Webcology (WMR.FM Formerly Webmaster Radio)

Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talked about a number of stories this week focusing on the implications of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, the suddenly introduced March 2023 Google Core Update, the introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT4, and the educational game SEOpoly.

There was no end of big and important things to talk about this week, we wanted to make time for Jef Van Gool, innovator of SEOpoly, a twist on the common board game but where you acquire knowledge and SEO skills rather than properties as you move up the rankings to the top spots. It’s a cool concept with a prototype that worked well at last year’s BrightonSEO.

Twitter had another very bad week after it deGoogled itself in a badly thought through response to the scrapers and bots attracted to the network. Last Friday, Elon Musk announced he was limiting the number of Tweets users could see in a day in response to scrapping activity and bots on the network. Those limits had numerous effects, including having nearly half of Twitter content in Google's index removed. Today the world woke to the first day of Threads, the Twitter-like messaging platform started by Meta and based on its Instagram platform. While Twitter's data is slowly returning to Google's index, it's a little less likely unhappy users will return to Twitter. Kristine Shachinger and Jim Hedger talk about the first day of Threads and the threat Threads might pose to Twitter. 

We also talk about OpenAI's quest to reign in AI, Canada's reaction to Google and Meta removing news coverage for Canadian users, Google and file structure, and a lot more. Tune in for an interesting and weirdly silly episode. 

Both Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger have coped with the chaos of personal loss in the last month while talking about months of chaos at Google search. Jim talks about the loss of his father-in-law while Kristine copes with having to leave a condo she's loved living in for nearly 20 years. Meanwhile, over at Google, goalposts got moved to define Parasite SEO, some Gemini videos appear to be far out of a credible viewport, Search Engine Land celebrates its 17th birthday, and AI growth accelerates so quickly it's slowing many AIs down.

Jim and Kristine comment on the sudden passing of the great Bill Slawski, the Dean of SEO

https://www.seroundtable.com/rip-bill-slawski-33446.html

May 2022 Broad Core Update 

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/05/may-2022-core-update

More FAQs being promoted in Rich Results?

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-showing-more-search-results-with-faq-rich-results-33479.html

Don’t get hung up on Toxic Links

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-on-toxic-links-tool-marketing-33435.html

Suing for Social Media addiction, California law allows parents

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/california-bill-allows-parents-to-sue-for-childs-social-media-addiction/451807/

WordPress 6.0 “Arturo”

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-6-0-is-released/451366/

Meta changes how it does political ads, or does it?

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/meta-brings-transparency-to-electoral-political-ads/451616/

On the eve of the first-ever brightonSEO San Diego Conference where Kristine Schachinger is going to speak, there was so much in the SEO and web marketing worlds for her and cohost Jim Hedger to talk about. We start with Google's claim that work on Core Web Vitals has saved over 10,000 hours of load time in the two-and-a-half years the set of metrics has existed. That takes us through a slew of Google and SEO news, along with a couple of items related to AI and Twixter before we loop back to the 3 Pillars of Google Search, a serious snippet of wisdom that came out as evidence in the DOJ's anti-trust case against Google. This is a fun and interesting news-related episode covering a lot of ground in an all-too-short hour.

Facebook Corporate Rebrand To Reflect Role In the Metaverse

https://dailyhive.com/toronto/facebook-new-name-rebrand-report

Story broke in TheVerge https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/19/22735612/facebook-change-company-name-metaverse

Facebook doesn’t know how they will rebrand (short history of renaming efforts at FB)

https://mashable.com/article/facebook-zuckeberg-new-name

Facebook slammed by its own oversight board for VIP treatment of VIPs

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/21/1047928585/oversight-board-slams-facebook-for-giving-special-treatment-to-vip-users

Martin Splitt on How Google Sees and recons content on a page and in a site

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/centerpiece-annotation/424152/

Roger Montti breaks down a long Duda Webinar from Jason Barnard in which Google’s Martin Splitt describes how the search engine examines content, determines topic, and separates out other sections of content

Google Analytics Bug Data Loss

13:59:44 From Dave Davies : https://www.seroundtable.com/google-analytics-bug-data-loss-32281.html

PayPal Pinterest Acquisition Offer

From Dave Davies : https://www.searchenginejournal.com/paypal-pinterest-acquisition-offer/424221/

YouTube SEO Auto Chapter Now a Metadata For Search

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/youtube-seo-auto-chapters-now-a-source-of-metadata-for-search/424266/

Bing and Yandex introduce IndexNow

https://www.seroundtable.com/indexnow-bing-yandex-instant-indexing-32268.html

Just in case you needed to know

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-seo-links-in-existing-or-new-windows-32261.html

Search Quality Evaluators Guidlines Changes

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-updates-search-quality-raters-guidelines-32276.html

Google Search Quality Guidelines Update

https://searchengineland.com/google-search-quality-guidelines-update-expand-ymyl-category-defines-lowest-quality-content-and-more-375276

If you think there's been a lot of algo action

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-algorithm-updates-more-extreme-32277.html

An all star SEO panel made up of Mordy Oberstein (Wix Studio), Mark Traphagen (seoClarity), and Jenny Halasz (JLH Marketing) joins hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger to look back at the events, changes, and ideas of 2024 and into a new world of even more rapid change as AI grows from its infancy towards its adolecence. An incredibly interesting conversation between five veteran search marketers, each with a unique perspective on the industry. This is the last show of 2024. On behalf of the hosts, producers, and everyone associated with Webcology, thank you for listening and have a save and happy holiday period. Best wishes for 2025 from all of us.

This episode also covers a lot of the week’s general news including the coming of ChatGPT5, Meta’s near universal introduction of AI to Facebook and Instagram, TikTok’s upcoming turmoil, how plans to kill the cookie have again gone stale, that Webcology was, this week, named among the top SEO podcasts to listen to in 2024 by Search Engine Journal. Thanks to SEJ and to everyone for listening and contributing to our shared industry in whatever ways you do. We cover a lot of other Googley things but nothing compares to the Google April 2024 Rotten to the Core Scandal.  It’s been a long week since yesterday’s news. Mark it in your calendars and diaries, April 24, 2024 was the day Google’s greatest myth was finally busted. Recorded live the day after the world learned conclusively how Google manipulated and degraded results to produce a higher query frequency in order to bump its bottom line, this episode deals primarily with what could be Google’s worst week ever. Google broke the Ghostbuster Protocol and merged the paid and organic streams of interest and in a long, detailed, and absolutely damning 4200 word essay released yesterday, former Google insider Edward Zitron fills in the five-Ws; who, what, where, when, and why. The piece traces the devolution of Google search back to an emergency all hands meeting in 2019 and places blame at the feet of the man who previously led Yahoo Search to oblivion’s great beyond. A stunning and scandalous story is quickly emerging and this marks the first open chapter.

Google November spam update is fully rolled out by @rustybrick. November Spam Update might be a bit less well adjusted than...

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-november-spam-update-impactful-32394.html

Hi Robot

https://www.seroundtable.com/googlebot-ip-addresses-32402.html

Google releases the IP addresses of its various bots in a JSON file. Google can kill your ads if you violate the organic webmaster guidelines – very rare but it’s happened. I know it happens in reverse too eh?

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ads-account-suspensions-over-violating-webmaster-guidelines-32386.html

Goog wins some Goog lose some. It was a busy morning for Google in the European region; first losing its EU antitrust case for $2.8 billion for abusing search engine dominance by promoting its own shopping service. Then the UK Supreme Court dismissing the case against Google for allegedly tracking iOS Safari users without their consent for $4 billion.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-loses-antitrust-shopping-search-but-wins-ios-tracking-uk-case-32399.html

SEO to Everyone: 02:00 PM

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/discovered-not-indexed/426457/

You should be creating links to yourself

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-you-shouldnt-be-creating-links-to-your-site-32398.html

RIP John Carcutt

https://www.seroundtable.com/rip-john-carcutt-32388.html

Sites need to be worthwhile to be indexed

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/discovered-not-indexed/426457/

Recorded two days after the 2024 presidential election, Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger contemplate the outcome and how a Trump presidency might affect the tech and search marketing industries. Tech can expect an era of deregulation, starting with Trump's aim to strip away federal safeguards over AI development, deferring any regulatory oversight to individual states. With enormous shifts expected throughout the federal government affecting so many different sorts of outcomes, it's difficult to say with certainty what is going to happen and when. The one guarantee is things are going to get weird, and likely very quickly. The show goes on to cover happenings with OpenAI, SearchGPT, TwiXter, how a flock of bees thwarted Meta's most recent nuclear ambitions. We outline how Microsoft Bing wants to give someone a million dollars and ten people ten thousand dollars, how Google search snippets sometimes contradicts itself, the mundane existence of Google's Jarvis AI, and perhaps the weirdest outcome of all, Trump's anticipated shift of course on the Google anti-trust suits. A wise Gonzo journalist once wrote, "When the going gets weird, the weird get going", and in the spirit(s) of Hunter S. Thompson, that's more or less what we're going to do.

Greg’s Guide to Social Media Algorithms

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/social-media-algorithms/453220/

Roger Montti on LaMDA

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-lamda-sentient/454820/

Google updates its notes on HTTP status codes

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-updates-http-status-codes-googlebot-job-posting-docs-33638.html

Google: Hypens over underscores in URLs

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-underscores-hyhens-in-urls-seo-33631.html

Content that’s not visible isn’t as critically bad as it once was says Gary surprising Martin

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-not-visible-content-33630.html

Office Hours Cut to one per Month

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-seo-office-hours-now-down-to-once-per-month-33621.html

"Whispers from within, Nature's laughter fills the air, Gentle cheeks release.", ChatGPT for Chrome, 2023

It's been another week of extraordinary A.I. developments with plenty of examples of A.I. screw-ups, gripes, and fears as we surge forward figuring out how to best use and abuse the powers of A.I... Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger look at Chatbots in Search and talk about a few weeks of watching Google's Search Generative Experience roll out. One critic called Google SGE a plagiarism engine and another critique noted the lack of passion that goes into generating haiku poems about farts so we asked ChatGPT to generate a haiku about farts and it did create an original haiku about farts so ChatGPT winds that around.

We also talk about the loss of navigation in the final weeks of Universal Analytics, how Google might be forced to break itself up to do business in the European Union, how a blackhat super scrape netted $800K, and more...

The world itself is burning as hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk through the sudden and sweeping changes coming to search results pages in 2025. While AI-faked images of the Hollywood sign burning are posted as news on partisan websites we talk about the sudden drought of fresh content for LLMs to train on now that everything ever written has been consumed and the use of AI created synthetic data to putty over an increasingly pockmarked information environment. While highly informed D-list celebrities berate government officials for their hiring practices and inability to control the weather, we discuss how AI generative results removes the concept of "canonically correct" answers in place of a response generated to answer a series of queries as well as possible but not necessarily the same way twice. Facebook has signaled its allegiance to the new order citing the reelection of President Trump as a cultural tipping point at the same time politicized messages overwhelmed the factual information that might help people in what has become the biggest natural disaster in American history. We even try to draw ourselves back as we note how much we don't want to be political but all this is happening in the environment we work in and we slowly realize that maybe there's no way to not be political when talking about what's going on. Damn...

Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger host an informative and very fun show today with guests, Mitul

Ghandi co-founder and chief architect and Mark Traphagen, VP of Product Marketing and Training from

the enterprise-SEO super-system SEOClarity (https://seoclarity.net). Mitul and Mark join Jim and Kristine

to talk about the multi-feature rollouts SEOClarity introduced during its Release Week. SEOClarity is all

about merging big data with understandable and actionable dashboards, insights, and suggestions.

When Mitul and Mark come on the show, we get to talk about grand-scale SEO wisdom gained from

studying billions of data sets gathered over several years.

In what is possibly one of the most interesting and entertaining interviews we've recorded in a while, Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk with SEO legend Martin MacDonald about the development and release of the industry's first AI-supported SEO Auditing tool, Serpere.AI - https://serpere.ai/. 

Martin has been a practicing SEO since the dawn of the commercial Internet and has worked with some of the largest websites in the commercial sphere, including TicketMaster, Expedia, and Orbitz. Founder of MOGmedia, Martin has shared his findings and SEO data with the SEO community as a trusted source for over a decade.

Today we talk about AI's advancements in the tech sector, discuss the intricacies of conducting a large-scale website audit, and cover how AI has made Serpere much faster and more accurate and how its use of AI radically simplifies the reporting and explanation process. 

Google Core Update finished rolling out

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-may-2022-core-update-done-rolling-out-33562.html

EU Publishers and Webmasters can’t block US traffic without also blocking Google and Googlebot 

https://www.seroundtable.com/eu-publishers-block-us-users-google-33557.html

Don’t add your company name to image alt-text. It’s redundant, undescriptive, and not helpful

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-company-name-in-blank-image-alt-text-33538.html

Yoast and IndexNow “They changed how it worked a bit (or explained it better) where we only have to ping one endpoint. With that, we basically replace the xml sitemap ping with a call to IndexNow and it’s done.””

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/yoast-on-why-its-adopting-indexnow-protocol/453516/

This episode, recorded in the seventh week of the longest Google update ever, covers a lot of news stories as quickly as we can. Stories range from news about AI and the various players in the industry pushing to integrate AI into everything to general advice on dealing with the various Googly issues search brings. We discuss the new sets of Google videos being made available, marvel at John Mueller's unending well of patience, and marvel at Twixter's carelessness as it auto-converted Xs to URLs. This episode covers a lot of ground in leaps and bounds as we move forward towards the inevitable end of the update.

Sometime last yesterday, word went out on Twitter and LinkedIn that one of the largest SEO conference in the world was coming to North America. Conference founder Kelvin Newman tweeted and posted his team was bringing the show over here in 2023 with a date and time to be announced in the coming weeks. We asked Kelvin to come on Webcology to talk about the experience and, what we expected to be a quick ten-minute promotion turned into a twenty-five-minute conversation about his experience organizing shows, how to pitch your ideas, the free ticket lottery system, and a host of other stuff.

We also walk through the enormous number of AI and SEO-related stories from the world of search including, 

• New AI-driven third-party plug-ins for Expedia, Kayak, Instacart, and others (https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-openai-web-browsing-plug-change-how-we-use-internet-2023-5)
• 22 best ChatGPT Chrome Extensions to try (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/chatgpt-chrome-extensions/485594/)
• Bing named the search engine of record for ChatGPT (https://www.seroundtable.com/bing-search-search-engine-chatgpt-35437.html)
• The opening of the first trial group in Google's new AI-driven Search Generative Experience (https://searchengineland.com/google-opens-access-to-search-generative-experience-today-427572)
• Google's not-so-new Topical Authority Ranking (https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-news-topic-authority-ranking-system-35438.html)
• and more...

It was a busy news week with a continuing November Core Update, Google's Site Reputation Abuse Policy Update and the subsequent major publisher crackdown, the DOJ recommending the sale of Chrome and possibly Android, lost GA4 data, a now missing GSC Experience Report, OpenAI deleting critical incriminating evidence by mistake, Meta level pig-butchering, the TwiXter eXodous, and the promise of BlueSky on the horizon. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger also talk about Gemini AI making death threats, paid advertising appearing in AI Overviews, Bing inserting paid ads into organic search results, SearchGPT becoming the third largest search engine after Google and YouTube by market share, the existence of Google Site Wide, Google Lens for Shopping, and more content avoidance advice from John Mueller. More newsy this week than most but entertaining and hopefully sort of enlightening too.

As Google's March 2024 Core Update marches on towards its eventual end, Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger talk about how a week's worth of rumors, assumptions, and half-baked ideas have led a wide section of the industry to go off half-cocked about the sweeping effects of this update. People are so angry with Google they're deleting and blocking official spokepersons in forums like Reddit while second guessing Google's motives. There have been a few documented recoveries from other parts of this update though there are still no documented recoveries from the Helpful Content Updates run between September and the start of the March 2024 Core Update.  In other search news, evidence is starting to build up that Google's SGE, and other A.I. driven search initiatives aren't actually ready for primetime just yet, Twixter restores blue checkmarks to all popular users with or without user permission, teachers are developing stronger tools and protocols to detect student work performed by A.I., Google publishes a tutorial on identifying INP issues, Gemini is coming to Gmail, and much much more.

Recorded in the week after Black Friday hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk through a bunch of stories affecting the world of search. The November 2024 Core Update conveniently ended an hour before we went into the recording session. We talk a bit about winners and losers and what we think will be the effects of this core update (while jokingly anticipating an upcoming December 2024 Core Update). We also talk about Bluesky's growth and vibe, using AI in unmanned weaponry, Bing withholding data from ChatGPT in Webmastertools, new search features at Bing, new features at Wix Studio, new features for YouTube creators, new rules at Google for dating ads, the very real possibility of Duplicate Content Blackholes in the ether of Google's cyberspace, and a whole lot more. Tune in for an interesting conversation about a sea of upcoming change in the world of search.

Today on Webcology Kristine Schachinger from Sites without Walls cohosts with Jim Hedger from Digital Always Media. They talk about The return of conferences and the State of Search Conference – last week in Dallas TX. They also dive into Barbados SEO – two weeks from now, as well as The 2022 Social Media Big Tech implosion AND MORE!

Geoffery Hinton is widely considered the Godfather of Artificial Intelligence. His research into human brain function in the late 1980s and early 90s at the University of Toronto prompted him and a team of early neural researchers to start to conceive of a digital brain that could learn. His work is considered the foundation of modern machine learning and large language models. He recently stepped down from his position as head of AI research at Google's parent company Alphabet so he could raise awareness of a terrible thing he can't stop thinking about. Ten months ago, an AI model Hinton was working with deciphered and explained the humor behind a joke. It wasn't necessarily a great joke but it was a series of complexities that built upon themselves to end in a twist requiring a leap of thought to understand. That the AI model was able to easily make the leap and understand the humor that made the joke funny astounded and terrified him. That was the moment he reckoned the rapidity of advancement since the beginning of his career in the late 1980s. What he thought would be happening several decades from now is happening today, faster and far fuller than he and other pioneers of AI anticipated. Last week, Hinton suggested he regretted much of his career. In this episode, Jim Hedger and Kristine Shachinger talk about Hinton's worries through a week's worth of AI news. We also talk about Hinton's extraordinary career and think about the advancements that can be made because of his work. We also talk about E-E-A-T, the coming of Google Analytics 4, Google's advice on canonicals for publishers, and Google's disavowal of disavows. We're still trying to get an interview with Professor Hinton. 

There appears to be a shift in Google's philosophies heading into next week's Google I/O conference. Google seems to be trying to change expectations with CEO Sundar Pichai talking about an all AI future and former chairperson Eric Schmidt talking about a future without blue links. Google's reputation for quality has taken a battering recently and many in the SEO community are feeling more than a little misinformed. That's easily understood when you realize Google has used the same terms to describe different things throughout the series of algorithm and core updates that stretch back to last September. In this episode, Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger try to peel back the onion like layers of Googleosopy while trying to offer sensible advice about how to deal with different aspects of the series of updates. Conversation naturally turns to several stories around AI and its efficacy as an engine for information. This was a fun, fast paced episode that tries really hard to keep its patience in the midst of creative destruction.

They say March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, except for those times when March comes in like a lion and takes out a wide swath of sheep. Then they just say, "whoa!". So Google rode into March like a hungry lion with a staggeringly complicated Core Update, a very serious shellacking of manual penalties, changes to who can monetize content with AdSense, a multi-sweep set of algorithm updates, and changes to guidelines given to search result quality raters. Various Google spokespersons have outlined Google's goals for this update while also trying to explain aspects of the update in their opaque and sometimes uptight Google coded ways. It will take at least four weeks for the March 2024 Core Update to fully play out, during which SEOs and webmasters can expect several sweeps over the course of the next four weeks. Expect a massive house cleaning as Google reacts to a year or more of deep seeded consumer complaints about declining search quality. Google says it intends to eliminate about 40% of spammy content. It remains to be seen if March goes out like a lamb or a lion but one week into the month there's already virtual carnage throughout the Colosseum.

A busy, news heavy show has hosts Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger cover three major stories, each of which could occupy a full hour long show. The WordPress mega-drama continues with the founder's faction at Automattic grabbing control of one of their rival WP-Engine's best known custom WP-Contributions, Advanced Custom Fields in a forking incident many think close to theft. Also this week, leading SEO and Digital Marketing Tool Maker, SEMrush acquired one of the industry's leading information resources when it purchased Third Door Media. Third Door publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and also organizes the Search Marketing Expo series of conferences. Meanwhile, Google is replacing it head of search, Prabhaker Raghaven with long time Google executive and Raghaven assistant Nick Fox who becomes head of Google's Knowledge and Information division. Bing is pulling back on several under used features shown on its search results page while both it and Google move to publish full recipes in search results, denying the original writer's a click. Over to our nuclear energy desk it seems that Amazon and Google are also entering the elite nuclear powered corporation category, joining Microsoft in making deals with commercial nuclear energy produces, developing their own small-scale nuclear generation capacities, or buying and refurbishing mothballed reactors such as the Three Mile Island plant. We also share a week's worth of Google information, updates, and explanations.

The power of the Billionaires' businesses mixed with the powers of The State. An image from the inauguration showing Mark Zuckerburg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, and other tech giants in the very front row showed us how clearly and forcefully the new Technoligarcy is taking charge. That is the very definition of fascism in action. In this episode, Jim and Kristine talk about the shift in power and work to work through their thoughts on how the futures of search, social media, free speech, and democracy itself will play out. And then we talk tech with a full sheet of news stories including, OpenAI's Operator, Operation StarGate, YahAIoo!, Scamtastic SEO problems, Google blacking-out scrapers and crawlers and most SEO Tools, the mislogic of recommending structured data, and a heck of a lot more. Come for the stunned faces, stay for great radio!

It was a particularly newsy and seriously silly week. It was also the end of June which is also the end of the second quarter so, for most SEOs, it's reporting season. This year, reports are made more poignant knowing the end of June is also the end of the line for Universal Analytics data, which gets universally deleted on Monday at midnight. It's also the end of the June 2024 Google Spam Update, which concluded a few hours before this episode was recorded. Show hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk about UA3 data, how to assess the Spam Update, the implications of OpenAI's purchase of the data analysis and indexing firm Rockset, Microsoft AI's craptastic views on the social contract of content, how Google Search measures its own quality, if AI can perform an effective and actionable technical SEO audit, and a whole lot more.

1 day, 13 hours, 59 minutes: That's the time left at the time of recording before Google pulls the data plug on Universal Analytics 3, replacing it with the much unloved and misunderstood Google Analytics 4. Many SEOs and other digital marketers, all of whom have been warned for the last 18 months are freaking out having hoped Google wasn't actually going to go through with the switch. Surprise, they will in approximately 1 day, 13 hours, and 58 from the time this sentence was spoken.

Joining Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger on Webcology today is Alan K'necht, owner of K'nechtology and one of the search marketing industry's expert's experts on analytics. Alan walks us through the changes between UA3 and GA4, pointing out similarities and differences search marketers should look for. This was a wildly interesting episode hosted the day before a significant milestone day in search history, the day Universal Analytics and the way it gathered user information, is being put out to pasture and replaced by something the sector dislikes but; as Alan points out, maybe you'll learn to like it. 

Reports say Apple is likely to announce a new user-centric web search. However, for the search engine to become functional, Apple wants to wait till January 2023 to do so.

Apple published a list of things that might affect rankings back in 2020

• Aggregated user engagement with search results

• Relevancy and matching of search terms to webpage topics and content

• Number and quality of links from other pages on the web

• User location based signals (approximate data)

• Webpage design characteristics

https://www.seroundtable.com/apple-search-ranking-factors-29821.html

John Giannandrea – was head of search at Google, left for Apple in March 2018 to lead Apple machine learning and AI division. https://www.seroundtable.com/john-giannandrea-from-google-heads-to-apple-25517.html

Core Updates use data from before the update starts. They might update data between Core Update events. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-core-update-data-refresh-33509.html

This Core Update... https://www.seroundtable.com/google-may-2022-broad-core-update-seo-impact-33512.html

New Google author markup for article structured data

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-author-markup-best-practices-33530.html

"To help Google best understand and represent the author of the content, we recommend following these best practices when specifying authors in markup."

• Include all authors in the markup

• Specify multiple authors when applicable

• Use the additional fields that is available to you

• Only specify the author’s name in the author.name property

• Use the appropriate author type

Wix Structured Data guide

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wix-structured-data/451282/

It’s BluShark Week here on Webcology as this week we’re happy to welcome guest Seth Price, founder and CEO of local-legal focused SEO firm, BluShark Digital. According to the AboutUs page on their website, “BluShark Digital uses the same cutting-edge marketing techniques (high-quality technical optimization, sophisticated content, authoritative link-building, and local optimization) that Seth used to grow his own business and has established itself as a best in class digital agency focusing on the legal sector.” 

That business that Seth grew, by the way, is a multi-officed law firm. Seth is also the founding partner of Price Benowitz Accident Injury Lawyers, LLP, a law firm with numerous offices around the Washington DC, Arlington, and Baltimore region. Price Benowitz started with two attorneys and now employs over 40 people.

Jim and Kristine spend a fast-paced and truly fun hour talking with Seth about local search, how his digital marketing experience helps better build his legal business, and how building his legal business literally built BluShark, his digital marketing business. With a wealth of experience to share from both businesses, Seth graced us with an insightful and information-packed conversation. If you're into local search, you want to hear this episode.

Twas two weeks before Christmas

and across the wide web

SEOs were hitting

their desks with their heads

Google had come to update itself

Guaranteeing no downtime

For us little elves

Along with a number of other Googley things, Jim Hedger and Dave Davies talk about getting Scroogled again this year. 

Today we spoke with the Founder of Inlinks and one of the truly great innovators in the SEO world, Dixon Jones. Dixon has made or been at the C-Level of two of the most important SEO tools, Majestic and Inlinks. Dixon was Marketing Director at Majestic from 2009 to 2018, leaving to help found InLinks. Based in the UK, his team at Majestic won the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation for characterizing the Internet in a way people would understand it, humanizing the Internet if you will. To do this, Majestic created a model of the Internet that was printed on the International Space Station. 

The interview moves through the history of SEO and looks to the future as Dixon is one of the industry's expert thinkers on machine-assisted learning. Like most of us, he is keenly interested in artificial intelligence. This was one of our more fun interviews in the seventeen-year history of Webcology.

We round up 2023 and look forward to 2024 with what is arguably the most experienced panel in SEO podcasting. Joining Webcology hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger are Ryan Jones - SVP of SEO Razorfish, Topher Kohan - Director of SEO for CBS Sports Paramount Global, Carolyn Shelby - Principle SEO at YoastSEO and Newfold Digital, Doc Sheldon - CEO of Web Narwhal, Grant Simmons - Director of SEO at Clickfluent, and Steve Wiideman - CEO of Wiideman Consulting. Everyone in the panel has at least a decade and a half in the industry. Collectively the group brings over 150 years of acquired knowledge to a conversation that ranges through the impact of AI on the industry to the many updates Google made in 2023. Catch up, look forward, and welcome to an interesting and probably chaotic future. Stick around for the laughs.

Google is rolling out a new label is search results for pages that are recognized as highly cited sources. Plus, Google Analytics 4 is Examined and Jim and Dave discuss this and more with Canadian SEO, Speaker, and Analytics Wrangler Alan K’necht.

Google on support for Ukraine

https://blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/warsaw-announcing-more-support-ukraine/

TikTok testing search ads

https://searchengineland.com/tiktok-tests-search-ads-383234

Product Reviews Update causing flux

https://www.seroundtable.com/volatility-march-2022-google-product-reviews-update-33177.html

Nofollow links are not followed, period

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-nofollow-dampening-factor-33169.html

Google Now Using MUM For Detecting Personal Crisis Searches & BERT For Detecting Shocking Content

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-mum-bert-crisis-shock-33176.html

MUM – multitask unified model

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-multitask-unified-model-mum-31441.html

BERT - Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-bert-update-28427.html

A war is being waged in the deepest heart of the Open Source movement for that movement's very soul. Last week, Matt Mullenweg, the original founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, the commercial arm of WordPress, laid down his version of the law by banning WPEngine from the greater WordPress environment. The dispute centers around money and time contributed to the collective which provides the engineering for WordPress. From Mullenweg's perspective, WPEngine has contributed too little of either after extracting hundreds of millions in revenues over the years. From WPEngine's perspective, "WTF eh?" Webcology hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger try to make sense of a fight that threatens the web's very understanding of what Open Source means. Meanwhile, Sam Altman has pushed OpenAI away from being a non-profit to being a for-profit benefit organization with Altman enjoying a 7% stake in the newly constituted company. This has pushed several key figures at OpenAI, including CTO Mira Murati and Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew to resign in the past week. In other news, Google has killed its helpful Cache feature while updating its Web Search Spam policies. Google also reported and is fixing a noindex bug that caused several JavaScript driven pages to be indexed when Google couldn't read the protocol. The show covered a lot more Google news in what was a busy post-COVID show after Jim caught and was sidelined last week by his first (and hopefully last) bout with the virus.

Three weeks into the New Year and Google has been mostly quiet, with the exception of the hounded and outraged who lost in the most recent updates which may well have been upgrades. Google has undergone several fundamental changes in the past year, the greatest of which are affected by AI. Today we talk about those changes in Google search itself and in the business of being Google. Is Google getting worse? It depends. On one hand, a recent German study suggests it might be, while on the other anecdotal evidence suggests spammy content are declining and ultralow quality pages are falling from the SERPs. How is the Search Generative Experience affecting searchers and the world's search engine of choice? Again, it depends. Folks love complaining about craptastic Google quality and Bing can only increase its market share by less than 2%, even after introducing ChatGPT's Copilot. If you ever got the feeling explaining SGE to your clients is as absurd as detailing most Seth Rogan Experiences, this is the show for you.

Several years of Mobile First. What’s changed?

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-mobile-first-index-guide/437472/

Google clarifies 15MB is really big

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-clarifies-15mb-googlebot-limit-33670.html

8 Tips on Ecommerce from Googler, Alan Kent

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-offers-8-tips-on-e-commerce-seo-33676.html

FCC Commissioner asks Google and Apple to ban TikTok from their respective stores

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/fcc-requests-tiktok-ban/456297/

Google Freshness Update explained by Roger

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/freshness-algorithm/

Google Updates structured data advice for products with multiple variants

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/freshness-algorithm/

Google rich results guidelines update now prohibits guns, 

https://searchengineland.com/google-rich-results-guidelines-now-prohibits-weapons-recreational-drugs-tobacco-vaping-products-and-gambling-related-products-386185

Kristine Schachinger is on the road this week speaking at the iGB Live Amsterdam conference so we had a special guest live from Amsterdam NL, Julia Logan, perhaps better known in SEO circles as Irish Wonder. Julia is a long-time web consultant who has practiced SEO since 2000. In 2020 she founded a boutique agency, Zangoose Digital. Jim, Kristine, and Julia have a wide-ranging conversation that just jumps in at one of Julie's many specialties, mainstream media's enormous effect on the online gaming space, which was the topic of her session at IGBLive. We also talked about the history of SEO, work in the DEV trenches, the effects of AI on the gaming industry and content creation, and the long-term implications for search marketing. Ultimately, this was a fun high-level conversation between three long-term web marketers who find the job and each other fascinating. We eventually got around to covering the week's SEO news. 

Truckin' through Groundhog Day of November 16th and talking Wikimedia too... "Six weeks until Christmas and all through the Web, not a placement was stirring because they were all dead. The dossiers were hung in massive digital files, defining all pages, their friends, and their while. And in Google's great blender, an awful sort just got slewed, making mincemeat of merchants whose lives just got screwed. I sat alone with rank checkers on screen but could only see red where once I saw green..." November 17, 20?? -- We had a show plan until Google did what Google did and so that plan got 302ed. We do have an interview with WikiCommons super-contributor Joe Mabel who spoke at the WikiConference North America 2023 held in Toronto last week, the one that was briefly truncated by a bomb threat but, because Google did what Google tends to do at this time of year, the interview was way too brief. Considering the importance of Wikipedia to the Web and its impact on search over the years, we could have talked with Joe for hours. Unfortunately, Google screwgled those plans by announcing what could be the most sweeping sets of changes to how Google creates, displays, and distributes search results since its first major update, 20 years ago today. We spend the last half of the episode discussing those changes. To Quote spokesperson Danny Sullivan, "Buckle Up!"

This week we have another special guest, Olesia Korobka, a SEO consultant based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Olesia is compiling a list of SEOs in Ukraine who need work or stability.

Google Search Central Virtual Unconference Returns at the end of the month – Martin Splitt tweeted with a “stay tuned” notice

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-central-virtual-unconference-back-for-2022-33018.html

No such thing as quotas for the number of rankings a website can achieve https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ranking-quotas-33014.html

Index Now added to Duda, All in One WordPress, and Rank Math SEO Plugins https://www.seroundtable.com/indexnow-duda-all-in-one-wordpress-rank-math-seo-plugins-33001.html

Yoast suggests IndexNow a lot more When than Now – Doesn’t improve crawl efficiency or lead to more traffic

https://www.seroundtable.com/yoast-indexnow-proof-33013.html

GSC URL Inspection Tool Errors

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-console-url-inspection-tool-errors-33010.html

They shalt not blocketh Americans https://www.seroundtable.com/blocking-usa-users-googlebot-33005.html

If you are not allowed to show your website to users based in the United States, then you also cannot show that website to Googlebot.

CSS colours are not ranking factors. 

https://www.seroundtable.com/css-colors-are-not-a-google-ranking-factor-32968.html

Google Russia declares bankruptcy after Russian authorities seize bank account.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/05/googles-russia-subsidiary-is-filing-for-bankruptcy/

Canada forces Google and Facebook to pay news publishers for loss of ad revenue – Search Engine Journal and the misuse of the word tax.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-criticizes-canadas-proposed-link-tax/450878/

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-google-warns-ottawas-online-news-act-would-break-its-search-engine/

-Online News Act, Bill C18 

“to compel global tech companies such as Facebook and Google to negotiate payment agreements with news organizations as compensation for news content that appears on the large platforms.” Modeled on successful Australian legislation 

“There is no link tax. Canadians are not paying for anything, and no money goes to the government. Facebook and Google earn money from having links to news sites on their platforms because the work of independent journalists has value,” Ashley Michnowski, spokesperson for Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez said. “We have had constructive conversations with Google, yet they’re pulling from their original playbook in Australia when Google tried to avoid regulation by exaggerating their concerns.”

Facebook’s Most Followed Content is mostly Spam – Facebook transparency Report

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/facebooks-most-widely-viewed-links-dominated-by-spam/450826/

Top 101 SEO Tools that are free – Jon Clark, Search Engine Journal

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/top-seo-tools-free/435299/

John Mu – Spam is Spam, no matter what language you speak

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-see-search-spam-in-multiple-languages-33438.html

Interaction to Next Paint might become a core web vital

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-core-web-vitals-fid-with-inp-33429.html

We started this week with the news that Google's original search spokesperson, Matt Cutts, and his wife Lindsay, are the parents of twins! That leads us to talk about Twitter and the "What Could Go Wrong?", attitude that wants to convert X into everything or distill the workings of the Web into X. From there, we have a fairly serious talk about Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE), which will be newly improved with links. Should companies be open to allowing their content to be used to train AI and LLMs? Several of the top 1000 websites think not so we talk about the efficacy of blocking your content from LLMs. We round out the show with an index full of Google organic search news and SEO opinions and would like to giggle while reminding link-spammers that emailing Danny Sullivan will not likely produce a beneficial outcome.

Jim and Dave welcome back Mark Traphagen and Mitul Gandhi to discuss the launch of ClarityAutomate a groundbreaking new platform that solves the most fundamental roadblock to achieving SEO results: execution.

ClarityAutomate empowers SEOs to take control of their results, tackling gaps in technology, skills and resources to execute SEO changes in real time through its innovative no-code SEO technology.

Equipped with flexible implementation and a powerful logic engine within seoClarity’s award-winning technology, users of ClarityAutomate can finally progress on their SEO project list with consistency, precision and ease — all within a matter of minutes — not days, weeks or months.

Earlier in the day, show host Kristine Schachinger sat on a panel about ethics and A.I. with Morgan McGraw from Madrid-based Contextual Advertising Company, Seedtag. Morgan walks us through how Seedtag's Artificial Intelligence, Liz, works through tens or even hundreds of millions of pieces of page content, user behaviors, and site analytics to help their clients reach the most optimal target audience possible. To explain that, Morgan has to explain how Liz and other A.I. works, what it does, and how it makes its choices. Most importantly, Morgan explains some of the why while addressing the ethical choices made making and training A.I.

Jim and Dave speak with Navah Hopkins, a search industry veteran, has officially launched her consulting business, Navah Hopkins Consulting, LLC.

Bill Hartzer.com reports:Navah is a a highly sought-after paid media and digital marketing strategist with over a decade of empowering brands and the agencies. In her new consulting firm, she plans on providing Digital marketing strategy, Account audits, SAAS product strategy, and General business strategy.

In the past, Navah has worked for companies like Adzooma, Justuno, Hennessey Digital, and WordStream. I’ve known her for years as one of the world’s best Paid Media specialists, and I’ve seen her speak about paid search and paid media at conferences such as Pubcon and State of Search.

Navah has a passion for innovation, fueled by a hybrid of strategic partnerships, data analysis, and consumer engagement. She loves connecting people who can mutually benefit each other, leveraging innovation to solve socioeconomic issues, and maintaining bottom line thinking with an ethics driven perspective.

Vladimir: Well, shall we go? - Estragon: Yes, let's go. - Stage Direction: They do not move. -- Many publishers are waiting for an imminent Google Core Update hoping this time the wisdom of compassion and perhaps a rewrite of one or more Helpful Content Update cycles will bring them back to the prominence and profitability of page one placements. Google representatives have suggested this update could bring hope or redemption or maybe a bigger bit of traffic. Meanwhile, Google is musing about adding more new and improved AI Overview responses in search results. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk about Google's intentions and a number of other topics including Bing's new SERPs that put a Generative Response alongside traditional ten blue links in a split-screen layout, Google's $60MM exclusive access to Reddit data, the advent of ChatGPTSearch, the CloudStrike outage, and a lot more! Meanwhile, a bunch of web based businesses are still stuck at a crossroads, waiting for something to come, something that's almost here, something that'll move them forward. Estragon: Let's Go - Vladimir: We can't. - Estragon: Why not? - Vladimir: We're waiting for Googdot.

Today we'll discuss a bubble chart that can help you understand which queries are performing well for your site, and which could be improved.

Data Studio Visualizations

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/04/performance-optimization-bubble-chart  

AI Content against Google Guidelines

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-says-ai-generated-content-is-against-guidelines/444916/

Wayback Machine archiving Ukrainian Internet

https://spectrum.ieee.org/internet-archive-ukraine

Conference Organizer, Vasil Azarov died earlier this week at age 40. Details of his death are unavailable at this time. Vasil organized the Brand Growth, B2B Growth, and the Growth Marketing Conference. He was also a community advocate and fundraiser.

Google My Business App is being discontinued

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-my-business-app-going-away-33198.html

Facebook WiFi

https://www.facebook.com/facebook-wifi/getting-started

Zuck Bucks – like Whoopie Goldberg’s Flooz but backed by a multi-billion dollar corporation

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/04/07/1528241/meta-is-making-zuck-bucks

https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/6/23013896/meta-facebook-zuck-bucks-finance-financial-services-products

Elon’s Twitter

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/elon-musk-twitter-impact/444860/

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/04/twitter-shares-soar-more-than-25percent-after-elon-musk-takes-9percent-stake-in-social-media-company.html

Google doesn’t care who produces content as long as it’s good quality content

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-seo-outsource-content-33205.html

Gavin Klondike joined Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger to talk about Google's intentions with the SGE moving past the end of the year. Gavin helped explain AI and LLMs earlier this year in our ELI5 episode. This is a fun deep dive into how Google might generate and present SGE results and another good explanation of Googlie AI.

Jim Hedger and Dave Davies cover a lot of ground today with a long talk about the Google Helpful Algorithm Update as its rollout appears to be winding down. While it’s too early to tell exactly how Helpful is going to fall out and its effects could take months to sprawl across the web, the update is having a substantial effect on sites that were actually affected. 

A quick but hardly deep dive into what Elon Musk's D.O.G.E. is doing and the technologies they're abusing to do it starts a conversation about the newest outrages of the week from around the Oval Office. We also talk about OpenAI4.5, a delay in data from the GSC API, CoPilot flying folks into the wrong repositories, the Chegg vs. Google case, Bing's AI Search tests, Google's crawler update spikes and crawl efficencies, Scrubbing search results, and nearly a dozen other Googley things. 

The Helpful Content Update wasn't about the content and the hope of recovery wasn't about to happen. Web publishes hit by the Helpful Content Update in September 2023 who attended Google's Web Creator Summit at the Googleplex this week were told the hope they'd held for seeing their rankings recover were likely in vain and that those placements were gone and not likely coming back. Oh, and it wasn't about the content. Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk about the disappointment and what disappointed publishers might do. They also talk about how Google has rolled AI Overviews out to over 100 countries, how Google is looking at similarity of content across websites, the no-data bug in GSC, SearchGTP, and the costs to Microsoft of growth through the development OpenAI. The show also looks at a number of pre-election issues and laughs about the 20 decillion dollar decision the Russian courts have leveled against Google. A fun news banter sort of show.

This was a weird week punctuated by the stupefyingly terrible news of the Titan submarine disaster, (which was confirmed by the US Coast Guard in the middle of the show recording), and the shockingly hilarious news of a potential cage match between tech billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. The early money is on Zuckerberg who is a trained MMA fighter and twelve years younger than the 51-year-old Musk. This is surprisingly real.

Other real things: Early bird tickets are still available for November's BrightonSEO USA in San Diego but the free ticket lottery opens on Monday. Google has introduced a new Core Web Vital, INP. Garry from Google goes over how ChatGPT and other LLMs are not reliable tools to diagnose SEO issues, the European Union is mandating Google break up its advertising business, Microsoft is developing an even more powerful AI which it code-named Orca, and USAToday is suing Google for decreasing ad revenues and monopolistic practices. Did we mention the high potentiality of the world's first and likely only billionaire cage match? It was a weird week.

This was a news and review show, wrapping up a number of weeks of talking about AI's effects on the search and on digital marketing. Going into the show hosts Jim Hedger of Digital Always Media and Kristine Schachinger of Sites Without Walls are expected to cover a lot of Google news and announcements. Almost predictively, AI managed to dominate a lot of the conversation despite our best intentions but when Microsoft's version of ChatGPT goes off on an NYTimes reporter trying to convince him to leave his partner and seek love with it, we sort of have to talk about it. Luckily, we also found time to talk about Google's new directives on Links, give an update on Google's Mobile First initiative, discuss Microsoft's new Terms of Service, make fun of Elon as the new King of Muskego, talk about better Lighthouse data, and happily lament the degradation and death of Internet Explorer. Gumbo episodes are lots of fun. 

This was a technical heavy show focusing on talking announcements from Pubcon, Google’s

Feb2023 Product Reviews Update, how Bing uses AI content, changes to credentials at Search Console,

Russian propagandists exploiting Twitter verification, and the cases in front of the US Supreme Court

that might threaten Section 260.

Google's August 2023 Core Update began running this week which makes this the August 2023 No Worries edition. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger explain what a Core Update is, how long they generally take, and how it's simply not worth worrying about the Core Update until the Core Update does its thing because we don't really know what the update is trying to accomplish until Google tells us or until it's done. Luckily, it was a mega-silly news week so there was a lot to talk about, starting with the ongoing weirdness that is Twitter which led to the launch of Meta's Threads on desktop which led to a lot of Google SEO news. This was a fun show in a worrying week where the overall mantra should be, "It's Only a Core Update, No Need to Worry."

Recorded on the 36th day of the March 2024 Core Update, the news segment of the show discusses what we know about the Core Update including that Helpful Content has been rolled into the Core Update. That suggests it will be part of Google's normal operations and that recovery can be possible.  Now, it's said if you don't understand the past you'll never figure out the future. One of the longest serving SEOs in the business, Terry Van Horne joins hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger to look at the history of Google updates going back to the Florida Update in 2003, trying to glean glimpses of Google's intentions and their outcomes.

YoastSEO has a holiday present ready for its Pro users, especially those who use WooCommerce. YoastSEO's Principle SEO Carolyn Shelby joins Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger to talk about the new AI feature in this the 24th version of the Yoast SEO tool. Carolyn is one of the longest serving SEOs in the business. Her career, which started in 1995, spans the entire history of digital marketing. She brings nearly three decades of experience to an experience of a lifetime, making what is arguably the most widely used SEO Toolset on the Web. Carolyn has been a friend for most of both Jim and Kristine's careers. She is also a former WebmasterRadio show host. For long time listeners, and for Jim and Kristine, it's a wonderful reunion on the radio with one of the most special people in our business. 

As the Actor's and Writer's strike continues, Netflix doubles down on its strong A.I. position by advertising a $900K / year A.I. Product Manager position. Even with the real-to-life drama of the writer and actor's strike, the weirdest news of the week goes to the social network formerly known as Twitter. Rebranded "X" on what appears to be a lifelong whim, the network Musk bought continues to sink into a swamp of its own making. We also get to discuss a lot of Google stuff including programmatic spam, reviews by cohorts of interest, and much, much more. Tune in to discover why X now marks the schlock. 

After a lengthy and highly revealing trial a federal court has ruled that Google is using its enormous resources to monopolise the search market in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act. “After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” US District Judge Amit Mehta wrote in his decision which has the potential to reshape the business of Internet dominance. We asked lawyer, journalist, and former WMR.FM host Bennet Kelley to explain the scope of the charges and how the ruling might affect Google's future. Bennet is the founder of the Internet Law Center and is considered on of America's top Internet lawyers. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger also discuss the new British government's reaction to Elon Musk's push for racial disharmony in the UK and Europe, an exodus of leadership at OpenAI, the new Search Console feature Google Recommends, and the coincidental timing of Google's announcements it would allow pubic hair grooming ads while it is also testing the new "Snippets you may like" label. From what we hear about anti-trust rulings, the first cuts are the deepest.

Jim and Dave speak with Ted Harrington who argues that companies need to take a similar approach to secure their systems. He explains how important it is to think outside the box and be willing to push boundaries in potentially troublesome ways, whether the subject is application security or something else entirely.

Ted Harrington is the author of HACKABLE: How to Do Application Security Right, and the Executive Partner at Independent Security Evaluators (ISE), the company of ethical hackers famous for being the first to hack the iPhone. He’s overseen security research hacking medical devices, password managers, and cryptocurrency wallets. Ted has helped hundreds of companies fix tens of thousands of security vulnerabilities, including Disney, Amazon, Google, Netflix, Adobe, Warner Brothers, Qualcomm, and more. For his stewardship of security research that Wired Magazine says “wins the prize, hands down,” Ted has been named both Executive of the Year [by American Business Awards] and 40 Under 40 [by SD Metro].  

He leads a team that started and organizes IoT Village, an event whose hacking contest is a three-time DEFCON Black Badge winner, and which represents the discovery of more than 300 zero-day vulnerabilities (and counting). Ted‘s work has been featured in more than 100 media outlets, including The New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and USA Today. Ted is a Boston Marathon finisher, and holds a Bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University, where he started his first company while a student.

A rough-voiced version of Webcology was recorded several days late due to illness. With Kristine Schachinger recovering from a second round of COVID-19 and Jim Hedger getting over a throat infection that temporarily cost him his voice, this is one of those "the show must go on" episodes. We cover a lot of news in this episode from major AI advancements to the outcomes of Google's Helpful Content update. (note, Jim found the document he insisted Kristine send him).

Danny Goodwin Talks to Jim and Dave About Joining Search Engine Land.

Search Engine Land is happy to welcome well-known search marketing journalist Danny Goodwin to the team as Senior Editor. Goodwin will join the editorial team, which also includes editors Barry Schwartz and George Nguyen, to help us to deliver best-in-class journalism on search and performance marketing to you – our global audience of digital marketers.

In addition to writing daily about SEO, PPC, and more for Search Engine Land, Goodwin will also manage and grow Search Engine Land’s roster of subject-matter experts. He will also help program our conference series SMX – Search Marketing Expo, working with our Events Content Director Kathy Bushman.

Prior to joining us, Goodwin was Executive Editor at Search Engine Journal, where he led editorial initiatives for the brand.

Goodwin is a respected member of the search community going all the way back to 2007 when he began as an editor for Search Engine Watch. He has spoken at many major search conferences and has been sourced for his expertise by a wide range of publications and podcasts. He’s seen first-hand how this industry has evolved over the years and we are thrilled that he will bring his intelligence and perspective to Search Engine Land and SMX.

It's been a week since Google dropped the long anticipated August 2024 Core Update. Hosts Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger talk about tempering early expectations in what is almost certainly a multi-faceted update, and discuss what SEOs and site owners might expect as the next three weeks grind on. There are promising signs for some and even some reversals of misfortune for others but there's still a few weeks to go before Google placements even out. When the update does end, how the search results will be composed and look for users might change. Jim and Kristine also talk about findings from Mark Traphagen at SEOClarity suggesting that higher rankings lead to higher chances of seeing links in AI Overview results, major issues with AI image generators, the arrest of Telegram app founder Pavel Durov, California's attempts to govern AI at the state level, Perplexity's plans to introduce ads to its AI features, the rise of children's accounts on Twixter, and a lot of Googley SEO stuff. - Note: our apologies for the late show. Jim's Aunt Lynda passed and it was a rather brutal week.

Google Researcher Punished Saying " Google’s Artificial Intelligence Had Achieved Sentience" as Google placed Blake Lemoine on leave last week after he published transcripts of conversations between himself, a Google “collaborator”, and the company’s LaMDA (language model for dialogue applications) chatbot development system. Is AI sentient?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine

Google Business Profile – Profile Strength Widget produces a box showing a representation of your profile’s health, along with prompts for creating offers, reviews, and new content or updates.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-business-profile-strength-widget-33596.html

Google Search Console Changes

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-console-invalid-or-valid-classifications-33594.html

Why Google Analytics and Google Search Console data differ

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-analytics-gsc-data-mismatch/438508/ 

Complete Guide to GSC

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/guide-google-search-console/452534/

Google experimenting with more featured snippets in SERPs

https://searchengineland.com/google-testing-new-featured-snippet-layouts-385861

Internet Explorer’s dead

Compare feature in GSC performance reports

https://searchengineland.com/google-search-console-testing-compare-feature-in-performance-reports-385855 

1+ Million WordPress sites affected by vulnerabilities that could lead to remote code execution attacks

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-vulnerability-in-essential-addons-for-elementor/436179/

Webcology named as one of the 15 top SEO podcasts

https://ahrefs.com/blog/best-seo-podcasts/

New Google Partners Program: After nearly two years, the new Partners program requirements have taken effect and Google will notify all Partners of their current status.

https://www.seroundtable.com/new-google-partners-program-32867.html

Facebook lost users for first time in a decade. Stock declined by 22%

Amidst months of controversial punishing updates, a disastrous A.I. rollout, and at least a year of questionable search results, SEOs and general search users are starting to ask if Google is actually broken. If it is working as it's supposed to, why are they trying so hard to fix it? Google says it's a matter of perspective so hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger try to walk through both sets of perspectives. The show also covers take aways from Barry Schwartz's SMX Advanced interview with Google's Elizabeth Tucker, Google's most recent responses to The Leak, a lot of turbulence at TwiXter (including Elon Musk's annoyance at the Apple - OpenAI deal), and, of course, the Apple - Open AI deal itself. An interesting week of as many news items as we can fit in an hour long show.

The Effect of Expired Landing Pages and other items from your website’s landfill on SEO https://searchengineland.com/how-expired-landing-pages-kill-your-google-rankings-377055

Great piece by Kasper Szymanski at SEL.Google local search algo update last week – coinciding with the introduction of the new Google (my) Business environment 

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-local-search-ranking-algorithm-update-32562.html

Relevancy and Core Update Factors, 

John Meuller refers SEOs a blog post Google posted in August 2019 https://www.seroundtable.com/google-help-advice-core-algorithm-updates-27984.html

(https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/08/core-updates.html) 

The recent Google Products Algo update is said to be larger than the one that ran six or seven months ago in April

https://searchengineland.com/googles-december-2021-product-reviews-update-was-bigger-than-the-april-product-reviews-update-say-data-providers-377056

A lot of search news this week and with Dave on the road in meetings Kristine Shachinger from Sites Without Walls in Las Vegas sat in with Jim to cover it. We started talking about Google's well-named new multi-analytic tag, The Google Tag, and how to properly apply it. 

John Mueller Says Search Result pages are relatively similar to no to low effort category pages. 

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-query-pages-equivalent-to-low-effort-category-pages-33699.html

FCC does not have the authority to force Apple or Google to remove TikTok from their stores however the US government continues to warn against it after US data was accessed by ByteDance Engineers from within China. FCC can fine TikTok and even force reforms on the company as reported in Axios earlier today

https://www.axios.com/2022/07/07/congress-tiktok-china-privacy-data

Google Search Console Insights now supports GA4 (only) 

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-console-insights-google-analytics-4-33706.html

From the what could go wrong file, Google testing Highly Rated By Users in Mobile Carousels. Google is testing a new carousel in the mobile search results named "Highly rated by users." This will show product results that have, um, high ratings from user reviews.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-highly-rated-by-users-carousel-33700.html

Google Merchant Center adds autotagging for all free listings on Google. When auto-tagging is enabled, after someone clicks your free product listing and free local product listing, auto-tagging adds some additional information including a parameter called "result id" to the URL parameters that searchers click on.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-merchant-center-auto-tagging-all-33709.html

Today's episode was recorded the day Russia invaded Ukraine. Jim and Dave speak with two SEO industry members living and working in Kiev, Igor Shulezhko and Anton Shulke.

Igor Shulezhko is a Russian speaking Ukranian living in Kiev. He is a brand ambassador for Serpstat, a cofounder of rankUP, and co-owner of Shmeo.link/. He has a friend translating for him.

Anton Shulke is head of Influencer Marketing at Duda, the highly SEO friendly CMS platform. Originally from Moscow, Anton lives in Kiev, Ukraine.

To cap off a disastrous PR month for Google, Mike King and Rand Fishkin published essays outlining the leak of a trove of Google APIs found in an open GitHub owned by Google. The SEO community's faith in Google had already been badly shaken since the series of updates which started back to early autumn 2023 and culminated in the HCU and March 2024 Core Updates. Now, after seeing what was in the documents, many feel as if Google misled or even lied to them. Debate in the SEO community is now fully engaged and already people are marketing new techniques and strategies based on findings they found in the documents that will go down in SEO history as, “The Leak”. Basically, Mike and Rand dropped what appears to be an 800lb gorilla into our midst and that gorilla needs a thorough examination before we let it run wild. To help us do that, we have in the studio one of the few SEOs we absolutely know to be qualified to dig into these documents. Ryan Jones is the Senior Vice President, SEO at Razorfish. He was instrumental in the dissection of Yandex last year and has spent the last few days digging into the documents and sharing his findings.

Tom Rusling from Audience Key drops in to talk about the myriad of ways Audience Key makes content creation and performance tracking easy, at least, that's what he came to talk about. This was a fun interview covering a lot of thoughts about the emerging content economy, how to build tools that meet SEO needs, and how AI is doing all the stuff AI is doing. We also talk about a massive data breach that compromised over 26 billion personal records, yet another congressional look at the behavior of AI and big tech, speedy WordPress plugins, and more SEO news.

Legendary SEO and all around friendly guy Tony Wright joins hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger for a wide open discussion about the future of SEO. Founder of one of the oldest agencies still operating, WrightIMC, Tony has lived through and adapted to sweeping changes in the course of his career. This episode, recorded on February 8, 2024, covers how to roll with change in a time when even Google itself appears to be having trouble adapting. This was a fun, smart conversation.

Welcome to the start of the second quarter of the 21st century. In the Chinese zodiac, 2025 is a year of the Snake, a period of extreme transformation as old ways are shed and new ones adopted. It seems like an apt description of what the coming year will be like. Things are going to change and if the news of this week is any indication, that change is so sweeping and encompassing, it is creating its own vortex in which all that falls in gets weirder and weirder and weirder. Here's a short list of some of the strange stuff we look at this week. Google has decided to be a start-up again. Apple is trying to save Google from the DOJ preferring the status quo over alternatives. Elon Musk's arguments have attracted odd bedfellows in his suit against OpenAI. Kekius Maximus rules Supremacists, and OpenAI's o3 cheated its ARC-AGI test and isn't that smart after all. That's just a start to the strange as we start this new year. We also talk about a lot of Google and Bingly stuff. Best wishes for 2025.

The Right to Remove Personal Identifiable information from Google

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-remove-pii-33326.html

Google, “we’re not stealing your content, you’re stealing ours!”

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-stealing-knowledge-panel-content-33328.html

New editor-in-chief at Search Engine Journal, Amanda Zantal-Wiener former Deputy Editor and Content Manager at HubSpot 

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/sej-eic-amanda-zantal-wiener/447271/

Using AI, false DMCA notices, and fake lawyers to generate or coerce backlinks

https://www.seroundtable.com/fake-dmca-ai-generated-lawyers-links-33308.html

EU amendments to the Digital Services Act calls for Google to show key parts of algorithm and to perhaps allow users to influence the information they see 

https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/proposal_for_a_regulation_on_a_single_market_for_digital_services.pdf

Google updates 3-strike policy for advertisers adds nine new areas of concern

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-ads-implements-3-strike-policy-rule/447780/

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ads-strike-based-system-9-more-33306.html

Google notes financial impact of Russia’s illegal invasion and occupation of Ukraine. 

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-feels-earnings-impact-from-russian-war-on-ukraine/447684/ 

Covering a busy week in search this episode closes with a 20 minute interview with CEO of A.I. driven search engine You.com, Richard Socher. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk about Google's freshly launched June2024 Spam Update, some Reddit heavy SERPS, unstoppable AI Overviews, the beneficial myth of traffic diversity, the ups and downs of crawl spikes, Microsoft's recall of Microsoft Recall, and a whole lot more. In the days before the show was recorded, Jim visited Web Summit's massive Collision Conference 2024 where big money, big ideas, and big organizations meet in a three day intellectual frenzy.   Jim speaks with one of the earliest pioneers of A.I., Richard Socher in a one-on-one interview recorded near the end of Collision 2024 in Toronto. CEO of You.com, Richard leads what is arguably the most innovative newer search engine. Combining generative AI from several sources with algorithmic search, You.com is working to build and perfect a set of highly proficient A.I. assistants designed around the idea that information should be easily accessible and easy to make use of. It was a fun conversation and a great chance to ask questions of one of the driving forces behind A.I. in search.

It was a busy news week made up mostly of Google trying to disabuse parts of the SEO community from the idea that E-E-A-T is anything more than an ideal. Google came out and said E-E-A-T is absolutely and unequivocally not a ranking factor, a ranking signal, or a ranking system and that E-E-A-T has less to do with how sites rank as much as it does with things Google Search Quality Raters should look for when evaluating the quality of search engine results. And yet, some folks wanna argue about it which makes hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger want to talk about it, at least Jim does. The show also covers Google Gemini which is so new and better it has replaced Bard, changes at Google Search Console, How a Helpful Content problem might not be, and how Google might clarify use of AI to generate on-page content.

Olesia Korobka joins us to talk about the SEO Charity Conference taking place online on March 27 for the Ukraine Animal Relief charity SEO for Paw founded by Anton Shulke. Before Olesia jumps in, we talk about Tuesday's State of the Union address in which, among other things, the CHIPS Act was threatened in a weirdly long ramble about bad deals. We also talk about Elon Musk's continued misadventures due to DOGE's misunderstanding of COBOL. Which somehow brought us to talking about Sergey Brin's musings about how a 60 hour work week (Five 12 hour days) brings the perfect blend between hard work and achievement. He figures that's what's necessary if his people ever want to achieve AGI before anyone else does. Achieving AGI is important and could be worth incalculable riches. The most advanced LLM, ChatGPT4.5 places the value of PHD level workers at about $20,000/mth, according to a new service ChatGPT is considering. Meta is about to deploy innumerable AI Agents in service of businesses on Facebook and Meta. It was revealed that Google Ads has mystery shopper ratings but it's a mystery how that works. Google Search Liaison gained an assistant named Rajan. Androids got a brand new scam buster. That and a whole lot more on an outrageous rollicking show. Don't forget about the SEO Charity event on March 27. 

The American president declared himself a king this week. In the meantime, Meta is laying off thousands of people and deleting a number of old live broadcast recordings. TikTok is restructuring towards laying offs too. Google Reviews and Google Business are fixing bugs while Google's Business Profiles support team is absolutely backlogged. Whoddathunkit but,AIs like ChatGPT and DeepSeek might cheat to win simple games. Google makes the Gemini App the only way to access Google's AI on iOS. Google's Ad-Tech users can now target national security decision makers and people with chronic diseases. Most importantly (besides the king thing), Kevin Indig writes-up a meta-study he did of 19 serious studies of Google AI Overviews in Search Engine Journal in a long but SEO must-read article. Lots of other fun Googley stuff in a fast paced episode unafraid to say, "the king is a fink".

It's reporting season and there's fallout on the floor. Shopify lays off 10% of the workforce on bad Ecomm bets while Meta(Facebook) posts its first quarterly loss in the company's history...

As Google's March 2024 Core Update enters its fourth week, and major league baseball finally returns, hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger cover a lot of conversation, theory, and the rising F.U.D. about the update. There are a lot of rumors, deep anger and resentment, and some genuinely bizarre advice being shared in SEO forums. There is also some genuinely good research and discussion happening in other SEO circles but it takes way longer to come to any conclusions and many in the SEO world appear to be rapidly losing patience. The show also covers announcements and news from OpenAI, TwiXter, TikTok, and tries to figure out what Google is doing in the travel, mapping, and shopping spaces.

Maybe it's the eye of a hurricane, maybe it's the calm before a brand new storm. It's really hard to tell these days but after a disasterous rock-eating rollout, Google is pulling back on AI Overviews. The SEO world has mixed reactions to The Leak, which is turning out as predicted, much ado about something but we're not sure exactly what. Some sort of garbled sense of stability appears to be returning to the SERPs as the effects of the March 2024 Core Update and the slew of previous and attendent updates start to play together, more or less as Google planned, or so we think. As the dust settles in Googlandia, the effects of flaky search results are showing in user comments with 54% of people complaining they have to look through more results than they did five years ago to find information, often having to rephrase their queries altogether. Meanwhile, OpenAI workers are asking for the "right to warn" of potential dangers, TwiXter has made distributing porn great again while running paid ads against racist and antisemitic hashtags, Microsoft's Recall AI can be tricked into revealing ever-saved personal data, MozCon20 perceives a crisis, and Google says Mobile First is... actually, we're not exactly sure what they were getting at. Confused? You won't be after listening to this.

Back from a the July 4th long weekend's rest, hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk through events of the last couple weeks, that look like Google and other players in the search world are pulling back from the promise of A.I. generated answers to the real world queries of their users. One example is how Google is showing far fewer A.I. Overviews in result sets today than it was in early May when it announced a disaster ridden shift to the A.I. everything universe. Given the enormous expenses in money and resources used in training, maintaining, and running A.I., economists are speculating on if the hype around A.I. is producing real value or inflating the world's biggest bubble based on rampant speculation. But that's not the confusing part. We also look at some simplified answers to some complicated questions from Google spokespeople who are usually clearer when muddying stuff up. Happily, our reports about the Helpful Content Update and decimation were apparently quite helpful. Some people still think it's Redditiculous how a Reddit expert's opinion can rank above that of a medical, legal, engineering, or other certifiable expert's opinion in search engine rankings. That might be because of the complex dimensions of credible information beyond the flat first one, credibility. Confused? We still are and you might be too but we still gotta sell soap.

In an interesting interview with A.I. researcher and artist Eryk Salvaggio, founder of the Algorithmic Resistance Research Group (ARRG!), hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger discuss generative A.I. and the arts. After Eyrk explains how A.I. image models work to generate images from chaos, the interview explores the immediate effects of A.I. on the art world, how A.I. might shape or augment an artist’s creativity, how it will impact the business models of creativity, and how to protect artists and content creators. Along the way, we examine some of the ethics of using generative A.I. in art and also explore the ethics of creating art designed purposefully to subvert A.I. training models. The continuation of our series on A.I.s impact, one year on, is a fun yet challenging episode.

Jim and Dave discuss how John Mueller of Google responded to a complaint on Reddit where the SEO or site owner was upset his one month old site was not performing on Google Search. The SEO said despite him "created backlinks on top websites with good DA and low spam score" his site is just not showing up.

SERoundtable shared the back and forth.

Here was his post, "I have created backlinks on top websites with good DA and low spam score but its been 1 month and still I'm unable to see my backlinks getting index on google search. I cant even find them on Semrush. Is there any solution or I have to wait more?"

John Mueller's response was like a teacher giving a harsh one-on-one to a kid who caused trouble in class. John replies:

(1) You are wasting your time:

I'm torn about leaving a snarky reply, but to be a bit more useful, I'd consider that perhaps you're not spending your time on things that are as effective for SEO as you'd like. Dropping links on random sites is not SEO anymore, it's just spam. All search engines have had to deal & ignore these kinds of things for years now.

(2) You are focused too much on the tools:

This is not to mention that a SEO tool will never be able to tell you if a "link is indexed". Everyone who crawls the web does it in a different way, with different speeds, with different assumptions. Even if you can see a link in the Google cache, that says absolutely nothing about whether that link is used for anything in search.

(3) Throw your strategy away and focus on long term, real effort strategies:

If you're trying to improve on SEO, my strong recommendation would be to throw all of this thinking out. You're wasting your own time on it now, and even if something accidentally happens to stick for a bit, it will quickly dry up - search engines have a lot of practice with low-effort, low-quality stuff, and they have no interest in spending any energy on it if they can.

So the response from the SEO was that he has "no technical issues" on his site and the "content is of good quality and unique" but he is super upset about his backlinks (which makes no sense but okay). He then goes to list that he has "dofollow links" from sites like HotFrog, Yelp, Foursquare, Chamber of Commerce. He then demands that his "backlinks cant be ignored."

So John Mueller replies again in a harsher but caring way:

I don't know your site (and don't really have time to dig into anything at the moment), but to be quite honest, all of what you've said there raises red flags for me in terms of low-effort / low-quality sites. Maybe it's ok enough to scrape by at some point, but at that level, you're going to see things come & go randomly, as updates happen across search engines.Maybe you don't care about long-term success, maybe getting some quick traffic & leaving is fine for you - that's ultimately up to you and everyone has done quick hacks in the past too. If you do care about long-term success in search with this site, or want to learn how to work on legitimate long-term sites, I'd recommend, well, not spending too much time on trying to hack together links like this.

A news coverage show that tried to focus on organic search with a lot of changes to report at Google. The biggest story this week has been the rollout of Google’s new Review Update expanding to cover reviews about products, services, and things. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger also talk about how a page or site’s quality can degrade over time, how schema triggers different types of SERPs, how the March 2023 Core Update might have affected local search, using ChatGPT for research, and the ongoing saga of strange going’s on at the social network formerly known as Twitter.

Longtime WordPress contributor Jono Alderson joins Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger to discuss the very weird goings on at WordPress. The interview starts around the 35 minute mark. Before Jono joins us, Kristine and Jim discuss the news of the week including a short update on the WordPress situation and stories from Google, OpenAI, TwiXter, and more.

As the August 2024 Core Update continues, Google introduces Custom Gems a chatbot framework that promotes the creation and constant training of AI "Experts", digital companions to help Google users go about the business of being hypercreative. This is possibly the greatest challenge to all other AI makers and arguably the most audacious outline for the future of virtual expertise. Back to the core update, some sense of recovery is being felt by many publishers who were hurt during the September and March Helpful Content Updates but there is still a few weeks to go so show hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger warn webmasters to temper their expectations. OpenAI and Anthropic have agreed to allow government to access major new AI models during development to help ensure safety, Twixter is actively interfering in the upcoming November election while it threatens a Brazilian judge who threatens to shut it down in Brazil. This as presidential hopeful Donald Trump threatens to throw Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in jail if he interferes in the upcoming election. Yelp is filing its own antitrust based action against Google while a judge in one of the ongoing antitrust cases admonishes Google for not playing fair in court. It's been a busy week. The show does spend a lot of time on a lot of Google SEO matters but it says a lot about the state of the industry when working through SEO issues is less complicated than the legal and ethical challenges facing the biggest platforms in the industry. As we said, it's been a busy week but it's the last days of summer and a long weekend is coming up and September brings serious season back upon us next week.

Jono Alderson is a well known SEO Consultant, one of the top WordPress contributors, and a bonafide Digital Superstar. He joined Jim and Kristine to fill us in on the backstory and implications of the ongoing drama in the world of WordPress. Jono has been around for a long time. He knows where the bodies are buried and in this interview, he explains how it unfolded to get to where we're at now. 

Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:

·         Name: Google helpful content update

·         Launch Date: It began to rollout on August 25th

·         Rollout: It will take about two weeks to fully roll out

·         Targets: It looks at content that was created to rank well in search over help humans

·         Search Only: This currently only impacts Google Search, not Google Discover or other Google surfaces. But Google may expand this to Discover and more in the future.

·         Penalty: Google did not mention penalty but this update does seem to feel like a penalty for sites that will be hit by it

·         Sitewide: This is a sitewide algorithm, so the whole site will be impacted by this update

·         Not a core update: Many are going to say this is a core update, it is not.

·         English Language but will expand: This is only looking at English-language content globally now but likely will expand to other languages.

·         Impact: Google would not tell me what percentage of queries or searches were impacted by this update but Google did tell me it would be "meaningful." Also, Google said this will be felt more for online-educational materials, entertainment, shopping, and tech-related content.

·         Recover: If you were hit by this, then you will need to look at your content and see if you can do better with Google's advice below

·         Refreshes: Google updates the scores constantly here but there is a timeout period, and a validation period and it can take several months to recover from this update.

New Google tool allows you to import goals from Universal Analytics (UA3) to GA4

https://www.seroundtable.com/universal-analytics-goals-import-google-analytics-33268.html

Don’t tell them it’s broken Roger, tell them the issue is Statically Evolving. 

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-analytics-real-time-reporting-bugs-33291.html

Tweak New Twitter

Home > Extentions > Tweak New Twitter

Google AI creating Google sourced Knowledge Panels

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-writing-its-own-knowledge-panels-33290.html

lose-work-without-warning/

Don’t switch horses in mid stream. Don’t change tires while driving. Don’t try to test new URLs on live sites just because. 

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-dont-change-urls-and-change-them-back-seo-33237.html

Ahrefs has raised 1.5Million for Ukraine

https://searchengineland.com/ahrefs-ukraine-fundraising-383731

Guttenberg 13.0 showing features coming in WP6

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-gutenberg-13/446758/

Best times and worst times to post to social media

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/best-times-to-post-on-social-media-in-2022/446255/

The August 2024 Core Update ended a week early and it might still be too soon to tell the winners from the losers but one thing is clear, Google can always be depended on to try to do what's best for Google. Some have seen drops in traffic while others have seen increases and still others have seen no changes at all. This update does appear to be setting a foundation for an increase in AI Overviews in results. Webcology hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk about the effects of this core update, the new International Framework Convention on AI, the DOJ indictment of Russian backed American far-right media empire, advances at OpenAI, how Elon Musk has torched tens of billions of his friends' monies, more legal troubles in Google's present and future, SearchGPT, and a lot of SEO thoughts about Google. This was a fun and fast paced episode.

There was a lot of Google news to cover this week in a short break from our usual breathless coverage of the AI revolution. This week hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger discuss a number of Google and social media stories, along with thanking Search Engine Journal for including Webcology in the Top SEO Podcasts for 2023. This week we covered

• the growth of Spoutable
• Elon's Secret faux-minor Twitter profile
• Google Product Updates - GA4 is coming
• Google April 2023 Reviews Update done rolling out
• Google rewriting page titles in SERPs (again)
• and the bipartisan plan to limit social media access to ages 13 and over

Most SEOs consider Google Search Console (GSC) their source of truth and trust the data to be accurate. What if I told you that GSC doesn’t tell you all of the keywords you’re getting traffic from? In fact, the tool doesn’t show a term for nearly half the clicks.

These instances of hidden terms account for 46.08% of all clicks in our study. The study includes one month of data across 146,741 websites and nearly 9 billion total clicks.

Google Updates Help Docs in wake of Stox’s Study.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-console-anonymizes-tons-of-queries-33735.html

GA4 supports Urchin Tracking Parameters (UTM) UTM Term, UTM Content, Conversion and Bounce Rate metrics 

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-analytics-4-gains-utm-term-utm-content-conversion-bounce-rate-33744.html

Google My Business App has ceased functioning

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-my-business-app-no-longer-available-33743.html

Google Maps App suggested as way to be able to message customer

There is no such thing as a ratio of nofollow to follow links in Google Rankings. 

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ratio-of-follow-to-nofollow-links-33711.html

Is the type of CMS used to build a site a ranking factor?

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/does-the-cms-matter-for-search-rankings/457580/

Massive set of updates and bug fixes released with WordPress 6.0.1

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-6-0-1-maintenance-update-released-with-multiple-bug-fixes/457471/#close

Google Data Studio and how to use it

https://searchengineland.com/google-data-studio-258871

If you are interested in sponsoring Webcology please email brasco@wmr.fm

Jim Hedger and Dave Davies have a fun rambling trip through Google’s most recent September Core Update and the newest Products Review Update, both of which stopped rolling out on September 26. Explaining how Google is merging its newly gained powers of perception with its foundation in link references, Jim and Dave explore the history and implications of Google's algorithm and core updates over the years.

We are in a time of sweeping change driven by A.I. yet there remains a great deal of confusion about how Large Language Models work and how A.I. content is actually generated. Over the coming weeks, we hope to help change that. In the ten months since the public introduction of ChatGPT, we've used a lot of airtime talking about AI and the Large Language Models behind it. We've talked about extraordinary uses of A.I. and very reasonable fears about how A.I. is going to be used. Like many others in the search industry, show hosts Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger have a better-than-average understanding of A.I. but, they also understand that relative to our guests they're merely well-informed laypersons. - LLM researcher Gavin Klondike joins us in this first of a several-week series to explain the basic concepts behind LLMs. Gavin helped organize the A.I. Village at this year's DEFCON which is where Kristine met him. In this episode, Gavin breaks down how LLMs are built and taught to predict the most likely syntax with which to construct a response to a prompt. He explains many of the processes LLMs use to generate responses and provides what is perhaps the very best analogy explaining how A.I. simply can never understand the topic at hand, even if it can help you understand that topic better. - This was a fascinating, frightening, enlightening, and highly entertaining interview that will absolutely help you understand the technology that's rapidly altering the ecology of the Web.

Another week, another article explaining how SEO has shaped the Web was written by someone who doesn't appear to understand how SEO shaped the Web. The week hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk about a piece that appears in The Verge that almost but not quite gets it and then proceeds to share numerous SEO myths and misunderstandings. We also talk about Google's SGE product carousel, more ways to use schema, and new Google changes coming to deal with spam, and hopefully, we dispel a couple of other SEO myths along the way.

Due to a scheduling conflict, this show was recorded a day late but it went nearly an extra hour overtime because there was just so much to talk about. There was a lot of negative news about AI as AI developers find new sources of content to train on and users find new ways to use and abuse new AI tool sets. From AI developing or enhancing video games to the depravities that have horrified a proprieter of an AI powered porn-site to OpenAI musing about putting AI systems into the bodies of humanoid robots, hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk about AI's influence and Google in the week leading up to the March 2024 Core Update. A long but often highly charged and interesting edition.

An article in Verve titled, "The people who ruined the Internet", teaches hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger a valuable lesson; if you're really going to really ruin something as big as the Internet, you'll want to include a live alligator for extra emphasis. Jim and Kristine, who both know most of the people quoted in the article personally, are awestruck at how badly off-base a really well-written article about SEO could be. There's a lot to unpack, dissect, reframe, cut into very tiny pieces, and virtually snort off the turntable here but, like all good SEOs, we try.