The SEO update by Yoast – May 2024 Edition

Welcome to this month’s SEO update by Yoast.

If you like the tune — and Niels, you’re spoiling it in the chat already — it is available on Spotify.

So go find Yoast SEO, and you can find our song on Spotify since this week.

So that’s quite awesome.

But today, we’re not going to talk about songs.

We’re going to talk about SEO.

And before we do that, there’s a few practical things that you need to know.

Over on the side — I always forget on which side — there’s a chat.

So you can interact with us.

And we always love to hear where you’re coming from.

So please do share, if you’re joining us today, what’s your location?

Because from all over the world, it’s fantastic to have you.

If you have any questions, there’s a Q&A section.

Right there, you can ask your questions.

And the end of this webinar will have a Q&A section.

This will be repeated after.

But most importantly, this whole webinar will be recorded and we’ll share the recording with you after the webinar.

So you don’t have to hurt your hand writing everything down right now.

If you miss something, that’s OK.

The recording will be shared later on.

So you’re probably like, hey, is that guy alone?

Well, no, I’m not.

There are two SEO experts that are going to talk you through all of the news of this month.

So let me introduce them.

But first, hi, my name is Taco and I’ll be your host today.

But before we dive into this month’s news, let me introduce today’s experts.

We start with the ever amazing– and let me move her to the screen– Carolyn.

Carolyn is principal SEO at Yoast.

She has a longstanding background in digital marketing and SEO and has always been focused on news publishing online.

And she is joined today by someone who’s also famous by now from this webinar and probably many other things.

And that’s Alex.

And Alex is a man with many talents.

He’s building a pet brand.

He’s the husband of the owner of a UK-based agency named FireCask.

And most importantly, he’s also principal SEO at Yoast.

And together, they form the dream team that will bring you this month’s SEO news.

So without further ado, please put your hands together for these amazing experts next to me.

Thanks so much for the intro, as always, Taco.

And hello, Carolyn.

How are you?

I’m good.

How are you?

Good, good.

I’m excited to go through this month because we’ve got quite the agenda, haven’t we?

But you know who we are, guys.

I’m Alex.

I’m a principal SEO.

And Carolyn from the US is also a principal SEO.

Indeed.

So now that you know who we are, we should probably get into it because we’ve only got an hour.

And I know you guys have a lot of questions at the end.

And we want to have time for that.

So what are we going to be discussing today?

As per usual, SEO news, AI news, and to be honest, they kind of overlap a lot today.

Little WordPress news, a little bit of Yoast news, and then we’ll do the Q&A.

The recording is always available afterwards.

So if you miss it, if you have to leave, if the dog decides to throw up on the carpet and you have to run away from the computer, you can still watch the replay afterwards.

Don’t forget, there are questions that you can do in the sidebar.

So if you have a question, put it in the Q&A area.

I know we keep saying that, but it’s easier for us to answer questions if you pop it into the Q&A than if you just put it in the chat.

So keep that in mind.

And this is why, because we can upvote them and we can keep track of the questions that are asked.

If you want to learn more about today’s topics, you can go to yoa.st/update-may-2024.

That is where you will see our webinar for today’s link.

And afterwards, that will be where you can find a link to the replay.

If you are new to SEO and you would be interested in joining one of our beginner SEO webinars, they happen every week.

So bi-weekly, the next one is June 6th, and it starts at 10 a.m.

Central European time, which is not 10 a.m. in the U.S. and the math is eluding me at this point.

So I will let you figure out the time zone difference yourself, but again, we do have replays of that.

All right, Alex, are you ready? – I’m ready, I’m ready.

Are you? – Let’s do the SEO news ’cause it was a lot this month.

So after our last update, this was still in April, but we’re gonna count it.

Google’s John Mueller went on websites, there went on.

He was doing a press junket basically, where he was talking about website recovery after the core updates.

He says that Google, okay, it says it confirms.

He’s claiming Google doesn’t hold grudges against sites that were impacted by the update, but he is acknowledging that recovery is not going to be quick.

Recovery is not only not going to be quick, but it is difficult to ascertain exactly what needs to be done.

He says recovery timelines vary, which, I don’t know if you remember the royal debate with recollections may vary, but that sounds like, that sounds like it’s been word-smithed a little.

And significant effects could mean multiple cycles to take into, you know, take effect.

He also said the following day, or two days later, that the helpful content update recoveries could take much longer than others too.

My interpretation of this is that there’s been so many complaints and so much uproar from big companies, and big companies pay Google’s bills ultimately, that they need to go out and calm everyone down.

And this is an attempt to calm people down.

I don’t know that they’re going to roll it back though.

I don’t think they can at this point. – No, I don’t know who it was, if it was John or someone else inside Google who said we are not rolling it back.

And that was a few months ago.

And you know that that isn’t just one person tweeting their personal view.

That tweet will have been checked to make sure that that tweet can be posted by at least 10 people.

So it must be a very conscious decision that it’s, and it’s now in core as well, helpful content’s now in core, which means it’s part of the main secret sauce.

So no, part of it’s like it’s doubling down, but I like it, it varies.

It’s like our version of it depends.

Timelines can vary.

We should start using that now. – Timelines can vary.

That just sounds like an AI, an AI smoothed version of it depends. – Maybe it will. – The other thing I see here is in both articles in different publications, meaning they’re saying this in multiple places, Google is reaffirming it doesn’t hold grudges.

I don’t think Google ever held grudges, but what I think Google does do is, and I don’t know if you guys have this in Europe or in Britain, but we have, when you’re in grade school, the concept of a permanent record.

And in your permanent record, they know everything you’ve ever done from the time you enter school until the time you leave.

And while I don’t think Google holds grudges, I think the things that are in your permanent record color how they treat and evaluate your site later on.

For example, if you are a known paste eater when you are in kindergarten, and then you fail a test when you’re in fifth grade, the teacher’s going to say, well, Johnny did eat a lot of paste in kindergarten, so I’m going to say he just definitely failed that test.

Whereas if you’re little Patty perfect, and you’ve never missed a day of school, you never eat glue, you never beat anybody up on the playground, did anything wrong at all, and you fail a test in fifth grade, the teacher will look back on your glistening record and say, oh my goodness, something must be wrong with Patty.

We need to get her, we need to find out if she’s okay, we need to let her retake that test, we’re going to reevaluate, because clearly something’s amiss.

So while I don’t think they hold grudges, I do think that they evaluate your past actions in light of your current performance.

And if you’re known to be a bad actor, they will come down and you like the fiery fist of God.

And if you’re known to be a generally good player, they’ll say, you know what, maybe this was a glitch, we’re going to come back and reevaluate in a couple days, see if they fix the problem.

One might even reach out to them and say, hey, did you know there’s a problem?

They’ll treat you differently based on your record, which is not the same as holding grudges.

So it’s not that they’re lying here, it’s just that they’re being very semantically careful with how they phrase things. – Yeah, as though it’s more anomalous behavior rather than pattern of behavior. – Yeah, which is why I think maybe, I know we’ll get into this later, I think newspapers in particular are going to have a difficult time with the site reputation situation.

And we can address that when we get to it.

Can you tell me about the structured data stuff? – I can, so Google have been on a mission to update the documentation, they’ve been doing it and each month and we’ve been telling you, I think it started with things like review snippets and FAQ snippets and then they started telling where things would appear in which SERPs and this one is growing the product structured data documentation, not restructuring.

I mean, maybe it technically is restructuring but it’s more elaboration on the same thing.

Whilst once one page is now three pages, they can go more long form and it’s got a bit more information that’s a bit easier for the beginner to understand as well as more useful documentation for developers as well.

What you need to know is you need to do nothing in terms of stuff on your site or there’s no updates of Yoast that’s specific to this.

And it’s all kind of all the rules and documentation are there already and it’s just elaborating on it really.

It’s just filling out their encyclopedia that bit more or maybe it’s making you, hey, look over here, that stuff over there isn’t happening, look at this, we’ve done this documentation, check it out. – I really feel like they’ve got so much dumpster fire happening that they’re telling the other teams, hey, the AI team, they need a little cover, let’s look busy so that we can give the people the old razzle dazzle and distract them a little bit from the flaming pile of poo that is happening over in this corner. – So yeah, that was part of the documentation.

But yeah, this is another– – Speaking of the flaming pile of poo. – Is it a flaming pile of poo?

I mean, it’s still excretion from a human, right?

This story. – Yeah.

So the Google AI now is recommending that you drink urine to pass kidney stones more quickly.

I’m gonna say that that’s questionable medical advice.

This is just a, this is the prime example that’s been making the rounds on acts of the AI giving people really goofy results and how on earth did they think this was ready for prime time? – You see, you do wonder because these aren’t hard tests that are being done, right?

You would have thought there was a bit more testing around it.

I know that it’s being, well, not, it’s not fully rolled out.

So for example, I’m not getting any AI overviews here in the UK, but you are, you’re getting a lot of AI overviews in the US.

And maybe that’s the test to see, you know, here’s one very large country in our primary, you know, business location that maybe we’ll try here and see how it works.

Or someone really, really was adamant inside one of the European headquarters not to roll it out and let maybe the American team take a bit of the fall for what’s happening without them going, “Look, we warned you and we treaded lightly.” – It could be, I don’t know.

There’s a couple of different ways to look at that, but this is definitely, this is definitely a big issue for them.

I half wonder if they’re localizing the pool of data that they’re learning from and reporting from to specific geographical regions.

And the US is just so vast that we have a much larger pool of commentary and data to pull from.

Maybe they can’t differentiate it.

You know, there’s a lot of reasons why they didn’t roll it out everywhere, but this is just, I don’t know if I’d call this teething problems.

This is an algorithm issue that they’re going to have to resolve because this is manipulatable and Google doesn’t like things that can be manipulated. – Yeah, I mean, I’ve also, as we go on to the next story, I’ve added a link to a directory of embarrassing Google AI overview answers where you can see that this isn’t the only problem.

I mean, we laugh about this, but this is actually data ’cause someone will do that, right?

Based on the direct advice of a search results page without doing any further research.

There’s a scenario where that will happen.

And this is not just this one term.

It’s amongst multiple terms, multiple niches and verticals and query bases.

It’s so wide that again, like we say, how is this not red flagged at any point beforehand?

I don’t know. – So here’s a thing that I’ve been kind of researching this week.

If you have a topic that has a lot of data around it, it’s going to be more difficult to influence the AI than if you have a topic that isn’t as broadly discussed.

If you have a topic or a subject that isn’t broadly discussed, but there also isn’t a lot, there isn’t enough data or enough mentions of it out on the internet to contradict a narrative that maybe you don’t like.

I found that if you have a Reddit presence, even if you don’t have a great deal of authority or longevity behind your Reddit account, you can post things on Reddit.

Google will find it and read it pretty quickly.

And if there’s nothing, if there’s no contradicting points or contradicting viewpoints or opinions also in Reddit, it will repeat back what you say pretty much as fact.

So I know people used to do this a lot with Twitter to get things indexed more quickly, but I would say that if you don’t have a brand presence on Reddit, you might want to consider throwing one up there real quick.

And do make sure that you manage it and stay on top of it, because if you can control the narrative there and do it in a non-ham-fisted manner, I would expect to see some positive AI results.

So AI is only bad if it’s saying things that you don’t like. – Yeah, that’s also true.

That is true.

So well, away from AI for one slide at least, Google are actually putting their foot down on other things such as big sites with abuse policy, reputation abuse policy.

You might have a nice insight from your days of news publications. – Yeah, I spent, you know, the better part of a decade at Tribune Publishing and LA Times was one of our papers.

And the way the newspapers make money is they would rent out subdomains of their sites.

So you have latimes.com, but you’d have coupons.latimes.com or directory, which was a business directory that people would sell links in.

And they were, let’s make, I don’t work there anymore.

The company that I worked for that owned them at the time doesn’t exist anymore, so I can say this.

They were absolutely selling links.

They were subdomains that were for thinly veiled affiliate sites that were purporting to be doing reviews.

But again, they were affiliate sites.

So they had affiliate sites, they were selling links on these directories.

They had the coupon sites.

They were selling their reputation because these companies knew that if they came in and they rented a subdomain from a big newspaper, they would have instant authority and instant ranking.

And it was, I don’t know why they’re surprised that this happened.

This was a strategic business decision on the part of these newspapers to continue making money while there was money to be made, nevermind the fact that it was going to come crashing down at some point because they needed to make the money.

And the business model that old school news publications operate on never really made a good transition to the digital world.

And the digital news landscape is not conducive to original old school news business models.

You can’t make money and you can’t sustain your giant newsroom and your giant building and all of your giant expense accounts with what you can do in digital news.

So I don’t feel sorry for them because this has been 10, 15 years in the making.

So they were told, they knew it was coming.

They didn’t care.

They wanted to make the money while there was money to be made.

And now they’re just going to have to figure out what to do. – Well, it’s like the same people who did scaled link building before Panda and Penguin came out.

Don’t complain when you know you’re abusing the algorithm and what it’s looking for.

So it’s also going to be interesting to see what the news niche in general is going to do if it can’t rely on its organic visibility as much and do the things that it’s doing.

It’s gonna be much harder for them, maybe in a good way, you know, it’ll cease bad journalism or not cease.

It will make it much harder for bad journalism to really pull forward into the wider online visibility. – Well, the thing is they were for the most part pretty good about keeping that wall between editorial and, you know, evil capitalism intact.

So they wouldn’t cross pollute the results, especially like in their site maps, but they are losing a significant revenue source by losing out on the ability to rent out these subdomains.

And I think it’s gonna result in layoffs and contracting businesses.

I don’t know how they’re, it could adversely affect journalism because they can’t afford to pay the writers anymore.

You know, this is gonna be big for the news industry and I don’t know that news as we’ve known it for the past, you know, 50 years is going to survive into this new age. – I’m going to be interested to find out what happens in the next year.

But yeah, kind of related to output of what you see in SERPs.

Eric Schmidt came out of nowhere-ish ’cause you don’t really see him much anymore, do you? – No. – And he came out telling us that everything’s kind of gonna be okay.

Yes, things are gonna stop linking to sources, maybe in Gemini and they may still show links in answers, but really, like I just found it is a bit very odd that he’s talking about stuff that’s happening right now when he’s probably not in any of, he’s not inputting at all any of those moments, but. – I think he’s out doing damage controls so that he doesn’t lose money.

I did some checking.

He owns 1% of Alphabet and 1% of $307 billion is a lot.

And I think he doesn’t want his investment and his net worth to get flushed down the toilet.

So I think he’s out doing damage control on behalf of the board. – It’s gonna be interesting to see if he does any more publicity about it, especially, you know, after more recent news, which we’ll touch on later.

Touch on later, there’s still more to come.

So what happened after that two days later?

There was search volatility. – That’s what it looks like.

I haven’t heard anything really about it after that, but there’s been so much happening.

It’s possible that it was still churning, but we’ve all been distracted by all the other nonsense that’s happening.

I mean, it’s not nonsense.

It’s just so much chaos.

And I think it’s easy to kind of forget that there’s ranking changes happening, but the increase in Reddit pages, the thin discussions, it’s all contributing to people’s frustration, which is contributing to big companies winding to Google and pushing back on Google, Google getting spooked about their market share and their stock prices, and then running around doing this apology tour that they’re on. – It does seem like an apology tour because Sundar, the same day, is having an interview with Bloomberg.

And from watching parts of it, I didn’t watch the full thing.

I’ve watched quite a bit of it.

It just seemed, I was saying before, it seemed like it was an interview personification of the GIF or JIF of that dog saying, “Everything’s fine,” with fire around them.

And there are so many concerns, and all they’ve kind of said is, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, we acknowledge that there are issues with essentially that core product for the mass market, but it’s all fine, everything.

We’ll sort it out.

Don’t worry about it.”

But also, if you’re a publisher, maybe worry a bit more. – I just, everything he says, I just wanna respond with, “But you told people to drink pee.”

Everything he says, it’s like, yes, but, you told people to drink urine.

So, I don’t know.

Good luck to him.

I wish him the best on his apology tour.

In other news, speaking of, let’s give them the razzle dazzle and distract them a little bit, they’ve now written AI overviews into their documentation, which in theory means it’s not going away. – Yeah, another bit of documentation that’s been, look over there, look.

We can read about it now, about what’s happening, but it’s interesting that obviously it doesn’t go into, hey, these answers may not be full proof and they’ve been generated by an LLM that doesn’t know enough quite yet.

But here’s the answer anyway.

It’s gonna be interesting to see what they’re actually gonna do in the next couple of months with all of these, the link that I shared before of all the wrong answers and potentially incorrect answers or just stupid information.

But again, it’s here to stay if they’re giving the documentation.

So it’s gonna be, what can they do with it?

They’re gonna have to do another version very, very soon, I think, before people really start to lose confidence in searching with them at all.

‘Cause that can be dangerous if even 0.5% go. – Yeah, how many people are gonna turn it off?

Because they’ve got those new tools that will let you just completely disable the AI overviews so that you never have to look at them.

So I don’t even know if this will be a net gain for Google in terms of the introductions.

Another thing that they’re doing to distract us from the AI debacle is they’ve added two new crawlers, Google Other Image and Google Other Video.

I don’t know if this is going to make a big difference in the lives of particularly Yoast users just because it’s not something you necessarily need to be blocking.

I can see some edge cases where you might wanna block it, but I think this is a, oh, this is cute, yay.

But this is a non-story. – Yeah, I mean, if this wasn’t announced, would anyone have noticed?

If a new robot is created in the forest, does anyone know? – No, no, that is, yeah, this is just, you know, hey, let’s distract them because searchers want to turn off the AI overviews.

People don’t like it, people are complaining.

Tools have been developed to shut the thing off so you don’t have to look at it.

That is a fascinating commentary on the public’s reaction, I think, to this tool that people are so upset about it, they want a tool to shut it off. – Yeah, and usually in previous things that get updated, I’m usually supportive of those changes.

I think the thing that most people can probably relate to is when Facebook updated their whole UX, it like all the did everything about the profile page, the newsfeed, and people are like, how dare they do that?

I’m going to leave Facebook and no one left Facebook and they stayed and everyone got used to it, right?

And I guess that could happen here, but the start is so bad that it’s gonna be really, really hard to win everyone’s trust over when it’s not a human-produced, potentially human-produced answer.

Creating more trust in humans unless in the technology that’s going in the search results. – It was, this has just been so widely panned.

It’s almost people stay with it now to mock it because it’s funny to mock.

They’re deliberately asking it weird questions so that they can get those nice screenshots to share in social media and go viral.

God bless, I hope they figure it out. – Yeah. (laughs) – Back to the, we’re going to distract people from AI.

Google’s now hinting at improving site rankings in the next update.

And I think this kind of ties back to the whole, how long is it going to take to recover from the HCU?

How long is it going to take to recover from the algorithm updates?

Because I don’t, we talked about this earlier.

I don’t, I’ve heard that people have recovered, but I can’t think of a specific example where there’s been a significant recovery, can you? – No, I think there was like whispers of one, but I remember now going in the thread, they never actually shared the URL, which means to me that is it real, you know, because there’s no real data to look at and compare and replicate in another platform like Semrush or anything.

So yeah, and if there’s still only one, that might be for, it may have been a recovery of some other sort that had nothing to do with HCU, that again, none of us have context over.

So at the moment, it does feel like Google is saying, “Look, I know that like we reduced your visibility by 95%, but like wait a little longer, maybe you’ll lose just 90.”

I don’t know, it just doesn’t feel like a great consolation prize to wait longer for another update. – But I have to go out of business for a little bit longer.

We promise something might get better maybe. – Yeah, and when will it happen?

I don’t know, we can’t say. – I mean, the guidance is valuable, the guidance is accurate, demonstrate a genuine commitment to helpful high quality content.

But how do you demonstrate genuine commitment?

That seems a little subjective. – Yeah, just a little.

And with, not just subjective personality and tone of voice, but niche and everything.

There’s too many subjectivity variables to go into it, which is a bigger problem for them to have.

But yeah.

So what’s happened in the last, yeah, we skipped a week because not a lot happened, right?

Everyone was just too busy, making screenshots of bad AI overviews.

And then yesterday, Mike King and Rand Fishkin published together two different posts that compliment each other.

But in short, there’s been the biggest leak outside of the DOJ case, is it, of Google.

And it’s so new that we don’t want to put any bullet points on, because it’s a lot of reading.

While Carolyn continues to talk in a second, I’m going to post them, I’m going to paste the two links, but there’s a lot of reading.

Mike King, his content, I know from his posts as well, are very, very complex and it’s a 40 to 45 minute read.

And there’s a lot to dig in.

And it’s also going to be interesting to see how Google responds to this, because in short, there’s a lot of things that’s implied in these leaks that completely contradict things that spokespeople have said in the past, both far as away as a few years ago, all the way up to slides that we’ve covered in the last, in this, in this Act 1, I think it’s the first couple of slides, that one John Mueller said, have already been contradicted in this leak. – Do you mean that they might not be 100% clear and accurate in their statements to the public? – I don’t know, because up till today, I thought that Google basically told the truth about everything they said, and were very, very transparent with everyone about everything that they do, so. – Did you really? – No, I don’t know, but if I said that, would AI have known that I was sarcastic? – No, because I don’t think AI is very good at picking up on sarcasm. – No, especially when it’s British, right? – Oh, yeah, because nobody can understand when you guys are being sarcastic. – Not even humans have figured that out yet.

But it is, it’s gonna be very, very, I think this is gonna have ripple effects. – Yeah. – It’s definitely the biggest thing I think has happened in several years, and is only making, it makes the last month of the bad PR month that we’ve been describing, that was nothing compared to what they’re about to have to face now, and I would not like to be in the search team today. – Maybe next month we can have a slide on Google’s very, very bad, horrible, awful month. – I know, maybe, I don’t know.

We’ll see what the, and I’m also interested to see who starts taking other search engines more seriously, you know, and giving up Google for Lens or something like that, and just checking, ’cause I know more people are doing that, giving up search engines for ChatGPT, or other chat-based AI platforms, but this is maybe people might have an exodus, knowing that they’ve been telling website owners the incorrect stuff, which means they’re not gonna get support off that lot, and now you’ve got AI overviews, so you’ve not got public support either. – I don’t know, so look at the number, the ratio of young people to old people is shifting in favor of the old people, right?

So the world’s population is just getting older.

Old people are the people that have kept AOL in business, ’cause AOL, FYI, still in business.

My mom still has an AOL email account.

Like, I think it’s really hard to break these patterns and this level of comfort we have with technology, so maybe the kids coming up can get us off of, you know, the Google addiction, and get us onto two different search engines, but I think that’s going to be a slow transition, just giving how entrenched they are with the majority of their user base. – It’s very interesting.

I can’t wait for the next month, and I’m gonna be off for a couple of weeks as well, so I’m gonna have to show– – You’re gonna have to work while you’re on holiday. – I know, I want to though. – All right, well let’s stop talking about AI and start talking about AI. – Yes, pure AI. – On May 2nd, I kept this slide for a reason, so on May 2nd, everyone was hyperventilating because OpenAI and ChatGPT were going to have a big press conference the day before Google I/O, and everyone was like, they are definitely, definitely going to announce a search engine.

They have registered search.ChatGPT or search.openai.com.

It’s active, it’s a thing, it is absolutely happening, and then OpenAI said B-I-N-G, no, and they did not.

So, and I’ve been waiting all week to sing that song.

And also I like Grumpy Cat.

I think that was a huge letdown because everyone was genuinely excited for the, you know, at the idea of a Google killer, you know, OpenAI, they’ve got the Google killer and it’s gonna come out, and then it didn’t, and it was just very, you know, it was depressing.

It really kind of set a down tone for going into Google I/O. – Yeah, it’s, it is interesting, it was also interesting, the, that anticipation, you said people were excited that there was another option.

And I think that’s another thing that Google maybe should be scared about, that there was so much anticipation simply from someone opening up the subdomain search.ChatGPT.com that it created media attention, not just within SEOs and AI people, but actually in the wider, in the wider world, and that excitement, again, that would scare me if I was a Google. – What if that was an accident?

What if that wasn’t even intentional? – Tell me more. – I know, like what if, what if, people create subdomains and like register things all the time.

What if that was just some guy who’s been working on something in the back room and they keep him, you know, his office is behind the boiler in the basement and he’s got his red stapler, and he set that up ’cause it was a project he was working on and no one’s ever gonna find it anyway.

And then, oops, someone found it.

And then it just blew up and got away from him.

I just, it would be funny if, funny and sad and ironic if that’s what ultimately happened. – I would assume that that person now may be working for the marketing team in a higher, in a higher managerial position going, this guy, they know. – This guy knows how to make stuff happen.

So moving on, on May 3rd, this was at Google I/O actually.

So the day after.

Apparently AI answers cost 80% less to generate.

And again, I’m gonna say, who cares?

That’s nice.

I don’t think it really affects anyone. – Yeah, it’s a great CSR post.

The PR firm can dish out.

That’s great. – This is a message to the shareholders.

That’s what this is. – It is. – This is 100% for the shareholders. – And again, the skeptic in me says, wait a minute.

So it was four times as expensive last month.

Why did you do that for this amount of time?

But that’s what happened.

And again, in three months time, they’ll say it’s 80% less again.

And part of us doesn’t really care anymore about the cost of what it costs Google to do these things.

It’s not even correct or perfect anyway. – They’re talking about how much money they’re saving because they can’t talk about how much money they’re making.

And this is a message for the shareholders. – Yeah, yeah.

Interesting how it’s all being pieced together. – In other AI news, Gemini stopped linking to most of their sources.

They used to have inline links.

Now the citations do not have links.

And we’ve got examples here.

So here you can see on the left, the blue links inline with the citations.

On the right, no longer linking to the citations.

I don’t know if this is a good idea for them.

I think maybe it’s not, but I personally use the documentation.

In the SG experience inline on the web browser, they’ll show you websites that they got the information from at the bottom.

So there’ll be like your answer right here.

And then you’ve got little boxes that show the websites where they got the information from.

I use that to kind of judge whether or not this information is likely to be valid.

So if all of the information they’re citing comes from Reddit, I’m gonna go, eh, maybe, maybe not depending.

Like if they said to drink two liters of urine and then said that they got the information from the National Institutes of Health, that might lend some credence to it.

So if they’ve stopped linking to sources, I think that’s a negative user experience. – Yeah, that is the equivalent to me taking away the link and then comparing it to the urine answer is the equivalent of me telling you to drink urine.

And then when you say who said that, that’s that my mate at the pub told me that he’s got a mate who’s a doctor and they said it’s fine.

And there’s no more checks, no more due diligence on that.

But it’s also interesting that none of the other AI-based search platforms are taking links away.

Like you look at perplexity and they actually double down on the source information, which is again, I think something Google should be like learning from, right, but let’s see. – I think, yeah, who knows?

It’s all changing so fast.

There have been some good analysis done of how the SGEs impacting organic search traffic.

And it was, this one was actually divided up by different verticals.

I think Bart Goralewicz wrote this.

So it’s in Search Engine Journal.

We’ll have a link to it if anyone’s interested in reading it.

But it’s looking at the effect on the SGE across organic traffic.

Just looking for triggers and patterns.

It’s showing how different sectors suffer or don’t suffer.

And I think it’s useful to know, especially if you are in one of these affected sectors. – Yeah, I’d also love to see over the next months and years, I’m sure we can talk to Bart about it, is maybe having a timeline of what that figure is in four weeks time, eight weeks time, and see how it goes up and down.

Because some may stay steady, right?

So you look at somewhere like real estate will stay at 82% maybe.

But actually they’ll realize that beauty, they heavy handed 94% and maybe switch that down a bit.

We’ll see what they do.

But it’s very interesting to see how they are attacking, is that the right word?

Attacking different verticals in the SERPs and seeing how they work with it, especially because we know that not all of them are 100% proof correct answers as well. – Well, let’s move on to some WordPress news.

This should go quickly and then hopefully we’ll have extra time for Q&A.

WordPress 6.5 enhances SEO with last mod support.

I don’t think this is a terribly huge deal.

The less modified element in the site maps is not even something that Google says they use anymore.

So yay that they included it, but I don’t know that this is a big deal.

It’s supposed to improve crawl efficiency and Gary said yay and thank them for doing this.

The more exciting news is WordPress turned 21 on May 25th.

I don’t know if anyone noticed, but we should all have some cake to celebrate our favorite CMS. – We should.

I actually had it, it’s my birthday coming up soon.

I actually had a blue and white cake that looked not too dissimilar to that.

I’ll have to share it. – You’ll share it with WordPress?

I don’t know, I’d be worried that they would, you don’t wanna share your birthday with famous people. – No, no, no, but it was on Saturday and it was a pre.

My birthday’s yet to come.

It’s on this Friday, so not yet.

Not official. – Oh yeah, Axel did point out as well.

I was going to say before you turn to the next one that Fabrice at Bing also kind of gave the last mod a thumbs up.

So cheers Axel, very observant. – Well maybe they are gonna start using it again.

That would be interesting to know if they’re adding that back in.

‘Cause I know there was a time when they explicitly said they’re not looking at last mod.

So if that’s coming back, that would be relevant and useful to know. – You know what Axel, we’ll reach out to Fabrice and try and get a comment for next month for you.

So we actually have a definitive answer from the horse’s mouth then. – That would be cool, thank you.

All right, let’s quickly blow through the Yoast news.

Our Yoast SEO for Shopify, the latest update has a brand new dashboard feature.

So if you are a Yoast SEO for Shopify user, there is a pre-made priority list of things that you need to work on for your SEO and you can kind of check through it and make sure that you’ve got all of your bases covered.

If you have not yet updated, please go out and do that and you will see all of these on new updates.

The other thing that there’s not a lot to say about the update, but if you are a Yoast SEO free or Premium or Video SEO plugin user, there was an update that just went out this morning.

So if you have not yet updated, you might wanna log in and run those updates to get the new changes.

Not a ton of new functionality, it’s not a big release, but it did come out today.

So I wanted to make sure I mentioned it.

Our next SEO update is going to be Tuesday, June 25th.

So again, the last Tuesday of the month, Alex and I will be back and so will Taco. – Yeah. – I know we have a lot of questions.

So let us get to the questions. – Yes, let’s go. – Sounds like a plan.

Let me get these out of the way and then your face is a little bigger and then I’m not as relevant, so I’ll be on the side.

Alrighty, so we indeed do have a lot of questions.

If you have a question that you haven’t posted yet to the Q&A section, or if you haven’t upvoted questions because you were paying so much attention to Alex and Carolyn, then now’s the time to do so because we will almost go through them by popular order.

I say almost because I always pick a few that I like best. – I have a question first, Taco.

Are you gonna be at WordCamp Europe?

That’s my question. – Yeah, most definitely, yes.

So there will be a big WordPress event happening in Turin, in Italy, on the 13th, 14th and 15th of June.

So that’s in a few weeks and a large Yoast crew will be there.

So if you want to meet some of us in person, then make sure that you head over to Turin to Turin for WordCamp Europe.

And don’t forget if you’re in the city at that time on June 14th to join our Pride event that we’re organizing that evening.

Enough self-promotion.

Let’s get to some questions.

I think we have a unique situation where we have multiple questions that are uploaded over 10 times. – Yeah. – Steve’s question is the one we’ll be starting with.

While I appreciate you dunking on Google and the gallows humor, thank you.

Really appreciate that as well.

What do you suggest for those of us who depend on Google rankings in our business and have bought Yoast products to help us do SEO well? – Do you want to go with that, Carolyn? – I can.

So the Yoast products help you do SEO in a fundamentally sound manner.

They’re not necessarily going to help you with your off-page SEO.

These are complicated nuanced answers.

It seems that the AI narratives, especially if you don’t like the AI narrative, is influenced strongly by the authority level of the people’s, the authority level of the narratives that Google’s finding.

So if there is no predominant narrative about something on the internet, it’s very easy to influence that by creating a narrative on an authoritative site like Reddit.

So if you had a thing that doesn’t exist anywhere in the universe except a mention on Reddit, that mention will be what the AI repeats back as fact, basically.

If there are a lot of competing, high authority, high EEAT narratives, then Google’s going to start having some trouble determining what’s fact and what’s not, and it isn’t really good yet at offering a statement and then saying that it’s disputed or it’s not factual.

AI likes to present things as though they were fact.

So what can you do about that?

I would make sure that you are paying attention to all of the things that go into making you an authoritative entity.

Do you have a Wikipedia presence, which I understand most people don’t?

If you can get into Wikipedia and become a Wikipedia presence, that is like instant entity status.

If you cannot do that, do other things to make yourself an entity and then constantly reinforce the thing that you are authoritative about, and the plugin will help you do that.

If you have the opportunity to go to the places where the narrative is happening that you don’t like and offer authoritative sounding contradictions to that narrative in the same location, the AI will learn and see that there are conflicting opinions about that, and then at the very least, you’re going to disrupt its ability to present that counter-narrative as fact.

I know this feels like it’s getting very complicated to explain.

The point is, you have to make sure that you are an authoritative entity on the thing that you want to be known for, and that is what’s going to color the AI results. – Yeah, and I’ve pasted in a small link about semantic links and entities from our blog, just in there to help you start out with understanding entity SEO.

There’s also another great post, not on Yoast, but Inlinks by Dixon Jones.

I think I’ve got that here in my, I do, in my clipboard.

Amazing, there it is.

That’s great, more information for you there.

Hopefully that, I’m hoping we answered, Steve.

Although we don’t dunk on Google, it’s very interesting to see that the monopoly is harder for them now.

So it’s interesting that whilst we all think that we’re relying on Google, we’re not just relying on Google, and the things that we do in Yoast SEO are for the greater good of all, search engines and best practice. – I think the reason Google being in what looks like a bit of a panic makes it more interesting and more news is because they haven’t done this before.

And I kind of likened it to the way the royal family used to never complain, never explain.

They’re doing a lot of explaining all of a sudden, and they never used to do that.

And that’s what makes it interesting and newsworthy because it is so different and such a departure from past behaviors. – All right, that’s a very long answer, but also- – It was a complicated question. – Yes, well, the good news is we have more of those.

So the audience is really putting you to the test today.

We have a few more that are in a similar fashion as the one you just answered, but this is quite different from Jania Dal.

They ask, is Google ranking sites with a significant YouTube presence more prominently? – More prominently maybe. – I haven’t noticed that, but I would wager that a significant YouTube presence, depending on your definition of significant, would play into the authority of the entity.

And when the authority of the entity is higher, then that information is going to be trusted more. – And also remember that YouTube’s owned by Google.

It’s another Google-owned platform that they will of course use to their benefit in the same way that even though Reddit isn’t Google, that’s the same way that they’re doing all of that stuff at the moment and clearly giving it more weight.

So if you can produce videos on YouTube and have more presence, do it and connect it as well as you can, of course, using our products and any other structured data that you can that may not be there. – And Google wants to keep it in the family ’cause what are the competitors to Google?

There’s Instagram Reels and that’s owned by Facebook.

There’s TikTok, which is not owned by Google or Facebook.

If it’s a Google-owned property, I feel like they’re going to be slightly biased, maybe not tremendously biased, but at least slightly biased, partially because they have deeper and easier access into all of the metadata and other details of that content that they might not necessarily have access to at Instagram or TikTok where they don’t have a business relationship with those companies. – All right, thank you very much.

So speaking about competition, is Microsoft’s Copilot doing better than the new Google AI, Emily asks? – Depends what better is.

Is that financial?

Is it user experience?

It seems that the answers that are being given out by Copilot are a bit more correlating to the correct answer. – Or maybe just less. – It’s better about not making goofs that are mockable. – I also feel like they’re trying less, but accomplishing more at the same time.

Like Google’s issues that have been happening, I feel like maybe because of a bit too much red tape that they may have under the hood of how it’s looking at information.

And weirdly, Copilot might not be thinking about that as much and therefore giving a wider range of information and learning from it as well.

But yeah, I would personally, my experiences with Copilot have been better than what I’ve seen with Google related products so far. – That being said, if your definition of doing better is taking market share from Google, I don’t know that that’s happening either.

So they might just be stepping back and waiting to see what happens as Google kind of Leroy Jenkins its way into AI.

Let them tank.

And I don’t mean tank in the die kind of way.

I mean tank in the Dungeons and Dragons.

It’s the big guy that can absorb all the damage kind of way.

That was, I’m sorry. – All right, I hope that answered Emily. – Let’s see.

We have a very interesting question from Sandra as well.

Sandra asked the past year I’ve invested in keywords and content.

As technical SEO often can require side improvements.

I have left that behind in the past, a bit in the past year.

As Mueller now speaks about site improvements, would you recommend investing our time and budget in technical SEO or a new site, technical SEO or a new site over content and keywords? – Oh, I wouldn’t go as far as to say get a new site.

I would say, yeah, have it audited.

Have your site, have a technical audit.

See if there’s anything glaring out there.

And there are improvements to make, but depending on the outcome of the audit, that may define what needs to be changed to change a site. – Well, I mean, you can have a new site without changing, without changing the URLs.

So if what you’re talking about is taking, I like to think of it as a cake, right?

So your content and your keywords are frosting and decoration.

The technical part is the cakey part.

So what, if you can, if you have a lot of technical problems, that means your cake tastes bad.

And all the frosting in the universe is just going to mask the fact that your cake tastes bad.

If a new site to you means I’m going to like surgically remove the frosting, put in a different piece of cake and then put the frosting back on, that might be okay.

I wouldn’t go through, I wouldn’t get a new domain.

I wouldn’t change the URLs.

Those kinds of things will screw up whatever search authority you do have.

So if you can preserve that and maybe just swap out the technical underpinnings to make them better, that would probably be worth it.

The reason content and keywords are great, if there’s something technical that is preventing Google from easily crawling your site, it’s not going to see all that great work that you’re doing, which is why technical can be very important.

If there’s something technically wrong with the site, it won’t matter how good the content is and it won’t matter that you’ve got great keywords because it’s just, it’s not, that technical problem is stopping Google from seeing the full benefit of all the great work that you’ve been doing.

And this is why technical can be very, very worth the investment. – So that means that you first have to determine whether the technical problems are preventing Google from visiting your site or understanding your website. – Yeah. – Yeah. – Before, so basically the answer is it depends. – Get a lot of– – It depends on the outcome. – Yes to auditing, but from the audit, it depends what to do next.

But yeah, Carolyn’s right, you know, I’ve been involved in loads of sites that I wouldn’t call a new site.

It’s just a theme update and a theme change and content– – And you can reflect on it too when it’s still not quite likely a new site. – Exactly, exactly.

So yeah, definitely look into getting a site audited. – All right, thank you very much.

We have a few minutes left and there’s a lot of good questions.

So let’s do a good one first and then we have a little bit of a fun question as well to end our day today.

So Laura asks, what is the impact on paid Google ads with the new generative search? – There isn’t an answer yet, is there?

I mean, I know that they’re going to show ads in these answers, which I guess is their main model and it’ll probably get more aggressive as time moves forward.

But from where I’m standing, and again, Carolyn, you’re exposed to more of this, it seems like it’ll be a trickle into more aggression rather than bam, here’s a bunch of ads and this is what you should be doing towards it. – The only thing I’ve noticed, and I don’t do a lot with paid search, but as a user, I’ve noticed that there’ll be like three ads now above the AI overview and there’ll be three ads below it and I don’t think about the effect on paid as much as I do on organic.

I know the effect on organic is, organic is pushed so far down the page that I don’t know that normal people are going to bother scrolling that far down to get to the organic results.

So I think if I had to guess, I would say that makes paid more important because if you need to get above the AI overview, the only way you’re going to do that is by paying for an ad. – That seems great to Google. – Obviously not what we want to hear doing SEO, but yeah, it’s a clear answer. – Look, on the other part, Taco, it makes SEO more valuable because there’s less to fight against below that scroll, even though like Carolyn said, not everyone scrolls, right?

But when you do and you want to do any form of research, the 10 links that we see may now be two or three, which means that fights even more important. – The building of your brand and the establishing yourself as an authority on your topic is going to be maybe less, less readily visible, but more important because now instead of fighting just for position on the page, you’re fighting for control of the narrative and that narrative is going to be reflected in the AI overview. – All right, as we’re coming up on time, we have the one fun question that we saw.

It was the first question asked when we opened this webinar and Larry Hilton asked, what does the title principle SEO actually mean?

We’re in a back channel chat, wondering as well. – I didn’t know.

So we obviously both interviewed for a position at the same time.

And from my experience, it was just a title that was in our contracts when it was sent to that, “All right, that’s it.”

Didn’t look into it too much and didn’t think about it, but probably the easiest and most conservative answer is probably a hierarchy thing.

And we may be at the top level of the SEO knowledge gap of team building.

What do you think, Carolyn? – I had to do some research on that because I actually had to explain it for some other reasons.

Apparently principle means that you are at the top of the individual contributor chain.

So if you know the difference between a role that manages people and a role that doesn’t manage people is just an individual contributor.

We are individual contributors, but we’re at the highest level of individual contributors. – Oh, that sounds really nice.

Go us. – Got that from an AI overview. (laughing) – It totally makes sense because I mean, you are the SEO experts at Yoast.

So I think with that, we can go to the closing for today’s webinar.

We’ve come up on the full hour.

There’s one thing I would like to ask you.

If you’re joining us here live, I just posted the link to a tweet in the chat and it would be fantastic if you learned something from the webinar today to share that in a reply to that tweet.

So if you’re listening to this on your favorite podcast platform, it’s slightly harder because reading out Twitter links is virtually impossible, but we’ll post it to the show notes.

Do reply to our tweet, let us know what you learned and we’ll take that into next month as well to bring more of your favorite content.

Alex, thank you very much for sharing your wisdom today.

Carolyn, thank you so much for keeping Alex in check and sharing even more wisdom.

And I love to see you all next month.

Thanks for joining.