The SEO update by Yoast – June 2024 Edition

So let’s get this show on the road.

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

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

Cool, thanks Taco.

Ready Carolyn?

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

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

We’re going to discuss the usual.

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

As always, there will be a recording available afterwards.

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

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

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

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

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

Central European Time or 10 a.m.

Eastern American Time.

Now, let’s get going.

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

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

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

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

But then the leaks happened.

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

Directory of embarrassing Google AI overviews.

Have you looked at these?

I have looked at some of them.

They were laughable.

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

Like, how are these results even coming out?

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

Right.

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

Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, no, we got to rush.

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

Well, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

How dare you?

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

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

Look how easy it is to navigate there.

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

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

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

Right.

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

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

Exactly.

But here we have it.

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

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

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

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

Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So there is really a permanent record.

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

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

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

Do you know what I mean?

Well, like bad links.

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

And you would build all of these really gross links.

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

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

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

Do you know what I mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I guess is the gist of it.

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

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

So this was a quickly evolving situation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Realistically your takeaway from this is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So moving on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, that’s true.

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

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

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

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

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

So it’s still interesting to see.

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

They are your shop window.

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

It’s a little free advertisement.

Make it enticing and write for the user.

Be helpful.

Generating content for SEO is not why.

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

Exactly.

Yeah, what else has happened the next day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As far as Yoast is concerned.

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

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

Yeah.

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

Hopefully, with the next core update.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love that.

I love it.

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

And that’s promising.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alright, a week later.

This is something you might want to cover.

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

JavaScript is one way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But if those words mean nothing to you.

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

Yeah.

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

Yeah, I would love to do that.

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

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

So I would love to do that.

Product variant markup now generates rich results.

That’s good to know.

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

Not what I wouldn’t even describe as nerd.

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

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

So that’s a bunch of stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s some tools available.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I just don’t think we’re there yet.

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

There’s a link to it.

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

Have you been seeing AI Overviews in England yet?

No, not me personally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It will attempt to answer it.

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

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

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

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

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

Did you, have you read this article?

Not in full, no.

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

Right.

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

Do something about it.

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

Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m kidding.

Canadians, I’m kidding.

It was a joke.

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

Up and down to the right.

Yeah, that’s a weird one.

I don’t know how they’d handle that.

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

Those are words.

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

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

Yeah.

Cool.

So we’ve got some cool stuff there.

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

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

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

But you just did so it’s okay.

If I can say the title, why not?

But this this kind of article would say so.

Let’s let’s explain why.

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

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

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

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

So think about any question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wired has a point.

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

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

Robots.txt is not enshrined in law.

It is a recommendation, it is a request.

It is not.

It’s not a law and it’s not illegal.

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

I think it does.

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

Not a law yet.

Maybe there should be a law.

But then who gets to decide that law and it…

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

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

Yeah.

But that’s for another day, hey?

We are at 10.

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

Yeah.

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

This is WordPress news.

So there was a test.

Core Web Vitals were checked.

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

And of the decliners, WordPress declined the least.

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

The winner of the losers bracket.

Is that a soccer thing?

Yeah.

I mean, I can start.

The point is things are getting…

Things are declining.

As things get more complex, they perform slower.

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

So take that however you like it.

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

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

So, hooray for WordPress.

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

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

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

Cool.

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

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

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

I think Bluehost had one other thing that they announced.

They did.

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

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

So always in favor of that.

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

Agency offering stuff.

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

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

You had to use the double negative there, right?

But it worked well.

So, yeah.

And that’s all of our WordPress news.

It is.

So we’ve got one announcement for Yoast.

Do you want to take this?

Because I know you were instrumental in the application.

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

Woo, us.

I know.

For the best global search software tool.

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

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

Yeah, we just want to talk about it.

All right.

That’s it.

Yes.

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

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

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

Amazing.

Amazing.

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

I think we’re doing good.

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

What do we think?

It’s going to be busy.

We have quite a few questions.

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

Go over to the Q&A section.

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

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

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

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

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

How are we supposed to recover from this?

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

So I would say there’s a couple things.

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

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

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

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

Then you have to start looking outside of you.

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

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

That would be my guess.

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

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

So have a look at that.

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

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

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

All right.

And Carolyn, I heard you say find new backlinks.

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

Absolutely not.

That is wrong.

And I would never encourage that because that is wrong.

No, Taco.

No.

I knew the answer.

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

Yeah, don’t buy any shady links whatsoever.

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

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

Any backlinks, quality backlinks are hard to acquire.

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

All right.

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

No, they’re not.

All right.

So we have Giuseppe who asked something similar.

How much will it take for Google to reevaluate things?

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

No other way to speed this up?

There’s no fast track.

There’s nothing like that.

There’s no queue skipping.

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

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

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

All right.

Maybe placebo effect, but it might feel nice.

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

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

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

Yes.

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

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

Yes, it will hurt.

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

All right.

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

How would you solve it?

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

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

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

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

And then all of your links will be there.

So if that’s the case, you’re fine.

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

All right.

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

All right.

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

Let’s see.

This has been upvoted quite a bit as well.

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

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

Like meta descriptions?

I was going to assume.

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

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

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

Increase that potential for CTR.

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

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

But CTR is potentially also tracked.

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

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

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

All right.

Thank you very much for that.

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

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

And that’s by Umair.

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

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

We are gradually fixing them back.

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

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

So I hope everything is fixed.

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

Catch the dub.

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

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

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

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

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

That’s a good answer.

Search and replace.

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

That would be good.

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

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

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

All right.

Thank you very much for that.

That was the last question for today.

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

You’ve been amazing and super supportive.

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

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

Thanks, everyone.

And happy optimizing.

Bye.