024 or some collection of those words.

And you should be able to find it.

And I will be there.

Looking forward to seeing whoever in the US wants to come visit.

And then WordCamp Europe is June 13 through 15 in Italy, which should be very fun, jealous.

And Alex is going to be at that one.

I don’t know yet.

Maybe I am.

I don’t know.

Maybe I’m not.

I don’t know.

We’ll see.

Well, the rest of the group will be there.

Yeah, on a coach, I’ve heard, like a coach full of Yoasties.

Wow.

Yoasties.

That sounds like a real trip.

That’ll be fun.

I know.

I know.

I don’t know how many– do you go straight into Italy?

You may even cross through other countries as well.

Floral tellers.

Floral tellers.

But yeah, of course you do.

I’m pretty sure you cross into other countries.

Yeah.

So what’s next?

When is our next update now that this one’s nearly over?

Next one is Tuesday, May 28, which I believe is– I was going to say it’s a day after Memorial Day, but I don’t actually remember if that’s what it is.

But it’s Tuesday, May 28.

It’ll be at 4 PM Central European Time, 10 AM Eastern Standard Time.

And it will be, again, hosted by Florrie.

Great.

And then now we have Q&A.

That was my cue, I guess.

Well, that was a very, very full SEO update again.

Thank you so much.

We’ve got a lot of questions and not so much time.

So let’s get started with the question.

The most upvoted one was from Marion.

And she asked, after the March core updates, our GA4 shows a hit in organic search traffic, but our Google Search Console performance is actually steady and increasing.

Why is there a discrepancy?

Who wants to go first?

Is there a discrepancy?

Because it gives you different data.

GA4 gives you who lands on your website.

And Search Console gives you information on who sees keywords and pages that are being searched for.

Well, it shows you click-throughs too.

Click-throughs too, but it will definitely never give you that 100% of everyone that’s coming in.

And again, it’s only showing you what’s in Google as well.

So it’s only showing you 97% of the data, not all 100, right?

I’d have to look at it.

That’s a tricky question where we’d have to kind of dig through.

So I would say, it depends.

But I don’t think I can answer that without– Yeah, but the good thing to do is always to look at Search Console and compare it with the time before.

So for this, it’s very important to look at your last 28 days and then compare that with the 28 days before that.

Look at both the keywords that have stopped ranking or gone down, as well as the pages that have disappeared.

And there may be a connection, but there may also not be.

Maybe something interesting.

Yeah.

Hope that answers their question.

All right.

Good luck, Maria.

The next one.

What does Google say nowadays about how often you should blog on your website or update your websites?

Oh, they don’t have specific guidance for that, because that was that one slide we talked about where they’re trying to devote more resources to things that have greater search demand.

So that’s really going to depend on how in demand your topic is.

You can look at your server logs to see how often Google’s crawling you and maybe time updates to coincide with that.

But there really is no– there’s no hard and fast rules on that anymore.

And is it going to be helpful?

Like, if you’re– I always use a baker as an example, but let’s face it, how much does a local baker really have to talk about?

They just need to get the bread made, and anything after that.

There may be content, of course, that baker will be able to make, but one a week?

Is that a number that you should commit to?

No.

But then there’ll be another niche where there is something happening every week, like the SEO industry.

So there is a reason to actually write a blog post every week about– well, maybe not every week.

But you know what I mean.

There is definitely a reason to do more quantity there.

Quality over quantity, that’s the name of the game.

Always, always.

All right.

Hope that helps.

All right, on to our next one.

I’m not sure how easy this one is.

Could you share a screenshot displaying a SGE example so we can get on the same page?

Not right now.

That was the answer.

Yeah, although I’m sure we can get a screenshot and shove it in the Yoast.com page where this video is.

So if you’re watching a replay, scroll down, and someone, Neringa, will be able to put something in there at the end for you.

I could definitely grab one for you.

We just can’t do it this second.

Yeah, sure.

So let’s see how many replays we get this time.

Yeah, and next month, hopefully, we’ll have a UK versus US SGE screenshot as well, which would be quite interesting.

Yeah, so May 28.

You can also wait until then.

All right, our next question is from Jen.

Jen asks, I was recently certified in SEO and content marketing.

We learned that we should read the top five or top 10 results in a SERPs and make sure our posts set the same thing in different terms because Google knows that info is what people are searching for.

Is this ancient information or just completely wrong?

Well, I mean, but what if it’s wrong?

What if that information is– I feel like that’s a little outdated.

I’m not going to lie.

I would go with it depends again.

Because to me, what you’re describing is competitor analysis.

But that doesn’t mean that the analysis you do means you have to take on everything on board.

It may be helpful to the SERP, but it may not be helpful to your brand or to get a conversion.

So I hope that answers the question.

I would say, yeah, look at it, but don’t take everything you see in the other four positions as gospel.

Don’t interpret that to mean I copy what they wrote and then just rewrite it differently.

That’s not what that guidance means.

That means look to see what’s performing well, but you need to write your own content.

You need to have your own research.

You need to know that the information you’re putting out is useful.

And if you’re putting out exactly the same information, why would you outrank the other people?

Write something useful.

Add to the conversation.

Add to the academic discourse.

You have to be unique and helpful.

If everyone else is already saying it, you’re not adding anything helpful.

Do what Gary said, be unique.

That’s a great bottom line.

All right, I think this is a very specific question, but here we go.

Is there a reason my website is pulling up in one market, top five, but not in another?

I thought I had optimized each location equally.

There’s different competing factors in each market.

So while you may be performing well in one, there’s something else going on in another.

You could have optimized better than your competitors here, but over here, you have competitors that are doing something different, better, more than you are.

So it’s a very specific to your situation kind of answer, but just because you’ve optimized for one market doesn’t mean you’re going to dominate everywhere.

Yeah, and if you’re a specialist in bacon, don’t expect to get too many sales in places who keep kosher or halal.

That’s a location-based thing, and it might be a culture-based thing.

And searches in Wijchen compared to New York will bring out different results based on what hopefully is what is most helpful on that context.

OK.

So I see we have room for one more question.

Let’s go for this one.

You don’t really talk about other search engines much.

I get it.

Google has the fast market share, et cetera.

But from where I am sat, this is the right time for SEOs to be looking at how their sites rank in other search engines too.

Would you agree?

Maybe before the Fabrice Canel slide, but then we started talking about Bing.

But I get you.

But we have to talk about Google 97% of the time, because it’s 97% of the monopoly.

And whilst they make the rules, it’s still consistent amongst other search engines.

But why would Bing make a different rule than what Google is doing?

There’s got to be some consistency.

Like schema, you use schema, and it should work on universally.

But again, you’ll be optimizing maybe for locale based on– I know in Russia and China, there’s very specific country based ones that will bring out something like– again, it depends on your market.

If you’re massive in the Chinese market, of course, spend more time looking, is it Baidu?

And there’s a couple of others.

Where’s DuckDuckGo?

I feel like DuckDuckGo is China or Russia as well.

But it’s one of those– just look at your locale.

Maybe I’m wrong there.

But it’s definitely worth looking at everything.

And like I said before, go into Bing Webmaster Tools.

And there might be something to do in there that Google didn’t see.

And that will in turn help another platform that is neither of those two.

OK.

Thanks so much.

Then we’re officially done.

We’re one minute over our time.

Well, thank you so much, Alex and Carolyn.

But also thanks to you, everyone that watched, that asked questions, that upvoted.

And I just want to end with, if you learned something today, I’ll be popping a link in our chat.

Please let us know on Twitter.

We would love to see your interactions there as well.

Let’s see if we can get it as alive as this webinar today.

And we hope to see you next time.

Thank you all.

Bye bye.

Thank you.

Thank you, Florie.

Thank you.