The SEO update by Yoast – July 2024 Edition

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

I’m very excited to be your host today.

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

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

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

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

So recording.

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

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

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

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

First of all, Carolyn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So Alex, Carolyn, enjoy and see you later.

Thanks, Florie.

Thank you very much.

I am super excited to be here today.

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

There we go.

Am I sharing?

I’m sharing.

Wow, you’re sharing.

I think I’m sharing.

I can see it.

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

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

All right, so let’s get going.

What are we going to discuss today?

The usual stuff.

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

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

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

We have a Q&A section.

Like Florie said, put your questions in there.

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

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

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

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

I’ve done that in the past before.

Yeah, so let us get rocking and rolling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They’re generally every other Tuesday.

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

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

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

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

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

So this is the last one before the summer.

I forgot about that.

So yeah, we’re off in August.

We are.

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

I don’t know.

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

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

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

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

A lot has happened since our last update.

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

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

UA has been deprecated in replacement of GA4.

And since July last year, was it?

Maybe the year before?

No, I think it was last year.

That’s when they started stopping tracking on UA.

And now they’re getting rid of it completely.

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

I don’t know.

I think it stopped July 1.

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

Really?

Because I’ve been getting emails still.

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, yeah.

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

But that’s up to you, the audience.

It depends.

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

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

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

We’re just doing the updates here.

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

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

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

It just keeps going forever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And you can’t pick and choose.

You can’t go back to it.

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

It’s complexity for the sake of complexity.

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

So anything that loads subsequently just doesn’t exist.

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

In certain situations, it’s probably great.

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

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

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

So I want that more digestible.

And I feel like pagination does that.

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

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

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

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

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

But– Exactly.

It’s much better places to waste your time.

So what else is going on?

What else is going on?

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

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

And someone said that omitting could actually boost rankings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that I would 100% agree with.

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, yeah.

And hopefully this person will include the brand names.

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

I don’t know how you pronounce it.

I say Nike.

How do you say Adidas?

I say Adidas, not Adidas.

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

Or Nike sneakers.

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

Very British of you.

Well, one tip, localize, right?

Localize it.

I said Nike trainers.

You said Nike shoes.

And it’s the same thing, right?

It is the same thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we’ve seen those.

Those have been leaked.

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

And there were tons of them.

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

They also look at behavioral analysis.

Behavioral analysis is click-through rates.

What are you doing when you go to the page?

How long are you engaging?

So it’s user engagement.

And all of that stuff we know is being tracked.

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

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

But hopefully, people are getting better information.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is that who you were thinking of?

Might have been.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So what’s happened next?

Rand Fishkin’s been busy.

Goodness, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Basically, the gist is it’s affecting it.

It’s not ruining the internet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I think it just needs to mature.

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

We’re all going to play with it.

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

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

Are regular people doing that?

I don’t know.

My mom’s not.

Probably not.

Probably not, no.

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

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

True.

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

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

Now, today, everything’s fixed.

So it’s now a non-issue.

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

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

And it wasn’t because your site was underperforming.

It was because Google had an issue which they resolved.

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

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

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

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

This is not a me problem.

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

Yeah.

Danny Sullivan’s always a great person to follow.

I think he’s SearchLiaison.

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

You’ll find them.

You’ll find them on X.

Go out and find them.

But yeah, do follow them.

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

Yep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

I mean, I find it weird.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So next, yes, shipping.

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

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

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

And obviously, we do handle some of those things.

But some can get very, very complex.

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

There are other things that help.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it’s a little bit of extra work.

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

Yeah, definitely worth it.

I do it if I pay so much.

Yeah.

And what else is that?

Oh, Google now defaulting to not indexing content.

What’s this all about?

This was a think piece by Vincent Schmalbach.

I can’t– it’s a little small.

I can’t read it.

OK.

I disagree with the premise.

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

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

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

And it didn’t matter what it was.

Google would index it immediately.

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

And everything was wonderful.

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

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

They are looking for genuinely unique content.

They are looking for authoritative content.

And I think that’s always been true.

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

They’re just not necessarily ranking.

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

No one’s searching for your content.

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

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

I think they index everything.

Whether or not they rank it is a different story.

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

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

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

Can I find it in Google?

And I can.

Now, is that because Reddit is an authoritative site?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, unless you tell someone about it.

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

Am I just making Google a deforestation company?

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

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

No, no, they’re a great company.

It’s brilliant.

I love working with them and everything.

Let’s move on.

Google’s reversal of third party cookies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least legal departments can relax.

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

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

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

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

But Google does have to be reversing themselves.

Yeah, I do feel bad for the lawyers.

But I also understand that they were on retained time.

So I don’t feel bad for the lawyers.

Oh, no, it’s not the lawyers.

It’s the tech people.

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

The lawyers get paid plenty.

They’re fine.

Yeah, they’re all fine.

They slept well that night.

I’m not worried about that.

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

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

I’ve just pasted it into the chat there.

Oh, well, thank you very much.

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

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

So what’s happened?

Google updates guided some EEA carousels beta.

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

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

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

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

I think it’s the European Economic Area.

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

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

I was right.

I was right.

Thank you, Samah.

I was right.

I was right.

So it’s the European Economic Area.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What else has happened?

Expanding translated results into more languages.

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

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

Google may allow publishers to exclude content from Google Discover.

Read it if you even are interested in doing that.

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

But something to look at.

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

And Google Page Experience ranking factors have been updated.

More information on that.

That’s kind of been relayed into Search Console.

But generally, people have better results from that.

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

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

But then what happened a week after, Carolyn?

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

There’s no boost.

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

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

And I went back and read the original article.

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

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

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

And then they got published.

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

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

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

It’s not necessarily the TLD.

It’s the local content.

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

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

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

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

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

Probably a little bit worse than that.

And what else has happened?

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

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

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

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

They’re shorteners.

They’re meant to be used externally.

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

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

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

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

Like, that is just a patently bad idea.

I cannot stress how much.

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

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

So no, Bitly is the same thing.

Do not use it internally.

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

They’re for external links.

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

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

So you’re going to need to fix those.

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

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

Do not use them internally.

Very, very, very bad.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And one more thing.

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

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

It’s Y-O-U-R-L-S.

I’ll put this in.

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

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

And maybe I’m just a control freak.

I mean, that’s entirely possible.

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

And to me, links are very important.

Yes.

There’s that.

Yeah.

All right.

Quickly moving on.

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

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

So that’s still like 50/50.

And most people I know have seen negative effects.

At least the only ones that I hear about.

So take that as you want to take it.

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

I see that we’re running short on time.

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

Yeah.

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

I predicted that it would go down.

And it has.

And now it’s 7%.

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

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

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

But I think it’s for the best.

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

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

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

Entertainment is quite subjective.

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

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

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

No, of course not.

Because A, Google is a machine and who cares.

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

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

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

Yeah, yeah.

What happened next?

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

Sorry, Apple users.

I’ve not been using it much myself.

I know there’s quite a few out there.

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

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

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

Maybe I do need it more.

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

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

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

Just use Perplexity, use Claude.

What’s the other one?

Jarvis, is it?

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

So check them all out.

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

Absolutely.

So it looks like Bing has updated their AI search.

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

The layout anticipates related questions.

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

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

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

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

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

And it will be very interesting to see.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s what they did with AMP.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You have to check for rogue accounts.

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

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

So do look into this.

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

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

And I’ve been quite happy with them.

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

Yeah, yeah.

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

If you’ve got 6.6, get it off.

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

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

And that was released only within days.

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

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

And I’m like, no, you didn’t.

I did that yesterday.

And then I looked, boom, it was new.

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

So yeah, that’s all the news.

Done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amazing.

It is amazing.

And then in Brighton, I’ll be there.

I’ll be talking there.

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

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

We’ll be sponsoring.

We’ve got a stand and everything.

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

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

I’m in Las Vegas.

I’m speaking at PubCon.

So I will for sure be there.

And I will be giving at least one talk.

I think they told me probably two.

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

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

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

All right.

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

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

We’re probably going to have two in October.

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

It’s what you want, really, isn’t it?

Absolutely.

All right.

Let us get to the Q&A.

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

So let’s dive in.

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

That’s from Abigail.

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

They’re very important.

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

So we know that they’re tracking those things.

We know that they’re looking at them.

And we know that site authority is a thing.

It’s a score.

And it’s directly affected by your backlink profile.

So backlinks are important.

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

You need content that’s worthy of being cited.

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

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

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

They’ll link back to you.

Sponsor a little league team.

Sponsor a bowling team.

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

High school newspapers fall over themselves for advertisers.

And it’s cheap.

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

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

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

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

In that scenario, I’m the link.

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

All right.

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

Make an X profile.

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

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

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

All right.

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

Even John Mueller says, don’t do it.

All right.

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

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

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

I get what you mean.

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

Yeah.

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

But you’re not.

You still have to be scrolling further and further.

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

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

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

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

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

Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

Okay.

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

Nothing to add there.

All right.

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

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

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

Have you experienced this before?

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

Cloudflare may know that.

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

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

They don’t use Cloudflare, though.

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

Sorry.

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

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

So Wordfence may be able to help you there specifically.

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

So go to check that out.

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

So let’s do one last question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

So that takes some discipline on your part.

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

So this was such an extensive answer.

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

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

Thank you, Carolyn.

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

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

You can see the link here below.

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

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

Thanks.

Thanks, all.