The SEO update by Yoast – December 2024 Edition

Welcome everyone to the all new SEO update by Yoast.

Let me get this starting screen out of the way because we’re ready for the last update of the year.

And I hope you are too.

We have a lot of people joining and I’m seeing all places from the whole wide world.

So welcome everybody to this stream and I won’t keep it very long as we have a lot of news to cover.

Although the last edition was only two weeks ago.

It doesn’t matter.

We want to go out with a big blast of news updates this year.

Before I go into some household notices, I am Nynke de Blaauw.

I work at Yoast as the Director of Partnerships.

I have been working here for four years and our principal SEOs, Carolyn and Alex, will take you through today’s news.

Before we get started, two things that are important if you’re maybe a first time joiner.

This edition will be recorded.

Everything you need to know about the news, all the resources and also the recording, you can find in the resources list.

And it should appear in a link below.

But otherwise, here’s the link in the chat as well.

Find all resources of this update right there.

And obviously, we will have room for questions at the end of this webinar or update.

So get your questions in the Q&A section.

You can upvote questions of other people if you find those interesting.

We know which questions to cover first during the Q&A.

We’ll try to make as much time as we can for Q&A.

But other than that, I think we’re good to go.

Okay, Alex and Carolyn, I’m inviting you on screen.

There they are.

Looking all Christmassy.

How awesome is that?

Yeah, you just need to show it a little bit better.

I’m on one of the standing desks, so there’s not much flexibility I have now.

I’m just making a suggestion.

Oh, Carolyn’s on mute.

Wait, I can unmute her.

Oh, sorry.

You have to stand up and show us it’s a turkey because all we can see is it’s brown and it looks like Mr.

Hankey.

It’s a turkey.

See you around?

I like that though.

I like the potential Mr.

Hankey though.

I mean, I’d wear a Mr.

Hankey jumper as well, but let’s not get into Mr.

Hankey though.

Okay, I’ll leave you two to it and I’ll be back in during Q&A.

Have fun, everyone.

Enjoy the last edition of the year.

All right.

So let’s see.

So when was our last one?

The 26th?

Yeah.

It felt like it was 10 minutes ago, honestly.

Let’s get the, we need to get the slides down in the, I can’t move them.

I can do that.

There we go.

Thank you.

All right.

So let’s get started, I guess.

This is me and Alex.

You guys know who we are.

What we’re going to discuss today, we’ve got some SEO and AI news.

We’ve got a little bit of Yoast news and we want to leave a lot of time for Q&A because I know we are notoriously bad about not doing so.

So the plan is we’re going to buzz through the news quickly and then we will have plenty of time for all of your questions and we’ll do a little extra Q&A for, as an early Christmas present for everybody.

Some housekeeping.

And I, Nynke already covered this, but please feel free to ask questions.

Vote other questions if you’d like to see them answered.

That’s how we know what you’re interested in hearing about and we do our best to meet those requirements.

If you’d like to learn more about today’s topics, as always, the entire recap and transcript are going to be available at the website that you see there.

The next how to start with SEO webinar is going to be December 18th, which is two days from now.

So if you’re here and you’re like, this is really a little bit more advanced than what I’m looking for and I need something a little bit more intro.

The how to start with SEO webinar is definitely the one that you want to catch.

It starts at 10 a.m.

Eastern time, 4 p.m. if you’re in Europe.

So hopefully you’ll be able to catch that before the Christmas holidays.

And I think we are probably ready to get started.

You ready to go, Alex?

I’m ready to go.

All right, let’s get this done.

Okay, so I will real quick talk about this one.

This looks complicated.

It’s not really as complicated as it looks.

C2PA metadata can appear in Google search.

If you skip down to that last bullet, honestly, all this means is that Google is going to be able to snip out if your image was made by AI because there’s metadata that appears in those AI images.

Don’t try to pass off AI generated images as legitimate, undoctored images because the metadata is going to give it away.

It’s going to get labeled as AI and you’re going to look like a liar.

So the TLDR is don’t do that.

The next thing that we’re going to cover is the first draft of the general purpose AI code of practice has been published by the European Commission.

It’s just the first draft.

It’s focusing on transparency, copyright, systemic risk management.

It sounds terribly interesting, but it’s a government body’s paper, so you have to kind of expect these things.

There’s four drafting rounds, and this is just the first one.

It’s not going to conclude until April.

The goal is to ensure that AI is trustworthy and it’s, you know, all of these rules are tailored in compliance with subject matter experts on, like, open source models and things like that.

I don’t think this is anything to panic about.

Like I said, there’s four more drafting, or there’s three more drafting rounds after this one.

We’ll know in April if there’s going to be any major impact to how we do business, but I don’t expect there to be.

So this is just something to kind of keep in mind.

If you are interested in reading what the first draft has to say, we’ll have a link for you in the recap.

Yeah, I guess so.

I mean, that’s law.

That takes ages, though.

You know, by the time the third draft is in, like, AI will be old school.

It’ll be like the cassette already, and there’ll be something else.

Probably creating its own laws for itself.

Our robot overlords will have already taken over, so it won’t matter.

Exactly.

It’s fine.

Everything’s fine.

I’m sure 2030 will be cool for everyone.

But until then, AI are, I think, in the game for taking on Chrome, which I think is quite interesting.

So they’re going into the browsing experience in general.

And whilst they talk about it going into ChatGPT and SearchGPT’s offering, this may become a new product that will create more mass adoption for ChatGPT and OpenAI as a whole.

And to go with that, a few days later, they announced that they’d hired a former Chrome architect from Google.

They’re hiring a Google Play, who’s going to go with that, and they’re hiring a Google Play Store.

Well, and OpenAI is an American company, so I don’t know that they’re going to put the European Commission’s preferences and desires at the forefront of their design strategy.

Yes.

Yes.

I forget that the Europe isn’t obviously the whole world.

And America is a whole different ballgame when it comes to that stuff.

I don’t know why that’s a good thing.

Well, we do tend to worry far less about what the Europeans think than what our own government thinks.

So it colors the way products are developed because those rules are secondary and the addressable market in Europe isn’t as large as the total addressable market in the U.S.

So companies, justifiably care more about the U.S. regulations than they do about what’s going to happen after the fact in Europe.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So let’s see what happens with the browser wars.

I am as well because I know that ARC have been doing stuff and then they kind of stopped, I think, doing ARC.

But now they’re going more into an AI-driven one.

And I know that ARC already has AI into it and some people use it.

And if you’re into AI browsing experiences, I suggest using ARC at least until OpenAI blatantly release one in Q3.

I’m going to go with Q3.

Is that your plan?

I reckon, yeah.

We’ll flag that and we’ll see how you’re up.

Flag it up in July.

Right.

The pre-holiday research that needs to be done or making sure that you need it for a holiday.

But up until that point, Google have added recommendations in GA about Merchant Center recommendations specifically to help fix product issues and way things to disapprove.

And it’s kind of connecting the two together, which I always find useful.

And, for the e-commerce store owners who are listening to this will find it extremely useful that they don’t have to just rely what’s going on in Merchant Center.

And they can be made aware elsewhere about things that they can optimize.

So I think it’s pretty cool.

Small gains, but every little helps, right?

Every little bit helps.

That’s for sure.

Apparently, Google Search has seen a UK decline.

Yeah.

I mean, we’re more open to testing things, right?

You think so?

Also, we think so.

Yes.

We think so.

I don’t know so, but I think so.

But I also…

Well, the second part of this title is very British, I think.

You know, we express low trust in AI.

Just change AI to anything new.

We will definitely question those things.

I don’t know.

As a Brit, I know that I’m stuck in my old ways with certain things.

We were even discussing earlier today how I’m only now doing more and more ChatGPT stuff.

And I felt like the Britishness in me was saying, no, I don’t like change.

I like my Google search bar.

And that’s where I’m sticking.

Not as an SEO, but as a Brit.

And now I open my mind to it.

And maybe I’m now contributing towards this UK decline that I’m seeing.

Because not just me, but other people.

Let’s just say that normal people I didn’t expect to hear about perplexity are talking about perplexity.

Complete technophones, in my opinion.

They don’t know what the hell’s going on with AI, but they know they use perplexity for things that they do in work.

And that, I would say, should worry Google.

A lot.

And then maybe this data is going to make someone stand up a bit more.

Unless they’re already on a standing desk.

I don’t know.

But if they would act a bit faster to what the audience wants and not what they think needs to happen in the next three years.

I think Google might be concerned about what’s going on.

I know in the last update, I reported that when Search GPT was made available to everyone, it popped up a thing and said, hey, install our Chrome plugin and it’ll help you.

So I installed the Chrome plugin and it effectively hijacked Chrome.

So every time I typed something into my Google search bar, it piped it through Search GPT and it shot me straight into ChatGPT.

So there was no, there was no, I could just type something in and go Google it.

Like just Googling things became very, very difficult for me.

So all of the searches that I had been doing in Google got shunted over to ChatGPT.

I’ve noticed that there’s been a couple updates to my Chrome and that functionality no longer exists.

I didn’t install anything, but I think Google went, hey, hey, no.

And shipped some, and I don’t have proof of this.

All I know is suddenly, suddenly that isn’t working anymore.

And I’m able to do Google searches again, just by going to that search bar.

So I think, I think Google is concerned.

Interesting.

I like also, by the way, as we go to the next slide, how we’re talking about AI and new platforms.

There’s a bunch of people having nostalgia of old platforms like AltaVista and Webcrawler.

I love that.

It also shows our age, right?

Shh.

We didn’t talk about that.

No, no, no, no.

No, Chromium.

What are they up to with Chrome in general?

Since we’re talking about that, there was a report done about how Chrome site engagement metrics are used.

So there’s scores, 0 to 100, as one does.

They measure user interaction and enhance, or to enhance the browser experience.

And the scores decay, which means if you score 100 today, but you make no changes over the course of the next six months, that score is going to get less because you’re not doing anything to improve the user experience.

So what they’re saying is there’s no possibility of being perfect and then just staying there.

You can’t just rest on your laurels.

They’re engineering it so you have to consistently and regularly make updates to improve that user experience.

It helps them allocate resources, enable features, and sort sites based on user engagement.

So if users are engaged in the beginning and then they kind of fall off, that’s going to make you less desirable.

If users stay consistently engaged, they will consistently rank you higher and help you attract more users because it’s going to help with your rankings.

The scores are device specific.

They are isolated and incognito and erased with history or inactivity.

So it’s things that kind of, it’s a score that exists within a specific portion of Chrome and Chromium.

And it’s not something that is reported to, I think, the mothership or added to your permanent record type of thing.

It’s very user-end specific, which I think is interesting to know.

So it’s not something you’re going to be able to fix necessarily.

Let me rephrase that.

In the past, sometimes things would break for a certain device or for a certain browser.

And as SEOs, we would look at that and say, I don’t care much about the people that are dumb enough to keep using that thing.

The way this works is because all of those things are scored, a bad score in one of those areas could affect things negatively everywhere.

So you do have to be concerned about the user experience of everyone, not just this is the browser I use, so this is the browser I care about kind of thing.

Which is, I mean, it’s a subtle difference, but I think it’s interesting to know.

Yeah, yeah.

I added what you can type into Chrome or, sorry, a Chromium-based browser.

So if you’re using Brave, et cetera, you can use it there.

You just type that Chrome colon, blah in there, and then you’ll be able to see everything you need to see.

Oh, yeah.

Excellent.

And I’ve also added in Dejan’s blog post that goes into highly technical detail if you want to geek out and see everything that it looks at.

He can be very, very technical.

So this would be a fun thing for you to test your favorite AI tool on.

Feed his blog post into it and say, can you explain this to me like I’m a five-year-old?

Because I use that phrase all the time.

It’s very helpful, especially when you’re trying to interpret something that is really outside of your field of expertise and you need some help digesting it.

So this would be a great opportunity to test that functionality.

Tell us about BlueSky, Alex.

Have you moved over to BlueSky?

No, I mean, I bought myself, I secured my usernames as best as I could because I’ve not got the most unique name.

But other than that, I mean, I think I’m the classic.

I installed it once, browsed through it once, twice maybe, and then never went back.

And maybe this is why I was skeptical about including this as a news item because right now, I’m sure that the data will say that three times as much engagement is happening on BlueSky.

But two things.

First of all, like, what are those numbers?

What’s that three times as much as what?

What set of data?

Is it a big set of data?

That’s one thing.

The other thing is that maybe this is a trend.

And I think that I use Threads as an example when in the first two weeks you would hear lots of stories about its supersonic growth and how many people have opened a cat.

And then, if you were to look at the same article three months later, you know, that trend has gone way down.

And it was just that FOMO of opening a new account on a new social platform where I found, at least with Threads, I think 95% of the updates were people telling me that they’d left X to go there.

But I don’t need to know that.

I don’t need to know that people have arrived somewhere or leaving.

I think someone actually said on X, like, you’re not an airport.

You don’t need to declare if you’re leaving or arriving on a social platform.

And I get that, but it’s okay.

But I would say for people listening and watching now, is BlueSky actually a place where you’re going to find out?

What’s the high value for you for what you’re selling as a product or a service?

Is your audience there engaging?

Because if they’re not, then there’s no point.

Just like some businesses and products aren’t going to go on to, LinkedIn to sell their stuff because it’s not the most appropriate social network to be on.

I think what’s going to happen, so this migration to BlueSky is very similar to the migration to Parler before Parler was shut down.

It’s in the opposite direction.

And it’s the users self-segregating.

And it becomes a little echo chamber.

And if it has staying power, it’s going to be interesting for businesses because you’re going to have to decide, are you going to invest in having a presence in the old place where everyone hung out and the new place where half of the people are hanging out?

Because now it’s just polarizing and self-segregating by political affiliation, really.

So businesses are going to have to make those decisions.

Who’s our audience and where are we going to invest our money?

And are we trying to please everyone, so we have to invest and be in all the places where all the people are?

It’s interesting to see, but everyone getting excited about 3x engagement.

Their engagement was pretty low to begin with.

And now it’s skyrocketed.

But 3x of 5 is 15, whereas 3x of 5 million is 15 million.

So there’s differences.

When you give percentages, it’s less impressive than if you were giving hard numbers and the hard numbers were impressive.

It is.

It is.

But again, that’s not to say don’t use it.

Look, again, I’m seeing in the chat that this guy is really working for people.

And like you said, maybe half the audience is there.

But the other question is, which half?

Like, is it the more valuable half?

Because if that’s the case, then the 50% on the other one, you’re shouting to half into a void, essentially.

So whilst I’m skeptical on some stuff like this and say, is it a trend or is it something that’s going to stick in the long term, like Mastodon joins the conversation as well, then I’m all for it, right?

I’m all for, you know, different social networks being around for different audiences.

There are, otherwise, there’d just be one, right?

I am vaguely curious if a company tries to have a foot in both camps, basically, where they’re advertising to the people, let’s say the people on the right that stayed on X and then the people on the left that all went over to BlueSky, assuming that that’s how it breaks down, if it breaks down cleanly.

If you’re trying to reach both of those, do you tailor your message for each?

And then if someone shares a screenshot of your ad there on the other place and goes, look, they’re lying to you.

And like, oh, yeah, no, they’re lying to you.

And then what does that do to your marketing campaigns?

It’s an interesting conundrum.

I don’t know if it’s terribly, it’s necessarily SEO related, but it’s interesting in terms of how you’re going to divide up your marketing budget.

Fun things to worry about over Christmas.

Yeah, yeah.

All right.

So how do people use Google?

SparkToro did an analysis, looking at 332 million queries over 21 months about how people are using Google.

They found that Google does still hold over 90% of the market share and drive 60% of referral traffic, which is not unexpected.

I think we all kind of knew that.

A third of the searches being navigational and over half are informational.

I think that’s interesting because I think Google would like it to be a lot more commercial.

They make money on those commercial queries.

So I think it’s interesting that there are still so many that are navigational and so many that are informational.

Navigational is like when your mom types in AOL.com into the Google search when she means to go to AOL.com, but she accidentally types it in as a query.

That’s what they mean by navigational.

So there are still clearly.

I think we could extrapolate.

There are a lot of old people that are still using the Google to get around and don’t quite understand how modern browsers work, which is, you know, it’s cute.

Branded search queries are nearly half of the searches.

A small set of top queries drive all of the demand.

Everything else is long tail, but the long tail is minimal in comparison to those brand queries and the head terms that we call them.

Google is increasingly using zero-click answers and the AI overviews to provide, well, not just provide, but like dominate these major categories like arts and entertainment and finance.

Any question you ask about a movie, Google is going to be able to provide an AI overview for, you know, give you a synopsis, tell you where it’s playing, all kinds of fun stuff like that, which is changing the way we use Google.

And it’s changing the results.

It’s changing how we optimize.

So those are interesting things to worry about.

Then they also found that search is a post-discovery tool now with brand discovery shifting to social media and other platforms.

And then Google being a secondary place where you go to get more information.

So you see an ad on Facebook.

You see an ad on X.

You see an ad on BlueSky.

If they do ads, I don’t think they really do ads.

TikTok, Instagram.

You see something.

You remember the name because it’s interesting.

You can’t remember how to get there.

So then you go to Google and type in the brand name and anything you remember about the ad.

And it tells you then how to get to it.

So it’s not used to help you learn new things.

It’s there to help you find more information about things that you discovered somewhere else.

That’s another big shift that we, I don’t know that anyone really expected to happen in the big way that it is happening.

So, you know, I think the most interesting part of all of that was the half is informational, which is a trouble to some site owners because with the zero adding to the zero clicks.

So again, we were chatting before about how I’m using chat GPT more.

And the example I used is Venom.

There’s a new film.

And I wanted to know a summary of the last two because I’ve kind of half forgotten.

And I added to the search contextually.

And I realized that for that kind of search, I’m never, not never, I’m not going to be going to Google to make that search for some time because ChatGPT gave me a much more concise answer.

Not that ads play a part in the decision making.

If you’re going to make an ad for like, I don’t know, Venom on DVD or whatever the streaming thing is, that’s fine.

But I’ve now realized that, especially with the wider and mass market, Google are now in a danger territory where they’re one bad search away from churn for that person.

Just one.

Right.

And it takes 20 years of effort, a generational effort to get everyone.

They’ve got a verb for searching.

Right.

But now people don’t search anymore.

They discover.

So now that even the name Google, Googling something is becoming a little bit redundant.

And information gathering is done much differently.

AIO is not as good as the others, in my opinion, at giving the user what they want.

So I’m really interested to see, again, what they’re doing, especially looking at this kind of data to show that brand marketing and informational driven searches are booming in a place where they don’t want that.

They don’t want that to happen.

I think part of the problem is that because things like ChatGPT make it easy, they’ll do that research for you.

They’ll find answers for you and prevent you from having to spend an hour going to five different websites and reading through those papers and the documents and trying to find the answer or synthesize the answer yourself.

It’s doing all that work for you very quickly.

Google’s answers just aren’t as helpful.

The AIO interface isn’t as helpful as having a conversation with ChatGPT or Perplexity or whichever AI tool you’re using, having that conversation with it to get to the answer that you want faster.

I couldn’t have asked Google which red wine I should use because these are the ones I have on hand in this recipe.

Because Google wouldn’t know the recipe right away.

There’s not enough room in that chat box for me to adequately fully explain and articulate what I’m trying to get at.

Whereas I can do that with ChatGPT.

It’ll rework all of my recipes and say, yeah, that Shiraz is fine.

I’m like, okay, cool.

Change everything else on the menu to accommodate for the fact that I’m using the Shiraz instead of the cab.

And away you go.

And then it does it.

Google just doesn’t do that right now.

Which makes it, yeah, that one bad experience where it’s just so much easier to do this other thing and not go to Google for that.

All righty.

Alex, I heard the core of day November finally finished just in time for the December one to start.

Yes.

Yes.

It finished rolling out.

There wasn’t too much of a massive disturbance in the force of SERPs that has been noted.

There’s been no one who’s been disappearing off the radar that maybe wasn’t already in previous core HCU.

There may be additional nails in a coffin that’s already been made kind of scenario, which is, again, a shame.

Because no one’s seeing huge benefits still from HCU.

But the other thing that they were doing, as well as the fact that they’ve already started another rollout, that I think happened last Friday, maybe?

Thursday or Friday.

That’s always mean.

And they say that’s mean.

But I’m sure from memory they do do this a lot.

They do a lot of core or important updates just before Christmas to keep SEOs on their toes.

Because I think it’s probably some sadist who’s working there who does it each year and with an evil laugh.

But again, it’s not been the most volatile.

It also came with an update.

And I don’t know.

It wasn’t in its own slide where in the last week someone from Google mentioned that there’s going to be more core updates.

They’re going to be happening more and more often.

So you might see that this time in a year we’ll have talked about a core update happening every single month.

You don’t know.

But I’m going to assume that that’s going to start happening now, especially the catch-up that they have to keep playing now with these serious players.

Yeah.

And I think now that they’ve got AI tweaking the algorithm now.

So everything is just happening so much faster.

They don’t have to wait for QA and for all of these other things that they would normally have had to put through different cycles and phases at work.

So everything is like every timeline is just compressing.

And it’s I think we’re just racing towards a singularity.

That’s just.

Just the lighthearted stuff you want at the end of the year, right?

Just inside the Christmas movies.

Pretty much.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

So other fun stuff that happened is OpenAI released ChatGPT-o1, which is the world’s smartest language model.

Their words, not ours.

It’s $200 a month.

I’m sorry.

I don’t use it that often to justify that kind of expense.

But, hey, if you can afford it, then go for it and let me know how it works because I will not be investing in that.

I’m sure there’ll be micro-influencers who have invested to, A, get status and, B, get a lot of engagement so that they’ll get a return on that $200 maybe by going on X, saying, here’s what I found, that kind of stuff.

Well, the micro-influencers probably got financed by OpenAI to try it out and then promote it.

I very much doubt they’re spending that kind of money on their own.

True.

Well, these are the kind of people that buy Lamborghinis recreationally, so what do I know?

Exactly.

Exactly.

I just don’t think that the normal person needs all of this, at least right now, on the level that you would need to – you would actually want to pay $200.

My prediction, in six months, this will probably be part of your $20 a month package and that the $200 will have something else that none of us even know about yet or even heard of.

I’ve been real happy with the 4.0.

I haven’t had a need to use anything beyond that.

So, I don’t know.

It would have to be really amazing and, like, clean my house, too, for $200 a month.

Exactly.

Exactly.

As well as that, again, I don’t know if it was also in the news, which I know is the next slide, but I do know that it wasn’t in the slide.

In this slide, so it didn’t get into a slide by now, but Sora has now gone on general release, which is the OpenAI video service that people can now go and check out.

So, that’s another thing to check out.

So, what else happened in the news?

So, I did mention that OpenAI hires the former Chrome engineer, so that’s already been covered.

Google Business Profile targets age-restricted products if you sell adult material and tobacco, things like that.

Then you can now have more specific stuff on your profile.

There’s a new Google Analytics feature that helps hidden product listings, which I think…

Oh, no, we covered that in the slide.

I think it got into both, so it’s very important for e-commerce that we needed to mention it twice.

Bing Webmaster Tools shows data for Bing and Yahoo, but not ChatGPT, although in GA4, there are ways of finding…

It’s not open on my other tab at the moment, but there is a way, and I did mention it in the last one, of how you can navigate to see how many people are coming into the site through ChatGPT.

And no, it doesn’t tell you what the prompts were that made them get there.

Google Search CTR reveals shifting industry trends.

That’s quite a long read, so if you’re into industry trends, I suggest you go in there and check it out.

That was on the Search Engine Journal.

And lastly, Google uses about 40 signals to determine canonical URLs.

So what did you say, Carolyn?

Don’t mess them up.

Well, it’s relatively easy to not screw it up.

So just don’t screw it up.

Provide a canonical for a piece of content and don’t send mixed messages because it’s looking at a lot of things.

It uses the things that it looks at to pick the correct canonical if it believes that the canonical you provided is bad.

So don’t give it a bad canonical and it won’t look for reasons to replace it.

Just don’t screw it up and you’ll be fine.

Yeah.

And I think that’s all of our news.

I think the only thing that wasn’t newsworthy maybe is the one bit of WordPress news is that Automatic acquired WPAI, which is a service that would bring AI capabilities into WordPress.

It’s probably not going to be newsworthy now other than me saying it, but I reckon in about three months, we’ll be chatting about this for about five minutes about what they’ve done with that acquisition.

Probably.

And the curious thing, though, is like everybody, all the WordPress plugins are incorporating AI into, like we did, everybody else is doing it too.

How are they, is what they’re doing going to step on what everyone else has been doing?

Are they going to work together?

I just, I’m curious to know what the plan is with this.

Aren’t we all?

2025 is going to be interesting for AI and SEO and WordPress.

It’s going to be very, these are going to have to be 90 minutes, I reckon, by April.

Probably.

Well, so we’re almost done.

We have one more slide before we go into the Q&A.

For the Yoast news, we wanted to share some stuff, but it wasn’t, the announcement isn’t happening until later this week.

So we just want to tease everyone with, there’s an announcement coming, you know, some new product features.

We’re not allowed to talk about them.

I’ve been given a list of words that I’m not even allowed to say.

So I’m just going to say, stay tuned.

There will be, there will be something before, before you take your Christmas break.

And we’re all very excited about it.

So the back end of WordPress on Thursday and hope that there’s an update to a new version and make sure you hit it.

That’s all we’re saying.

Yeah.

Real quick.

I mean, a lot of the upcoming events and appearances aren’t happening until February.

So you’ve got plenty of time to plan your travel for that.

The next SEO update is going to be January 28th, which feels like 100 years from now, but it’s like six weeks.

So six week gap.

We should have a ton of new news for you.

Looking forward to that.

And now, now we’re ready for our QA.

Hey, and we’ve got loads.

We’ve got, actually, we’ve got time.

Oh my God, we’ve gotten another 10.

I’m so proud of you.

I was like, we’re just thinking, once a year you’ll get this.

That’s it.

Exactly.

You all had to wait till the end of the year to get all this space.

I will move the slides away and move us to the big screen.

So everybody, well, that was already arranged.

Really nice.

Yeah, let’s start.

So for everyone joining the stream, you can go through all the asked questions right now and upload the ones so we can actually have an updated list of the questions.

But let’s start with the most uploaded question at this moment.

Shauna posted it and it’s about AI in Photoshop and images.

The question is, I use AI in Photoshop to expand images to fit the dimensions needed.

For example, change a square into a rectangular one or by extending background trees.

Will these images on the website now get banned or will there be a penalty for SEO?

And eight upvotes, so I guess a lot of people are questioning this.

That’s a good question.

I actually don’t know.

I think what’s going to…

So if it’s a real image in the beginning and you’re just using AI to expand it, the question is, is Photoshop going to add that metadata that triggers Google to label it as AI?

So there’s that.

Are you going to get penalized?

I don’t see why you would get penalized.

There’s no penalty there unless it’s identical to what somebody else has done, which it’s not.

And even then, it’s not a penalty.

That’s just duplicate content.

So I would say, is there a penalty?

No.

Is it going to trigger a label that depends on Photoshop?

I hope that helps Shana and the other…

Oh, nine people now.

Thanks, Carolyn.

So there’s another question posted by Torren.

I’ll pop it on the screen.

In terms of best practice for search engine rankings and the appearance slash consistency of results in search engines, would you advise using the SEO variables in a website’s page settings, like title or page title, or typing the web page’s desired appearance manually?

It depends.

And it does depend.

I mean, here I’m going to assume he’s talking about the title tag of a title.

I don’t know if…

Is it Torren who’s here?

Maybe he’ll say something in the chat.

Go on, Carolyn.

No, I think I see what he’s asking.

So you can define those variables in the Yoast settings.

Yep.

And that’s great.

That’s perfect for the default behavior.

But Yoast already allows you to override on a per page basis what that title, page title, etc. appears like for the search engines on each page as desired.

So I think the best practice is you define the default behavior in the settings using the variables.

And when you feel the need to manually override it, you do so on the page.

I mean, I don’t know that there’s…

You have to do what’s best for the situation, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

Meanwhile…

Thanks, Carolyn.

I saw Don’s question coming in.

And Don, I have moved your question to the Q&A.

So if other people want to know about that too, please upvote Don’s question.

My Q&A is reloading right now.

Okay.

An AI question.

Votes coming in as we’re talking about it.

Votes are coming in, yeah.

The numbers coming in, yeah.

This question was posted by Meg.

And the question is, as AI continues to impact search and Google continues to roll out updates, what are the core things we should focus on as a foundational SEO strategy?

Is it keyword research and content?

Is it technical SEO?

What should be the main priority in 2025?

I’d say yes to all the above.

And I know it sounds weird, but like, I, at the beginning, when I first started SEO, I kind of had to explain to people who weren’t in my team that they had to, the more they thought about SEO, the worse it may get for them.

And the less they think about SEO, the more natural they will become.

This is from a content creative point of view, keyword point of view, such as back in keyword stuffing days, how many times, what’s the, what’s the proportion in the whole piece of content that I should say this keyword.

And the answer is as naturally as you should.

That’s what it should have always been.

And I guess it’s the same now.

And just kind of ignore the fact that AI is around.

You need to adapt to it.

And weirdly, in the next year, my belief is that AI is going to adapt more to, you know, what we’ve been doing all this time.

And there may be new things we have to do, some of which will be covered inside our plugin, some of which will be covered in the updates and methods that we’ll have to do in blog updates.

But the basics of what you’re all doing now, I would say, just keep on being helpful, honest, transparent, and white hat.

And the internet in general will respect you back.

I would say there, we’ve, we’ve published several articles in our, in our SEO blog that talk about how to, how to deal with and kind of massage the, the AI narratives that are being presented about any given topic that, that the AIs are asking about.

The, the goal going forward is less to just rank and more to be one of the citations or sources that the AIs are using for these answers.

And how are they deciding what to use as the source?

They’re looking for consensus.

So if there’s a consensus answer, are you one of the consensus answers?

Are you providing robust information?

Are you an authority on that subject?

So this is all about the EEAT.

Are you doing, are you doing all the things that are going to elevate you to an entity that is recognized for having expertise in whatever particular field you have expertise in?

And I think the EEAT portion is what you’re going to need to be focusing on.

That being said, I can think of three or four articles that we recently wrote in our blog.

So if you want to go check there, there’s a lot of information on how you should be prioritizing your tasks going forward.

Cool.

Meanwhile, I’ll read the next question.

And Carolyn, maybe if you can quickly put up those, or at least one of those posts.

I’m not sure if you, I’ll give you some time.

I’ll just pick a really long question to read out.

Okay.

Let me refresh for a bit.

I think this ties into…

I’m going with the 10 vote.

What?

Have we got to go with the 10 vote?

Or are we going with the long question?

No, I’m going with the 10 vote because I think that’s a really important question in the age of all the AI search.

Okay.

Derek asked the following question.

How important are websites going to continue to be as a definite source of info and content for businesses, especially in the age of no-click discovery?

There’s the word discovery already.

Alex, you did a great job.

I know.

I know.

I think they’re going to be very important.

They’re going to be as vital as they were before.

If there is no information to discover, there’s nothing to not click.

Like, I would say we should still be contributing towards the web and its content.

And doing so, we will still get cited in some way in the future.

So long as there’s got to be something to discover, right?

Otherwise, there’s nothing there.

And without the site, Google can’t source this.

Think of the search engine.

They’re just middlemen, right?

Middle people, middle machines.

I don’t know what they are.

They’re the messenger.

They’re the messenger between what you want and the answer.

And if they don’t have the answer, they can’t be the messenger.

So they need the creators more than the creators need them, even though the power play doesn’t seem that way at the moment.

Like, weirdly, if all web creators now just stop typing, right?

Google will have serious issues.

Serious, serious issues.

So, like, they’re playing with fire, I think.

Because these small publishers, that’s going to have a knock-on effect.

Because now, if I was 18, 19, and I had an interest, 10 years ago, I’d be all about making this niche website.

Today, I’d read three things.

I’d be like, why would I do that?

Why would I spend my time?

And in four years, like that, all my visibility is gone.

Why would I spend all of that and build a company that could mean nothing if my one reliance is on the messenger, you know?

True.

But that’s for another week, probably, that rant.

So, for businesses in particular, it is still important to have a website.

Because if you ask your favorite AI for information, let’s talk about Yoast as an example.

If you asked a question about the features of the product or the features of free versus premium, where’s it getting that information from?

Yoast is the authoritative entity on Yoast.

So, it’s going to go look at the Yoast website and read all the information about the product features and then do a comparison for you.

So, if we don’t keep that updated and we don’t take time to promote and prioritize the things that we think are important, then the AIs aren’t going to know that to repeat it to the users.

If we’re not owning our expertise and then taking advantage of the platform that it’s provided us, then we’ve then wasted this opportunity to deliver the information to the AIs.

Even though there were no clicks involved, somebody’s got to go get that content from somewhere and they rely on the authority to provide that.

So, it might be in the Yoast case, us to provide that info than other people providing that info about you, right?

So, that’s the thing you want to own, whether or not the search engine landscape is changing.

Yeah.

And I also get big boy travel’s issue.

Like, you don’t care as much as being cited as an AI answer.

We want to retain our traffic.

So, the problem there is the only reason you feel, okay, I don’t know your specifics, but I’m going to make some assumptions.

If you need that traffic because you make your money on traffic and not on conversions, then that’s a problem with the business model.

And I think that the business models that make their money solely on traffic are going to probably be in a position where they have to evolve because I see that traffic source drying up.

That’s one, and it’s one channel.

Remember that, like, spread the channel.

It’s like any business will say don’t, well, any service-led business won’t say, well, make sure that less than 30% of your turnover isn’t with one client, you know, one supplier because then that’s an issue.

Here, all these small publishers are effectively saying that 98% of their turnover is with one client, the search provider being the client.

And if that’s cut out, it goes.

So, spread as much as possible and attract as many as possible in different areas, in the maybe BlueSky.

And just real quick to provide my English-to-English translation for the Americans, when Alex says turnover, he means revenue.

None.

Yes, sorry.

Not people quitting.

Because when we say turnover, people quitting.

A glossary.

I’m sure all the AI platforms are telling me that it should say that, but us Brits, we don’t like going on to the new things, do we?

We said that.

I just know that when I hear it, I get confused, and my brain has to go, thank you.

Okay, Rob.

He means Rob.

It’s nice you take our American-based audience into account.

Okay, next one.

Oh, we have a tie between two nine times upvoted questions.

I’ll just start with the top one from Johnny.

I want to add videos to my product pages, which is good, I think.

In terms of SEO, are there any important considerations, any specific settings maybe in Yoast to optimize for on-page videos?

Well, I think we have a whole Yoast video add-on that you can get that is designed specifically for videos.

And there are SEO considerations for videos, which you can definitely set, I think, within the tool.

There’s a separate video site map that you can get.

There’s a lot of different video things you can do, but I would definitely say if you have videos to add to your product, pages, then please do.

Anything that helps your engagement and provides more information to the user is going to be helpful.

And the clear as possible.

So Carolyn was thinking about it from a technical SEO point of view.

I was picturing it from a content point of view.

Make sure they’re helpful, of course, and it might sound obvious, but sometimes it’s not.

Make a use case out of, so let’s say it’s a product or a service, find the solution and benefit, find the use case of it.

If it’s a product, especially get it in its surroundings.

In situ, if that’s, I don’t know if Americans know in situ as well, as a term, like as an example of when it would be used.

And that will be then interpreted by all of these platforms, which are getting more and more sophisticated.

So in a year, it’ll be able to read the content of those videos, and it’ll really complement the text around it.

And again, it’ll figure out the context between the video and the text and the page that it’s on and where it is on the site.

So yeah, all very important.

All ties in together.

In the meantime, I was searching for a few blog articles about this.

So Johnny, if you just search the Yoast website, you’ll find a lot of blog articles about this, but I’ll share one that I think is maybe the starting place for you to discover this.

So I hope this helps.

Yeah, and Phil Nottingham.

Phil Nottingham knows everything there is to know about video.

And also, just annoy him on X or whatever he’s active on.

He’ll just have to answer for his personal brand.

We don’t want him to get too distracted, Alex.

But I get it.

I get it.

Okay.

Then there’s…

Oh, we still have time.

It’s amazing.

I really have to get used to this.

It’s really nice.

There’s another question by Leigh, if I pronounce this right.

Aside from working on all the standard stuff to rank UX, off-site SEO and on-site SEO optimization, producing quality content that meets the EAT, standards, keyword research, organic backlinks, etc.

What can be done to get Google to understand your website is worth ranking well again?

After the helpful content update, I have yet to recover, and I’m pulling my hair out.

Oh, don’t do that.

Trying to understand what I’m getting wrong when it seems I’m doing everything I should and am a true expert in my field.

Thanks.

So there are…

The HCU is a different thing.

It’s a classifier.

And once you get…

So there’s two buckets.

There’s helpful and there’s not helpful.

And there are…

It taught the machine to identify the characteristics of unhelpful by giving it an example and saying, if it looks like this example, it’s not helpful.

And then push everything that’s not helpful into this bucket.

And you are stamped with the unhelpful…

You’ve got the embroidered unhelpful on your chest now.

And there’s not a lot you can do to undo that without getting rid of the…

The appearances of unhelpfulness.

And the problem…

This is a long answer that’s going to be difficult to do in this thing.

To give you a quick…

Without knowing your situation, this might work for you.

You could try moving everything to a subdomain and 301ing your main site to the subdomain.

However, you would need to get rid of whatever elements of your site are betraying or causing it to think that you’re unhelpful.

And when you’re like, but I’m not doing anything that other places aren’t doing.

That’s a matter of interpretation.

And the problem is that Google’s looking for ducks.

And even though you are not a real duck, you’re apparently wearing feathers and have a bill and, you know, and occasionally quack.

So Google thinks you’re a duck.

We need to figure out whatever it is that’s making you look like a duck and take just enough off so that you stop triggering the, oh my God, it’s a duck alarm.

Because we want to unduck your site.

If that makes sense.

It’s a long answer.

The way you said unduck your site, I was like, you so used the right animal and word to go with that.

I know.

You did it on purpose.

That was the plan.

See, she did a keyword research as well before she even answered the question.

So maybe, maybe you send us an email because it is a long answer.

And I would, I would love to help you with that.

But I, because it’s a classifier and not an algorithm thing, I think once you, once you’ve got the, you know, the black mark on your, on your record, it’s going to not take you out of that bucket until we figure out what’s putting you over the edge or tipping you over into the, the ducked bucket.

We do wish you luck.

We do wish you luck.

Yeah.

We do.

It can be done.

Other sites have done it.

So, so we just, we just need to figure it out.

We have another question from Don.

I think it’s the same Don.

I didn’t remember the last name.

I’m sorry about that.

Can you speak to schema markup and how important schema is to the future of SEO and AI?

That’s a huge question in a few words.

I’ll be honest.

I’ll be honest.

I don’t know.

I actually don’t know because I am quite subjective about this.

I’m a huge lover of schema.

I think it’s really important.

It’s clearly a foundation of our products as well.

And it’s been a foundation of structured data for a long, long time.

And some people are skeptical.

Oh, well, we’re not going to need this structured data because AI is going to be able to structure all the data we have.

But I would also like to think that over these years, structured data is there.

Not because Google and search engines couldn’t read that.

And it can do everything that people are saying, skeptics are saying already.

It can do all of that.

But it’s handing a bigger spoon to the messenger, right?

They’re handing a bigger spoon.

It’s making it easier to do their job.

So if you put yourself in the search engine shoes, like if you’ve got a choice of two and one has given you everything in a nice little platter and another site has given you unstructured crap, essentially.

It’s like giving you a book with no punctuation, no paragraphing.

It’s just one big block of text.

The more that that happens, the bigger the job is going to be for the messenger.

And they’ll maybe not look at you as fondly as a site or a page that is giving you structured data.

So maybe because I say I don’t know, maybe I should change it to I can’t predict how search platforms are going to interpret them because there’s unpredictable stuff that’s been happening in our vertical in general that I like to hope that schema isn’t going away anywhere soon.

But I don’t also want to eat my words in 12 months and say that maybe something’s been figured out.

But things like Merchant Center, feeds, feeds are just essentially structured data, you know, that they all help.

And especially in e-commerce where I don’t see unstructured data not helping.

You know, when we dig into stuff like products and product variants, right?

If there’s no structured data, I don’t even know how a search platform would even deal with unstructured versions of a shoe that has different sizes, different colors, different prices.

Some are on sale.

Some have different returns and refund policies.

It can’t do all of that without structured data and therefore schema.

So maybe that wasn’t a short answer.

But I’d like to hope that it is in short.

It was a big question.

So we didn’t expect a short answer.

Yeah.

What do you think, Carolyn?

I don’t know if you have.

We have two minutes left.

Do you want to add to this or do we go to a last question?

I think schema right now is still, if it’s easy for you to implement, implement it.

I think I actually, oh, it’s not published yet.

I just wrote an article about that for Search Engine Land and it’s not come out yet.

But I have advice on which schema is important and which schema is not important.

And I don’t have time to tell you about it.

Another teaser, Carolyn.

We’ll talk about it.

We’ll probably be able to talk about it at our next update.

We’re done with this one.

Let’s see if we have time.

One, two.

We have one from David that has the most upvotes right now.

Can you give an overview of the current state of play for GEO when people search through AI bots, as in ChatGPT, rather than through a search engine?

Or the messenger, as we now call it, and is you offering any training for this?

So we have answered a few questions that were directly related to this and just phrased a little bit differently earlier.

So GEO is generative engine optimization, which isn’t really what I call it.

I just tended to call it, you know, optimizing for the AI narratives, which is long and not easy to remember.

Point is, we do have some blog posts that were written to help you understand how the AIs are making decisions on what to include, which you can then extrapolate into, this is how I should optimize for that.

So we’ve got a few blog posts.

I’ve got some talks that I recently did that I think maybe we should turn into blog posts, and that can provide some training.

But is there a specific, you know, this is exactly what you do.

What you do is improve your EAT, and you make yourself an expert in the field, which makes you desirable to be cited.

So the short answer is, be an entity that is an expert in that field, and then provide answers that the users are looking for.

And then you’re improving the odds that you will be a cited source.

Once you’re a regularly cited source, you will be a cited source for all manner of things that are related to that topic, and you can exploit that to your heart’s content.

Yeah, to add to that, because now we really have to close the stream, I’ve just popped in one more resource, which is our AI for SEO training, part of the academy, that comes with any of our premium tool.

So just take a look there, if that might be helpful for you next to all the blogs and the stuff on the internet.

Alex, the same.

Yes, I would like to say there’s a few people who said they’ve had upvoted questions that haven’t been answered.

So one of two things, either they’re being liked a lot in the chat and they didn’t go into the Q&A part, or something’s up.

Can you please connect with us?

Connect with me or Carolyn.

I don’t care if it’s X or LinkedIn or through the website.

Find us and we’ll get back to you.

Wait, wait, wait.

I almost forgot.

Before we close everything out.

Wait.

So a couple things.

Number one, Ask Yoasie is back up.

So if you go to the website, we can answer the questions that didn’t get answered in Ask Yossi.

So it’s yoast.com/ask-yoasie/.

Y-O-A-S-I-E is how you spell that.

So we’ll be answering questions that didn’t get answered there.

Also, just we have a subreddit now.

If any of you are Redditors and you’re interested in discussing the podcast or asking additional questions or discussing that, I’m in there frequently.

So the subreddit is r/yoastseo.

Obviously, you can spell that.

And hopefully, we’ll see you guys there.

But that was all I had.

So Ask Yoasie and then the Reddit, Yoast SEO.

Cool.

Or annoying social.

See you on Reddit.

See you on Yoast.com.

Or see you in the next SEO update.

Thanks for joining, everyone.

I think this was a wonderful way to close the year.

We’ve covered a lot of news.

We’ve covered, I think, most questions ever during one of these updates.

So thanks all for joining us throughout 2024.

And we’re super excited to start the new year all with you at the end of January.

For everyone that’s celebrating holidays, happy holidays.

Make it a good one.

And see you in 2025.

Happy holidays, everyone.

You’re welcome.

Bye.

Thank you.