The SEO update by Yoast – January 2025 Edition

Hello everyone, welcome to the first edition of the Yoast SEO update for 2025.

I hope that everyone can hear us.

We are very happy to welcome you.

And we’re broadcasting from the Yoast headquarters in the Netherlands.

I’m seeing in the chat that most of us can hear us.

That’s great.

My name is Marina.

I’m a researcher and developer here at Yoast.

And I’m very happy to be your host today.

Now, as you know, every update we go through the highlights in the SEO world for the last month.

But this update, we have also prepared something extra special.

Our experts, Alex and Carolyn will share with us their SEO predictions for 2025.

They’re going to tell us what it is that we don’t actually have to worry about, what it is that we really should pay attention to, and generally how to navigate these choppy waters nowadays where every day seems to bring new developments.

Now, a few quick notes for the newcomers.

The webinar is recorded, so you will be able to replay it later.

We will send you a link to the recording along with a script if you prefer to read it, plus all the resources and articles mentioned today.

Now, all that’s left for me to do is to introduce our experts.

Standing on the one side of the ring is Carolyn Shelby, Alex Moss, who has a vast experience in technical, especially structural SEO and all facets of digital marketing.

I’m leaving you in their good hands.

Enjoy.

And I’ll see you again for Q&A.

Thanks for having us.

And welcome.

First edition of the SEO update for 2025.

I know.

How are you feeling?

Excited.

I mean, ready to rock and roll.

Let’s see.

How do I?

There we go.

Let’s make this.

I’m being techie here.

You are.

I’ve moved us to the side.

Here we go.

You don’t want to see us.

You want to see what the hour’s up to.

That’s right.

All right.

So now that we’re ready to go, just wanted to remind everybody, because I know we get a lot of questions.

There is a recording.

You will get a copy of it afterwards.

So please don’t worry about that.

Today, we’re going to discuss the 2025 predictions.

We’re going to go over our SEO and AI news, which we always do.

A little bit of Yoast news.

And then hopefully, we’ll have extra time for Q&A today, because it feels like we might be able to make some good time.

We’ll have to see how that goes.

Again, if you have questions, check the right side of your screen.

There’s a tab for questions.

Ask your questions in there so they get recorded.

That way, we’ll know at the end who’s got questions, how many other people want to hear answers to those.

Helps us keep track of everything.

If you ask in the regular chat, high probability we won’t see the question.

So if you have a good question, put it in that tab, that will make everything better.

All right.

For more on today’s topics, or just to see what you might have missed in case you’re taking notes or something, you can go to yoa.st, which is basically yoast.com, update-jan-2025.

So that is that.

How to start with the SEO biweekly webinar.

The next one is February 11th, which feels like more than two weeks away, but I don’t think it is.

It’s at 9:00 PM European time, 3:00 PM New York time.

So plan accordingly.

This is a great place to go if you’re literally just starting from the ground floor and you need to get up to speed with the basics of SEO. perfect podcast for you to listen to.

So we hope you join.

All right, Alex, are you ready?

I am ready.

Let’s try and see what’s going to happen this year.

All right.

Alex and Carolyn’s predictions for 2025.

Here we go.

Yeah.

We decided to put them all in one slide at least for you.

So we thought we’d give you all of them at once and it might spur some questions in the Q and A as well for the end on if you have further questions on what we’re about to discuss.

But what’s about the first one, Carolyn?

Well, I was going to say brand building and reviews will be even more important for SEO.

Now, I did want to note that we didn’t list these in order of importance.

They are actually listed in order of how wide sentences.

So it doesn’t write over the tops of our heads.

So brand building though, brand building and brand building to me feels like old school marketing.

So it’s almost like what’s old is new again.

And that happens.

It happens in fashion.

It happens in a lot of aspects of life, but building that brand traffic, building that brand recognition is, it’s going to be very vital in helping, helping the AIs associate the value of the information that you’re providing with the entity that is your brand, help establishing your brand as an entity.

All of this is going to be playing into how search is evolving.

So it’s not going to be, it’s not going to be good enough to focus on non-brand keyword phrases because ranking for those non-branded keyword phrases is going to be difficult if you are not an established brand, hence the need for the brand building.

So it’s, it all ties together.

It’s not as cut and dry as it used to be.

The reviews though, you know, why don’t you, why don’t you share with the reviews because you’re a little bit more embedded in that.

Yeah.

Well reviews.

I mean, I’ve just shoved in the chat, I think it’s two years old nearly now, a blog post by Google talking about perspectives.

And I believe that was the beginning of them implying that maybe Reddit was going to come into the SERPs, but it also really emphasized how important third-party opinion is of someone’s brand.

Like, what do I feel about brand X, Y, and Z?

That, from another user’s perspective is actually respected more than what the brand thinks of themselves.

So whilst you do do the brand building that Carolyn just mentioned, that’s, that is kind of one part of the piece.

And the other piece is getting reviews out there.

And that doesn’t mean give me a one out of five star rating.

It actually means write something about it, which will gain context as to what you’re like as a product or service and as a brand.

That in turn is going to get interpreted by search engines and can I just call them AI search platforms at the moment?

Just call, let’s call them that for the, I keep saying LLMs, but I know it’s wider than search platforms.

Just don’t call it a GEO because I don’t know why, but I can’t get behind that acronym.

It’s not happening.

That to me is location, right?

It always will be.

Yeah, it’s location or it’s a car that they made like in the eighties.

It’s just, you know.

Exactly.

But yeah, this is going to be, I think this year, they’re going to really hit hard.

I know over 2024, they’ve been doing a bit of policing over, um, GM, GBP, um, and Google business profiles, by the way, that’s what that means.

Um, so anything local based and anything product based, those reviews are going to become really, really, really more important than they were the last few years as it collects perspectives from as many sources as possible.

Yep.

Um, where are we at now?

Oh, AI search figuring out how to monetize the, the SERPs.

I think if, or did I skip one?

You did.

AI powered search and personalized results.

Now I’ve kind of experienced this, but so I asked ChatGPT to tell me everything it knows about me.

Right.

And I was very interested because it started telling me things that I had definitely not put in the public sphere.

I was like, how did you know this?

Now what it did was I asked how it knew, and it told me that it actually went off my previous discussions with ChatGPT in my account.

So it was just taking the history of my, but I found it very interesting.

It was using that and then telling me what it knew based on what I was telling it about me in a more private settings.

That’s nice.

But I still, again, had to say, no, no, no, forget that.

I’m talking publicly available information.

And then it was kind of generic.

And then I realized that you had to really knuckle down.

Like, what do you know about me between 1996 and 2000?

And the answer is nothing.

But it was interesting that it does understand who you are based on the conversations you have.

I think it’s still relevant for the things that it knows about you in the private settings, because you do a lot of searches within those private settings.

And it’s going to tailor the results that it gives to you based on things that it knows you like and don’t like for particular angles or facets of that information that it knows that you’re interested in.

So like, at one point in time, I asked it to do a search and something related to SEO.

And it had given me really basic SEO information and recommended that I that I that I include that in whatever it was I was doing.

And I said, which do not cite the deep magic to me for there.

I was there when it was written.

And it said, okay, noted.

And it never brought up basic SEO to me again, because I told that I wasn’t interested in hearing it.

I there’s been other people where it’s it’s suggested experts that that I might I might like.

I’m like, No, I hate that person.

That person’s awful.

I’ll never mention that person again.

It was okay.

And then it just it just stopped.

So even in even in private settings.

So you know, I think it’s going to reduce, some of these new personalized filters, which I think is relevant to know because it’s reducing.

I think it’s going to reduce lightly, at least slightly for now, the reliability of traffic estimates.

So we’re not really going to be able to say, we know that there’s this many searches per month for this particular phrase, and that’s going to result in X amount of traffic, because that X amount of traffic is going to be reduced and divided based on all of these bazillion variables and personal preferences that we just you can’t account for those.

So I think that’s, I think it’s going to be interesting.

It’s going to get really, really personalized and really granular.

Oh, yeah.

And that, I guess, brings us on to the next one is my prediction is, and I don’t want it to happen, right?

But these platforms are going to be on a mission this year to make sure that they have some monetization.

They need some return back from all of these things.

And I’m surprised that Google haven’t sorted out ads in a way that they want to yet.

But the fact that they haven’t means that they’re working really hard in my belief to try and suss out a way to do that.

By doing that, I think there’ll be more injection of products.

And because at the moment, I think they’re really good at making solved knowledge, informational based intent content, that kind of thing.

But when it comes to making decisions, it’s going to be hard because of course, we know in the past perplexity, I’ve been putting affiliate links into some products and ignoring others.

But I think that’s gone away.

But I think this will be a more objective point of view where it might be that in the next six months, merchant central crop up is a really important thing, even more important than it is already, to then tie into other areas of Google.

And I believe that OpenAI or Bing will work together to make sure that their shopping feeds somehow tie into the answer engine of these platforms.

I think they’re going to have to figure out a way to monetize their service because, and I know we’ve got an article about it later, with DeepSeek coming out.

And the big disrupting factor with DeepSeek is that they are, they’ve developed what is being purported to be better than what OpenAI and Perplexity and Google have done on a tenth of the budget, one one hundredth of the budget, and in a shorter amount of time, which would spell, and I’m not saying this well, it’s a speculation.

It could mean that the venture capital and the investment in these American companies that say, oh, it’s going to take trillions of dollars to build this stuff.

That investment could start drying up.

If the investment starts drying up, they’re going to be, there’s going to be a lot of pressure on them to start turning profits and making money so that they can continue to support their infrastructure.

So, yeah, they’re, we’ve reached a point in time in their life cycle that they’re going to have to start making money.

They keep riding on all of this investment.

So, I agree with you on that.

Let’s talk about EEAT because it is definitely becoming more crucial.

I used to kind of be like, eh, EEAT, whatever, that’s not a thing.

But with the AI intelligence, I know that’s redundant, with the, with the, the new intelligence and the new decision making that goes into returning these results where the computer is, is basically evaluating how, how reliable a source is and if a source is trustworthy enough.

You have to work on your EEAT to make sure that when they’re picking sources to present to the users, that your site is one of the trustworthy sources.

Gone are the days where you can, you know, sit in your mom’s basement and just churn out content for the sake of churning out content and be relatively anonymous.

I don’t know.

It was a site called all about dogs.

It must know everything about dogs.

Now, people want to go to PetMD.

They want to go to a veterinary’s website.

They want something trustworthy.

They just don’t want some site that claims that it knows everything about dogs.

So, I, I think we really need to start paying more attention to, to that or at least get, get a lot more serious about your efforts to improve that.

Yeah.

And it is weird because I know some SEOs say EEAT isn’t a ranking factor or a signal.

So, what’s the point in working on it?

And my answer is twofold.

Why wouldn’t you?

I think it’s kind of a risk to omit EEAT from work, regardless of rank of ranking signals or factors.

And why wouldn’t you want to increase the authority of the people that represent your brand or the brand itself?

That to me, just, just to do SEO elsewhere, that to me is ordering on greater black hat by ignoring things that are there.

And I also think that is going to become important, even more important because Google, as we both know very well, they don’t just do things for no reason.

And, and you did say in a, in a, in a previous update, something about how you did it about secret sauce.

Like everyone knows kind of like what Big Mac sauce is, but no one knows the exact proportions of what is entailed and it might contain onions.

It may not contain onions.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t in the list for that reason.

They may decide in 20 years to add onions to that.

And that may change a bit of this sauce.

And that, I guess like here EEAT is the onion, right?

They may just decide under the platforms to bring that in as actual something to consider.

Well, or, or it’s, or it’s onion powder that’s in the sauce actually, but onions go into making the onion powder.

So you can say there’s no onions in it, but there is onion powder, which means you still need to work on the onions because the onions make the onion powder, which then goes into the secret sauce.

You know what I mean?

Basically there’s no peanuts in this product, but it may have been made in a building that had a peanut on the other side.

And therefore you have to tell them that there may be something for people with allergies.

That’s actually the opposite of what I said, but, but still kind of directionally in the right, in the right, in the right, the right way.

So moving on, Core Web Vitals.

If your site is not crawlable, if your site does not perform as well as another site with equal expertise and trustworthiness, then you will not get selected.

This is really a race to be the best and the best will get cited as a source and then have visibility in, in these engines.

I mean, it’s, we’re not going to get to a point where we don’t have to do that anymore.

I think it’s, is the crux of that.

Yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

And that goes to schema really, which I would say is part of, well, I wouldn’t say it’s a performance enhancer, but it’s definitely a data enhancer.

Well, that is getting to the point where it, we may not have to do that anymore because the AIs are so good at extracting content, but where Schema right now is valuable.

If you can take data that might be kind of buried down in your page and not easy for the crawlers to extract and shove that into the head of the document with JSON-LD and that gets sent over in the initial request.

So that that’s data that’s going to be very easily adjustable by the crawlers and the engines.

And it, it just ensures that the important bits on your page are absolutely seen and absolutely seen right away.

But I think the, I think the value of all of the Schema that we have available to us is going to start having diminishing returns over the course of this year and going forward.

Yeah.

I would still think in the, I don’t know me, I cannot disagree with it, but I would still think that it’s still a big reliance.

And I don’t know, I keep, we keep going back to food.

I know, I know Taco and Lawrence are doing loads of food.

I’m really hungry.

I know I’m hungry now, but it is like, if you’re going to spoon feed someone, I guess at some point, yeah, they will be able to have soup with a fork.

But right now it’s a bit of a hassle.

Give, still give them that spoon, right?

It’s still easier to digest that information if you provide it in a nice way.

Whereas if you were to just not have any structured data, I believe it would maybe get more annoyed at trying to interpret every little thing without it being spoon fed.

Well, and to use the spoon analogy, if you had to choose between eating soup with a spoon and eating soup with a fork, what would you choose?

You’d obviously choose the spoon.

So it just helps you, it helps you be the spoon rather than forcing, forcing the search engines to use a fork to get your, to get your content.

Yes.

Yeah.

And Rebecca Campany, if that’s how you pronounce your last name, you do have a very valid point.

Schema does go beyond SEO.

Obviously we can only talk a certain amount because we’re doing an SEO update, right?

So whilst it may not be as crucial in this area, yes, it is crucial for things like, like feeds and data input and into interpreters.

It’s, it’s, it’s still vastly important.

It will be for some time.

Well, I wrote that article in search engine, search engine land in December, mid, mid to end December about which bits of Schema are still very important and which bits you can probably skip.

I think we have a slide about that, but I don’t recall.

If you’re curious, though, Search Engine Land, December, look for my name.

I have an article in there about that topic.

So the next thing, zero click searches.

I think that’s pretty obvious that that’s what can you say about that?

It’s gonna, yeah.

I mean, for informational based searches.

Yeah.

These platforms are going to steal your visits, right?

But then I would then say, well, if you know, that’s going to happen and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Then perhaps think about what your, what the intent of that content is for the user and for you and what you want them to do from it.

Is there an action?

Unique value proposition.

What is your unique value proposition?

What is your value add?

What are you providing that’s different and unique and useful to answer people’s questions?

You can’t just put out content and put out content.

It has to be unique and it has to be useful to somebody.

For some reason.

Yeah.

I mean, and if it is a real threat that zero clicks are taking away visits, you may need to now this year, because these shifts are happening is reevaluate is, is it is the only metric you want those visits and those clicks from a SERP?

Is it actually valuable?

Is it going to get you to the next step?

Do you, what’s the conversion from that?

What do you want them to do?

Once you think about that, then it may redefine the way in which you produce your content and may dictate on how you update that content to make it still helpful for zero clickers out there.

Should we do food analogy, the drive-through folk, you know, and get it right in their lap in the car, then, you know, finding out more and going inside the restaurant to find out what the menu is.

Yeah.

So, do you want to cover the local SEO?

I don’t do a lot of local, but I do know that I have seen a lot more of the augmented reality, which is what AR is, floating around where, especially with like the the metaglasses.

I’ve heard those are going to start doing like AR overlays in your vision.

Right now, it’s mostly audio and it can do camera stuff, but it doesn’t have like a heads-up display.

And I’ve heard that the next generation of those metaglasses is going to actually have heads-up display, which means there’s going to be there’s going to be an AR integration.

And you’re going to want to make sure that, especially for your local business, if somebody walks past and sees your sign, that that sign is somehow tied to your local business listing.

And there’s going to be that connection there so that you are, it’s returning data for that, that user, the guy who’s walking around with the heads-up display.

Yeah, which does make local SEO really important because the coordinates and locations are going to be even more important.

And I know, I don’t know, I’ve been in, I was in the NFT and Web3 World where I know that they were doing AR and MR, which is mixed reality, in headsets to really try and get incentive of membership and community.

Like you can get 20% off if you go in the store and you were able to like scan something on the wall that you can only see with your phone and certain apps.

And whilst that’s a bit, further down the line and not really an SEO organic thing from a local point of view, it’s something that once wearables are becoming increasingly usable in the mass market.

So we were ahead of the time with Google Glass, I won’t say ahead of the time, I mean, they were a bit too early.

Now it is becoming a place where the technology is catching up to what wearables can really do and actually be useful to the non-technical person.

But as well as that, if you go back to ChatGPT, now there are local based answers that you get, like what’s a hairdresser near me, for example, or a salon, sorry, in America.

And it will literally embed a map and it will show you plot points.

And whilst it’s not, in my opinion, as good as the traditional SERPs and local searches, it’s clear that it’s done a lot in such a short space of time, which brings us to the 2025 as a year, this time next year, local will be very important in all of these searches.

I mean, there’s more, right?

There’s more, but we could go on for another hour.

Yeah, I mean, I thought we’d try to cover the highlights.

I think it’ll be interesting to come back and revisit this next year, because I know when I was revisiting my predictions from last year, I feel like directionally I was right, but I honestly didn’t think, I didn’t see, I didn’t see the level and ferocity of the advancements coming the way they did.

Like, it just, it got, it went a lot further, a lot faster than I thought it was going to be.

So, meet you back here next year.

Let’s move on to the news that we can get rolling through that and then have plenty of time for Q&A.

So, here we go.

This one’s, I would file this one under “duh”.

Google’s disavowing toxic links is a billable waste of time, says John Mueller.

It’s kind of been like that for a while and there are agencies that will bill you for that time to do the disavowing.

And there are people that do disavowing wrong in that they’ll disavow just everything or they’ll disavow entire domains or their own domain.

I’ve seen people do that too.

If you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re not actively under a penalty, I absolutely would not touch this with a 10-foot goal.

No, I don’t think I’ve been anywhere near the disavow link in about two and a half, three years.

And that was only because I went to check that it was even still at the same URL.

But it’s also funny that people who tout disavowing links, I would then say are probably the same agencies that create the links that you would need to disavow in the first place.

So, ask them instead of the disavow how they can control the removal first and then you’ll find that they’re also good at doing that.

Interesting.

Do they call that a self-licking ice cream cone?

Something like that.

Yeah.

So, tell me about this.

Consumers now consider ChatGPT a Google alternative?

I mean, I know I do, but I’m glad I do.

I do.

And I think that, I don’t know, I mean, I talk to a lot of friends and family and stuff that are away from the SEO world or even the technical world.

And if I know that someone who calls me because they’ve got a problem with their printer is talking about ChatGPT, then that’s a problem for Google.

Like, the norm is, right?

If they’re starting to install the app and understand what it is and starting to do their searches on there, then that’s happening.

I also think it’s a problem if someone like me is starting to turn away from the traditional search, which is what we’ve been so used to in our jobs for a generation.

Now I’m using it for informational-based searches.

Like we were saying before with the products, they haven’t got it sorted out.

So I know what search intent is now for which platform.

And that’s what this year’s prediction’s about.

That’s going to get even murkier and will actually make this story even more valid.

And yeah, Google’s got a lot of work to it.

I’m not not envious of the people in DeepMind right now.

You know, I feel like they’ve become a bit spoiled, I think, with the, you know, enjoying their 90 plus percent market share domination.

They’ve certainly got, there’s room for them to lose and still be dominant.

I don’t think they’re going anywhere soon.

But I am, I do find myself preferring the ChatGPT search experience and I get more out of it.

You know, I don’t have to dig as hard or as long to find the information that I’m looking for.

And that’s valuable to me.

It’s really, it’s increased my productivity a bunch.

And I don’t think I would want to go back.

It’s one of those things.

It’s like heated seats in your car.

One day you’re just sitting there and you’re like, how did I live before this?

Like, how did you live in the UK?

I live that every day.

You know, I don’t actually turn it off.

You know, I mean, I think just Canadians in here will go, what are you talking about?

Why do you think you’re cold?

No, I do think I’m cold.

I think I’m colder than you half the time.

So we’ll save that argument for a different day.

All right.

Also in December, quality, faceted navigation.

I’m surprised that this is still a kind of an issue.

But it was written about on Google Search Central.

So Google thinks that people are still having problems with faceted navigation.

Faceted navigation is where you’ve got those mega menus where you can sort things by like the same t-shirt.

You’ll have the same t-shirt available in red, blue, and yellow.

And you’ll also have it available in four different sizes.

And if each one of those variations produces its own URL, that’s going to create a ton of weird, thin content that is going to be difficult for Google to consolidate and help users navigate.

So they’ve provided some guidance on how to use your canonical properly, when to use nofollow and when not to use nofollow, when to use that in conjunction with a canonical that doesn’t point at itself.

It’s nuanced guidance.

So I would recommend if you have questions about faceted navigation, do go to the Google Search Central blog and read that article.

Yeah.

And of course, Yoast products do do that already.

It does add the nofollow canonical.

It also does rel previous and next pagination as well.

Any signals you can send to help Google sort through that, I think is something you should look into.

You want to tell me about the core update?

I’m not sure there’s much to tell on it that it happened.

To be honest, I mean, this was a core update.

So you don’t call them HCU.

They’re all as one now.

And we’re just telling you it happened.

And if you found that there was a big drop off or change of some kind, because you could have had an uptick as well, of course, by maybe thinking if you did get an uptick, that may not be you having a positive, it might be a competitor getting a negative and you reaping the rewards.

But if you found that between the 12th and 18th of December, there was drop off and you haven’t come back since from where you were, other than seasonality, then maybe investigate it and see if there’s a correlation with the algorithm update, because then most likely was the core update.

Then that leads us to a week later, where the spam update started on the 19th of December and then completed on Boxing Day.

I don’t know what people were doing on Christmas Day, if they were testing or what and why it happened on Boxing Day, but whatever.

Releases should never happen on holidays.

I think it’s horrible and cruel to do that to people, because nothing is worse than finishing up your family dinner, having your phone start blowing up because something’s changed or crashed.

It kind of ruins the holiday.

So thanks, Google.

It does.

It does.

And I feel like Google do do that often.

They do a mid-December update quite a lot, but I guess it’s a game of chess, right?

With SEOs.

With some SEOs.

Possibly.

I mean, I have comments, but I will keep those to myself.

Next slide.

Next slide.

Maybe not.

Reddit went through, had like a dip, like a pretty precipitous drop off at the second week of January, I’d say.

So, well, end of the first week, January 7th.

There were charts on Semrush, charts on Sistrix.

Glenn Gabe reported on X that he was seeing drops across several tools, all for Reddit, indicating that they were branded queries.

He’s saying it could be a relevancy adjustment.

Could have been a lot of things, but that seems as plausible as anything else.

But then…

What then?

Was it 20 days later?

I mean, I would say it’s about two weeks based on the Sistrix graph here, but what happens with Reddit generally if there’s a dip?

It’s usually followed quite quickly after it’s, you know, it just comes back and then ends up going up even more.

So this graph’s from today.

So in a week’s time, that may be higher.

Maybe we’ll update it next month and see what the real change is.

Yeah, and it’s not quite up to the peak, the prior peak, but it’s right up here.

So, I mean, I feel like this was maybe a glitch and not anything worth panicking about.

It would be nice to think that maybe the reliance on Reddit wasn’t, you know, was slowing down a little.

But somebody asked if Reddit was still going to be so heavily focused on by Google.

All I want to say about that is, because my son was asking me, and I don’t remember why we were having this conversation, but I thought it was really in-depth and interesting conversation for a kid to ask.

So, Google invested a lot of money into Reddit.

If it’s an experiment for Google to use this information, they don’t want the information to become useless by going out of their way to not feature it.

So they’re going to promote it, and they’re going to make sure that it stays relevant so that the data they’re collecting stays valid and their investment remains good, if that makes sense.

We did some similar tests, like at some of the large corporate news jobs that I’ve had that involve large ears, where they were testing an AI-generated particular section of news, and the test failed because the editorial department wouldn’t allow that news to ever touch the homepage.

It was never allowed to appear in the recommended reading in the side rails, and it was not allowed to appear in the new site map.

So whether or not that content had any possibility of ranking for anything was mixed before it had the chance to start the test.

So what I’m saying is, there’s no point in investing the money to run tests or to try anything new if you’re going to shoot yourself in the foot and render that investment null.

That’s my complicated mind to talk about that.

Interesting.

Interesting.

Now I understand why my son just looked confused and walked away.

Cool.

So good.

Cool.

What else has happened?

We’ve still got a bit to go.

Google’s market share dropped below 90% for the first time in 10 years.

Well, nine and a bit years.

Probably related to what we said before about ChatGPT becoming a search engine of choice for normal people.

Yeah.

Well, it doesn’t…

Their market share is so huge.

And the quantity of queries that occur every day is mind-bogglingly vast.

That every percentage drop they experience is huge growth for these other companies that are picking up that drop.

So it doesn’t look like it’s hurting Google, but it’s…

And it made an entirely possible they don’t even feel this.

But these other companies that are picking up what Google’s losing, this is massive for the development of these other smaller search engines.

So I’m…

Personally, I kind of like to see this.

I feel like it’s a…

We’re not to the point where the playing field’s being evened, but we’re giving these other guys a chance to compete and to try.

And I like to see that.

Yeah.

A bit of healthy competition.

Absolutely.

Capitalism.

Yay.

We’re talking about competition and dominance.

The CMA, who is a part of the UK…

This is in the UK.

So on the gov.uk website, which I will put into the chat here, is basically an investigation that’s going to happen this year about dominance in the industry in the UK.

It’s kind of coming…

Not off the back of, but it’s related to the European version of the same thing that…

What is it called?

The Digital…

Something Act?

Digital…

DMA?

No.

Oh, the DCMA.

The Digital Copyright Millennium Act.

Something like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Something like that.

And this is now going into the UK where it’s talking about why is there so much dominance?

And this might be one of those political games that is being played to eventually split out different companies, which has already been kind of a rumor.

But every country or continent or country or country that starts doing this will mean that there’s more and more leverage for it to actually happen.

So we’ve got to wait until October.

So maybe in October’s SEO update we’ll know a little bit more.

The Department of Justice in the U.S. has ordered as part of the Google Monopoly case that Alphabet be broken up into component pieces and specifically Chrome kind of be split off from everything else.

And it’s interesting that other countries are kind of following people.

I’m wondering if they think that if they all make the same demand and enforce it in all these different jurisdictions, if it is more likely to work.

Since Google is global.

And just saying in this one little spot you can’t be Google might not do anything.

They might be okay.

Maybe we just won’t work here anymore.

Very interesting.

Google inks deal with Associated Press to bring more real-time info to Gemini.

This was probably going to have to happen because they were scraping the news sites for data anyway.

And the newspapers all get their headlines from the AP.

Very little of the news that you see on newspaper websites is not originally an AP Newswire story.

So there’s a few organizations that are still writing their own stuff.

But even the stuff that they write goes out on the AP Newswire and then other places pick it up in syndication.

So rather than having individual newspapers with individual deals with Google, they just went straight to AP because AP kind of catches all of it.

I’m interested to know if the AP is going to disseminate that out to the newspapers that they partner with.

But they don’t really partner with newspapers so much as newspapers are allowed to subscribe to them.

So AP is making out like a bandit on this.

I don’t know what that’s going to do to individual news outlets, though.

And I’m interested to see how that plays out.

Yeah, definitely.

So next, this is what I kind of covered before in one of the trends.

But this is kind of a preamble to this is going to become important.

And again, Google say things for a reason.

They don’t just do things for the sake of doing things.

And here the recommendation is to attract people to actually write a review for you.

So not just to say, rate us out of five or out of ten, right?

Why?

And that is handy for a few reasons.

A, adds good context, which you can then use elsewhere in the site if you want to.

B, adds to the perspective of the third party, which is what we were chatting about was really important before.

Which C, in turn, helps search platforms get opinions as you as an entity, either as a person or a company or the service or product that you’re selling underneath that company.

But yeah, I would say do that.

Well, Google are saying do it with them.

So I would hear it’s mainly focused on product reviews through shopping and local reviews through GBP.

But of course, with that, I would say they’re also implying that you do that with third parties.

And I don’t know if it was asked as a question.

Someone asked in the chat, where should you get the reviews from?

SEO’s answer is it depends because it does depend on what you’re selling and where you are.

Because Trustpilot might be for some, but not for others.

Just like social, LinkedIn versus X are two different things, two totally different audiences and two different messages.

So that’s what they’re basically saying.

But that’s something I was kind of advising from the beginning.

Get as much, you know, get as much third party perspective as you can and reviews from other people.

Because that, you know, enhances EEAT as an entity, I would say.

It goes hand in hand with that.

I 100% agree with that.

So let’s see.

What else have we got?

Advancing.

There we go.

On January 17th, there was a big scare in the ranking volatility because all of the tools suddenly started reporting huge losses and really just erratic data.

And it turned out that Google was blocking these rank checking tools.

So the data that they were getting was spotty if they were getting any at all.

And they’re freaking out because their business model is built on collecting this rank checking data.

And people that use the rank checking data were freaking out because it looked like their sites were tanky.

When they weren’t, it was just bad data.

So what calmed everyone down was they would see that they’d lose all their rankings.

Then they’d go into their analytics tool and go, yeah, but traffic’s still okay.

So what’s wrong?

Turned out Google started requiring, what exactly was it?

It was they want to start requiring that all of these, the ranking tools have to be able to execute JavaScript.

Or what was that exactly?

Do you recall?

I can’t, I actually can’t remember now.

It was, it was something to do with JavaScript and, and crawl and crawling it.

And then that made it harder for it blocked out some of these third party platforms.

Now, some of it has kind of come back, but I would, if I would worked in those tool platforms, I would be saying danger will Robinson somewhere in a meeting and saying, oh, we need to, we need to make sure we support that.

Because one day they can just turn that on again and not turn it back off.

And what do you do?

Because that was just a few days and there was a few heavy SEOs that were having a few meltdowns there.

I’d have a meltdown if my entire business and some of these, some of these rank tracking companies are multimillion dollar businesses.

If my entire business model relied on that rank tracking, I’d have a heart attack.

I probably would have died to be honest.

All right.

Google simplifying visible URL on mobile search.

Yeah.

I thought I’d mention this very quickly.

Yeah.

I thought I mentioned this because a, there’s nothing for anyone to do.

Breadcrumb markup is still there.

It still works.

It still applies and it’s still going on desktop.

This, I was just adding this because I thought maybe someone here was checking rankings on mobile and notice that the second part of the breadcrumb, beyond the root, the root folder of the domain is now gone.

Don’t worry.

That’s not a problem.

This is something that they’ve actually actively done.

It tidies up a bit of mobile real estate.

That’s kind.

That’s all.

Start to improve the UX.

And that’s about it.

But lastly, I put this in because three weeks ago, I don’t think I’d even heard of DeepSeek.

Right.

And now it’s everywhere.

And there are a few reasons why.

The first one is that it’s open source, which is very interesting to a lot of people because people don’t always like the SaaS model or like OpenAI that do things like this.

And then there’s a lot more extending that can be done.

A lot more like, well, we know all about open source, right, and how useful and handy it is.

And it can run locally.

That’s also important for people who don’t like data collection from these companies.

And you can keep all of these things a bit more private and you can have a bit more confidentiality and therefore a bit more trust in the actual platform itself.

Like I was saying before, it knew things in ChatGPT that I had already shared with it, but then it used it, yes, to my advantage.

But what else is it going to use in a year when monetization comes in?

And then it remembers what I was doing a year ago and then brings it all back.

Is it going to be handy or is it going to freak out a bunch of privacy conscious people?

That I think is going to be quite an interesting…

People don’t care about our privacy anymore.

People give away all of their privacy so that we can get through the airport faster.

No one’s going to care about that if it makes your life easier.

They do.

Look, if I like chocolate and I talk about chocolate, send me adverts for chocolate.

I’ll buy it.

No problem.

But yeah, the other thing that’s a real big threat is that it was made for…

Well, they claim it was made for just under…

Well, it’s $5.6 million.

So I just put just under $5.

So I am incorrect by a mil there.

But comparing it to OpenAI’s $5 billion and they have supposedly now got…

I mean, Sam Altman’s even said in a tweet, I’ll put it there.

He’s actually considered it a proper competitor and says it’s interesting.

Now, if someone like Sam Altman says this is interesting and impressive, that probably means away from the screen, someone might be pooping themselves a little bit this year and that they have a lot of work to do.

And I would also think, well, if they did that now, they’ve got something else up their sleeve that’s going to blow whatever they’re going to do in six months in the water.

I feel like this is like the Drake and Kendrick Lamar thing.

Like someone drops a song and then 20 minutes later, someone drops a better song.

It’s crazy.

But they released their…

It’s open source too.

OpenAI is not actually open.

So it’s pretty groundbreaking.

Also, I’m not good with math.

So $5 million to $5 billion, that’s three orders of magnitude, isn’t it?

Yeah.

I mean, it’s a lot, right?

I mean, it’s enough for investors to go…

Well, an order of magnitude is huge.

What’s going on here?

You’re starting to get into that.

That’s like…

Exactly. …your mind can not comprehend.

And I think it even got into the BBC as it’s been the most downloaded app over the weekend on Apple, which is another big threat.

I mean, it’s so much of a threat here.

It’s hit US stock market, not just OpenAI, but NVIDIA stock went down 17%.

I think Bob, from Yoast, he mentioned it was $500 billion devaluation just for the existence and release of this other competitor.

Do you know why that was?

That was because of Davos.

I forget who the guy who was who said it, said that China built this with whatever the top-of-the-line NVIDIA chip is.

And they’ve got like 50,000 times more of these chips than they’re supposed to have because there’s all these sanctions and restrictions that are designed to prevent China from getting these top-of-the-line chips for this reason.

And yet they’ve got them all.

So sanctions aren’t working.

Somebody’s trading with someone they shouldn’t be trading with.

Like there’s all kinds of geopolitical implications here.

So it’s exciting times.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we’ve got our last bits of news also in the news.

I’m going to go through these quick because we’re already at 10-2.

ChatGPT is now available to…

Search GPT, sorry, is available to all free users.

It wasn’t a month ago.

Forbes has cut ties with freelance writers after the devastating advisor thing if you want to read more into that.

Yeah, read into that if you want to.

Google Search Console has hourly data if you are that anally retentive to data or your company is that big that they need results right now.

Bing are now hiding Google Search results because why not?

I guess so.

I mean, why would you?

And ChatGPT introduces operators on the same day that Perplexity introduces agents, which helps you around locally on your machine and stuff.

You need paid for stuff.

If you’ve got a paid for account with either of them, have a look.

I assume that the ChatGPT operators is with the $200 a month one.

It is.

I wanted to play with it.

And they’re like, yeah, you can play with it.

Just upgrade to the $200 a month account.

I’m like, whoa.

Yes.

Yes.

Crazy.

That’s crazy.

And that’s all the news we have on the goings-on, except we’ve got Yoast news, which was last month we implied that there was a new functionality being introduced, and it is now here.

On the 18th of December, we released Yoast dashboard, and it has nice insights and actionable stuff that you can get.

It’s available in free and Premium, and there is more stuff coming to the dashboard pretty soon, but I can’t talk about any of it.

But I can answer other questions with Carolyn now.

Oh, no.

No, we can’t.

We’re at events.

God, I’m even one step ahead, aren’t I?

Where are we?

If you’re planning in attending WordCamp Asia or SMX Munich or Brighton SEO in the UK, we’ll be there.

So make sure that you find us and say hi.

Now we can talk about the next SEO update, which is happening February 25th, so after Valentine’s Day, and we hope to see everybody then.

Now we can do the Q&A.

Hey.

Hello.

All right.

Just starting immediately with the questions.

The one that I think most of us are wondering about, how is SEO relevant anymore, given that AI becomes so much more popular every day?

I would say if SEO is dead, reverse everything that you’ve done and see what happens.

If SEO doesn’t matter, right?

You don’t need any of these things.

Get rid of your title tags.

Get rid of your meta descriptions.

Get rid of any schema.

Remove it all.

And I would love to see how it performs in the next six months.

If SEO isn’t relevant anymore, then noindex your site.

If there’s no visibility, then what is it?

If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there.

There’s no way to hear it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But yes, I would say very much so that SEO is important.

And we have the SEO is dead thing every year.

It went from, oh, no, as a threat when I first entered to, oh, this is quite funny, to now it’s, oh, right, okay, we’ll chat about this again next year.

SEO changes and evolves each year.

Our skill set has to go bigger and wider.

And we have historical knowledge of SEO as well as the fact that we have to keep up with these trends right now.

So I would counter argue that we’re even more valuable than we ever were.

And that, again, reverse everything.

Noindex your site.

And we’ll chat about the successes from it.

Yeah.

SEO is really, if you want to be mentioned in these AI overviews, if you want to be mentioned and be one of the cited resources for the AI answers, and in the narrative because they are going out and they’re pulling information from different places.

So the shift, like I said before, is going away from just targeting keywords and making sure that you’re providing valuable information that’s answering questions and that you, you as an entity or your brand as an entity is trusted enough to be considered the expert canonical source for the answer to that question, which is all still SEO.

It’s not SEO from 10 years ago.

Right.

A lot of people asked about EEAT and I’ve shared some links so you can check comments to your questions as well.

Now let’s move on to one question which is not related to AI because we can’t talk just about that.

Is Reddit still being prioritized by Google?

Well, I think I answered that before.

The answer is yes.

Google invested a lot of money, not a lot of money by Google standards, but a lot of money by Reddit standards in taking that information, having access to that information to help train their LLM, to help generate answers, to satisfy some questions.

They need a source for opinion and sentiment.

They can’t get, you can’t rely on brands to honestly answer what people really think about their products.

Reddit is a source where they’re going to get that from Reddit and Fora and other places.

But if Google had to pick one and they picked Reddit, they’re going to continue to prioritize that because that’s what they’ve invested in.

You know how we say if you want your videos to be seen and ranked on Google, put them on YouTube?

Because YouTube is part of Google and they keep it in the family.

Reddit, that Reddit data is now kind of part of the family.

And that’s why they’re going to prioritize it.

Right.

And another interesting question I think is more practical.

Are there any useful methods for adding or requesting backlinks from reputable sources?

Well, the best methods are always the oldest methods, like communicate well, try and connect with the person you’re emailing, be personal.

Don’t say hello, first name, you know, or do what I do sometimes, which is copy the last email and send it to someone else.

So I’ll email Carolyn and say, hi, Dave, how are you doing?

That’s my class.

That’s my classic mistake.

Even when you think you’re personalizing, you need to double check everything.

That’s also why I love the undo send button in Gmail.

Save my career many times.

Very, very well.

But yes, get an engaging subject that’s, again, relevant to them and give them something that they can actually, instead of saying, oh, here’s a link, you know, this is what we do.

Like be creative about it and try and connect with the person and try and read their previous stuff as well to try and see what their work is and connect that way as well.

But again, I’m not the best at actual outreach.

It was terrible.

I hate link building.

I’m just going to throw that out there now.

A while ago, I had an intern who was an engineering student, but he was in a fraternity.

You could tell he was a ladies’ man, liked the ladies.

We worked for a company that was producing medical content.

And a lot of the links that we were trying to get were at libraries.

So rather than having him email the librarian or the webmaster at the library to request links to our content, I had him call them.

Because librarians are usually women.

And he has a voice that women like to listen to.

And I had him do old school outreach in that fashion verbally because I was playing to his strengths.

So if I think the problem with email is email is very easy to mass produce and it’s very easy to it’s cold and it’s easy to delete it.

It’s very difficult to hang up on someone on the phone.

So I think if there’s any possibility of doing outreach in person or quasi in person where it’s more difficult for that person just to tell you no and hang up on you, I would try that.

That’s obviously going to take longer.

And the yields are going to be smaller, but I think the yields could be higher value.

Thank you.

Another one.

What can we do with zero click searches?

We kind of have to talk a little bit before.

Yeah.

Create.

Look at search intent.

Read about search intent.

I’m sure if Marina isn’t putting in a link, Taka will be there in a sec.

Adding a link in there.

Search intent is very important.

If it’s just informational, think of the second batch of intent there.

I would always couple that with commercial or transactional intent.

And when it comes to zero click, try and think of, well, if they’re asking a question, what’s the answer that I can entice someone into coming to my site to know more?

Or do an action as a result of learning that information?

That’s in the easiest in a nutshell way.

How would you phrase it, maybe?

You’re very good at making what I say more eloquent.

Well, I mean, I think with the zero click searches, I think it depends on what your business model is.

If your business model has been traditionally providing just aggregating information and then relying on eyeballs to monetize those visits, I don’t think that business model is going to be viable going forward.

I think if you’re a brand, though, and you sell a product or you have something other than just raw information that’s generic to offer people.

So you’re answering a question.

You can provide some kind of service to them.

In those situations, those zero click searches are important because you’re helping people develop a rapport and a reliance on your brand, which will then cause them to start speaking you out specifically.

And they form an emotional bond with you.

And people like to do business with people they like.

People like to give money to friends.

You know, it gives you a face.

It gives you a name.

And I think that’s the value of those zero click searches if you can be the citation.

And I don’t know if that was a translation of what you were doing or just my own thing, but.

It’ll have to do because this is 60 minutes, 61 minutes of SEO done.

Thank you very much, everyone, for joining.

Thank you for your questions and all the discussions in the chat.

It was a lot of fun.

We will see you at the next update in a month.

As we mentioned, it’s on February the 25th, again on Tuesday.

We’ll see you then.

Peace.

See you all there.

Bye, guys.