Last week’s episode (297)  See all episodes Subscriber Content

This week’s edition covers important privacy tools from Google, ongoing SERP turbulence in early August, and a warning about creating content by tapping into popular searches. 

We have the latest details on Google’s emerging Search Generative Experience (SGE) including new examples of links, videos, and images now appearing. There’s also news about improvements to ChatGPT, the disappearance of the Link Reader plugin, and tips for using the AI assistant Claude.

Finally, I’m thrilled to announce the launch of my new membership community The Search Bar, which will enable deeper discussions and access to my guidance on topics like AI and prompting. Read on for all the details!

Google is rolling out new tools to protect our privacy. 

• Results about You – a dashboard to let you know where your personal info pops up online 
• Safe Search blurring – graphic content blurred by default 
• Request removal of any personal or explicit images of you that are on search

I expect this is in preparation for the age where everything publicly available online is available for AI tools to use. 

Barry Schwartz has noted an increase in people discussing a possible Google update August 3-4. This seems to be the norm to have significant shakeup with no word from Google as to why that happens a few days into each month.

In the subscriber section I’ve written a fair amount on my thoughts on the recent ongoing turbulence. With machine learning systems and also ongoing changes to SERP features (especially in the US) we can no longer view Google’s algorithm as fixed elements that just change during major updates.

This is such a trendy thing to do right now – find keywords that people are searching for, and then create content so you can rank for them. This thread started with a recommendation to find and summarize Reddit posts. 

Our "stance" on content is to make it for people-first:https://t.co/NaRQqb1SQx

Content with the primary purpose of tapping into popular searches is probably not really people-first and wouldn't be recommended for long-term success:https://t.co/b1MYLCMGC9

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) July 31, 2023

If you are creating content in this way, here are a few of the helpful content criteria that Google’s AI systems try to consider:

• Is the content primarily made to attract visits from search engines?
• Are you mainly summarizing what others have to say without adding much value?
• Are you writing about things simply because they seem trending and not because you’d write about them otherwise for your existing audience?

In this video, Google’s Martin Splitt shares how to get the most of this tool.

• The URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console provides useful insights into how Google views and indexes a page.
• It shows if the URL is indexed, has enhancements like structured data, and is mobile-friendly.
• Clicking “View Crawled Page” gives more details like rendered HTML, HTTP response headers, resource requests, and JavaScript console messages.
• Rendered HTML shows what Googlebot “sees” for indexing. Check for missing content vs source code.
• HTTP response headers help debug server issues like incorrect robots directives.
• Resource requests show failures loading JavaScript/CSS/images. Fix missing resources.
• Console messages give hints about JavaScript issues.
• Can also do a live test for latest results without caches. Useful for debugging.
• Overall, the tool provides valuable debugging info beyond just basic indexing status. Use it to diagnose SEO issues.

More SEO Goodies

The issue where GSC was not showing the full number of links it should has now apparently been resolved.

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1687432882812268545?s=20

Here’s how to send Google Ads data to BigQuery by Himanshu Sharma.

Mordy Oberstein noticed large thumbnails in his SERPs.

Looks like Google is going with wider image thumbnails.

Also, this is the 1st time I've personally seen indented results get thumbnails.

Does it feel like there are a lot more image thumbnails these days?

cc: @rustybrick pic.twitter.com/vDVw5oqYh3

— Mordy Oberstein (@MordyOberstein) August 4, 2023

If you are trying to learn about WordPress theme editors, Donna Cavalier shared some resources.

There was a significant issue with Google Ads this week where Ad Manager Forecasting was incorrectly predicting lower numbers of ad opportunities for YouTube Cross-sell ad units, causing errors, latency, and unexpected behavior for affected publishers. 

Wondering if your pages are considered keyword stuffed? John Mueller says there’s no specific number Google looks for. Rather, ask yourself whether you are annoying users.

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1686627322663759873?s=20

GA4 has a new audience report which will help you identify the most engaged and profitable audiences.

Lily Ray noticed an odd pattern of sites with many sites showing changes July 8, 2023.

Any ideas as to why? Respond to Lily in the thread. You can tag me as well if you’d like to.

Ross Hudgens shared a case where implementing sticky navigation increased goal conversions by 39%. Wow.

Implementing a sticky navigation increased goal conversions by 39% on our B2B blog.

It also improved time on site and bounce rate metrics.

This is a common best practice, but good to see data strongly supporting making the change as well. pic.twitter.com/wKPM2uTp0D

— Ross Hudgens (@RossHudgens) August 2, 2023

Google has confirmed that SGE (Search Generative Experience) is not just an experiment, it is the future of search. Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai said the SGE is “the next step in the journey” and also, “over time this will just be how search works.” Here’s what we know so far about the SGE, including screenshots of it in action.

This episode has a lot of visuals so it may be best to watch this one on YouTube.

Subscribe

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts  | Soundcloud

This video helped me understand much more about Gemini. I would consider this a must-watch for anyone who wants to understand the AI related changes we are about to see in Google Search.

Gemini was discussed in Google’s most recent earnings call as a model that will significantly change how search works.

Links in SGE!

One of the biggest complaints on SGE has been the fact that it doesn’t link out to websites. Now it does!

Shalom Goodman posted this image showing inline links within the SGE answer.

However, others have tested the same query (how much does it cost to charge an electric car) and are not seeing links.

Brendan OConnell shared this example where the links were not as obvious, but rather were dropdown arrows you needed to click on.

Nick LeRoy found the same. However, unfortunately the SGE response for his name is confusing him with another Nick LeRoy.

Mike Futia had a different experience, seeing a quotation mark you hover over that then shows you several sources for each item in the SGE answer.

Colleen Harris has a good point:

what's frustrating is that when you have one of those sites it shows as a regular organic visit, so you have no idea it came from there.

— Colleen Harris (@cdawg2610) August 1, 2023

There are now videos and images in SGE

Google announced that we would soon see videos “where it’s helpful to see something in motion.” Glenn Gabe found one on a search for “how a curveball works”:

No websites in SGE means it thinks you want creative content

Gilad David Maayan found this result with no websites listed alongside. Danny Sullivan said that this may happen when SGE thinks it’s being asked to make a creative result. I’m fairly certain Gilad was not looking for a poem about AWS Ansible, but who knows?

Sometimes SGE thinks it's being asked to create an original response (like "write me a poem") & might not show resources. That's probably what's happened by mistake here. See the "creative content" message at the top? We'll look at this to figure out why it happened and improve.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) July 31, 2023

If you see in the line above the response "creative content" that's where SGE thinks it is creating unique content. We are still working to improve when it is mistaken. Use the feedback link to report. It will help us further.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) August 3, 2023

SGE is often confusing entities

Vijay Chauhan found this SGE entry for me. Although it’s cool it has links embedded, it’s not cool that some of the information is referencing other people with the same name as me, but making it look like this is all about one entity.

This example shared by Lily Ray is just awful.

Ads in SGE

Jeannie Hill noticed ads at the top of her SGE answer.

Andy Simpson saw ads on mobile SGE, but they were below the answer:

Google’s knowledge graph provided information for this overview

Glenn Gabe captured this interesting SGE result with a note showing “Google’s knowledge graph provided information for this overview” in place of a website. 

Nicholas McDonough noticed something similar:

Glenn also observed that SGE results do not appear to be tracked in GSC so far.

Showing gated content

Lily Ray noticed this. Not good!

This is all gated content 😬 pic.twitter.com/DqaM221Knw

— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) August 3, 2023

Why bother writing product reviews?

Again, found by Lily Ray.

Also, even if Product Reviews sites do all the proper testing & reviewing the products, plus providing evidence…

Google SGE could just scrape & summarize all their findings.

Adding links in SGE answers is a step in the right direction! https://t.co/XBgby5KZRN pic.twitter.com/8wdRc5yBzA

— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) August 1, 2023

New ChatGPT Updates

We’re rolling out a bunch of small updates to improve the ChatGPT experience. Shipping over the next week:

1. Prompt examples: A blank page can be intimidating. At the beginning of a new chat, you’ll now see examples to help you get started.
2. Suggested replies: Go deeper with…

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) August 3, 2023

I noticed an improvement as well. Previously if you were having a GPT-4 conversation and ran out of prompts and decided to continue with GPT-3, you were stuck on GPT-3 for the rest of the conversation. Now, you can continue with GPT-3, and once you get access to GPT-4 again you can revert back.

Link Reader Plugin is no longer available

I’m not seeing this plugin in the plugin store anymore. It was so useful. A few have pointed out that you can still use other plugins such as Access Link and Web Requests.

I will be surprised if these stay. There is so much you can do with these plugins, but also they aren’t good for the web. One of my favourite uses (I need to apologize to those of you who run recipe sites) was to say, “Find me a good recipe online for [x]. Then, show me just the recipe portion of that page.” Voila – I have the recipe with no ads or distractions and can modify it with things like rewrite it for a 2 person portion or make a variation without this ingredient.

With that said, ChatGPT, especially GPT-4 has made us some incredible recipes this week.

OpenAI is hiring data scientists

This looks like a very cool job.

Can you break ChatGPT with a bunch of a a a a a a a a’s?

Apparently if you put a string of a’s into GPT-3 you will get weird responses. Mine just gave me something based on my custom instructions which wasn’t worth reporting on. But, this is interesting:

send chatGPT the string ` a` repeated 1000 times, right now.

like " a a a" (etc). make sure the spaces are in there.

trust me.

— nostalgebraist (@nostalgebraist) August 2, 2023

Here are the help docs. Rachel Woods has a good point:

Edit: Wish OpenAI had added a chatbot to their developer docs & shown us how to handle hallucinations in a public forum 💁‍♀️

They still make up a lot of information in my experience https://t.co/J6NT9vsC0C

— Rachel Woods (@rachel_l_woods) August 3, 2023

Google Assistant will likely soon be powered by Google’s latest LLM technology

The Assistant team went through some changes. A letter to the team says, “We’ve also seen the profound potential of generative AI to transform people’s lives and see a huge opportunity to explore what a supercharged Assistant, powered by the latest LLM technology would look like.”

This made me think of the NYT article from April that mentioned Google’s project Magi, which is likely Google’s new Gemini powered Search Engine that is coming soon: “The new search engine would offer users a far more personalized experience than that company’s current service, attempting to anticipate users’ needs.”

I keep thinking about what it means to have a search engine that anticipates users’ needs. I’m not sure if this is related but I noticed something interesting on my Pixel phone. Sometimes it will show me things on my home screen depending on where I am located. If I go into my yard, it will display my latest Audible book even without me asking for it. I wonder if Google is trying to predict my needs (as often when I’m in the yard, I’m listening to a book.)

NotebookLM

I’m hearing some reports from folks who have access. This is the tool that lets you use AI that is grounded in a body of Google Docs.

Andy Simpson shared this example which was interesting. You can put up to 10,000 words into the Google doc. He pasted in the entirety of the QRG and then asked, “How can I use this information to improve my SEO strategy”.  However, I’m not convinced that the answer it gave really was grounded in the QRG information pasted in. While the QRG does talk about the importance of popularity or being recommended by other experts, it certainly doesn’t recommend building backlinks as suggested here.

I asked Andy to ask the question, “What examples does this document give on improving E-E-A-T?” This is not a bad start. I think there’s much more we can do here by asking targeted questions.

Andy and I will likely explore this further and report back to you.

Alvario Cintas shared an example where he used NotebookLM to summarize his class notes. It was able to identify the key topics discussed and suggest questions that could be asked about this content.

Rakuten partnered with OpenAI

Rakuten has partnered with OpenAI to integrate state-of-the-art conversational AI into its consumer and business products across e-commerce, fintech, digital content, and telecoms. The collaboration aims to enhance Rakuten’s online shopping, customer service, and merchant tools by combining OpenAI’s pioneering technology with Rakuten’s data, channels, and large ecosystem of users and merchants in Japan and globally.

LK-99

If you’ve been following the discussion about LK-99, a potentially world changing discovery of a room temperature superconductor, and you’re confused, you’re not alone. I had an interesting conversation with ChatGPT to help me understand more. It sounds like if the world learns to create superconductors, it will dramatically accelerate technological progress and enable major advances in many areas, especially computing and AI.

How do you pronounce Claude?

I was saying it like it was a French name rhyming with code. But apparently a lot of people don’t say “code” like I do 😂

But then I was chatting with Lily Ray and she said it like, “clawed”. Looks like most people agree with Lily.

How do you pronounce Claude?

— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) August 4, 2023

I also learned that while to me, “cod” rhymes with “clawed”, to others it does not. Several British folks shared with me voice recordings where they pronounced it as Clorde.  Language is so strange!

What is Ahrefs up to? 

These appear to be GPUs for AI.

We just received some powerful toys to keep enhancing and advancing both Ahrefs and Yep pic.twitter.com/NxsueNHOYN

— Dmytro Gerasymenko 🇺🇦 (@botsbreeder) August 2, 2023

This looks interesting – Generative AI for legal.

Here are some great articles and videos I found this week. In the subscriber content, I’ve included Claude-assisted summaries to save you time.

Why Noindexing Syndicated Content Is The Way – Tracking 3K syndicated news articles to determine the impact on indexing, ranking, and traffic across Google surfaces [Case Study] by Glenn Gabe

The Complete SEO Content and Technical Audit Guide by Stephen Jeske and Patrick Hathaway

THE DECLINE OF FAQ RICH RESULTS on the STAT blog

Our SEO Agency’s Plan, Revealed – video by TJ Robertson

GBP is recommending AI to write business descriptions

Will Scott noticed this:

Um.. Holy crap.  Google AI is now recommending business descriptions.#GoogleAI #GBP #BusinessProfiles #DigitalMarketing#SEO #ContentRewrite #TechNews #MachineLearning pic.twitter.com/u5stSlDr84

— Will Scott – Coined the phrase Barnacle SEO (@w2scott) August 2, 2023

It only appears to be available in some accounts for now.

How to push down a negative Google Review

This is a great video by Joy Hawkins discussing a technique for pushing positive reviews above negative ones in Google search results. They tested adding photos to old positive reviews, which bumped them to the top of the reviews section and pushed negative reviews down. This was effective for a client with a single negative review at the top. 

However, for a client with many negative reviews, it didn’t work as well. The takeaway is that business owners should encourage customers to add photos to positive Google reviews, which can push those reviews above negative ones. But if there are many negative reviews already, this strategy may not be as effective.

Looking for a new SEO job? SEOjobs.com is a job board curated by real SEOs for SEOs. Take a look at five of the hottest SEO job listing this week (below) and sign up for the weekly job listing email only available at SEOjobs.com.

Each week I send the Google Doc draft of the episode to paid subscribers on Friday before it is fully published Monday. It always contains a bunch of extra content.

This week’s subscriber content includes the following:

• Using Code Interpreter to increase CTR on pages that rank well but don’t get enough clicks.
• Thoughts on how the review system works.
• Case study: Site’s migration has limited SEO impact despite redirecting quality backlinks
• Lily Ray’s advice for recovering if impacted by an algo update
• Using Claude to decipher what it is SGE likes to rank
• Lots of my thoughts on recent algo turbulence – why the SEO weather tools may no longer be that useful, and why many sites are seeing drops that look like Google algorithm update hits, but each on different days. Also, why we are seeing more turbulence on US SERP weather tools than globally.

Susbscribe $18/m

Not able to subscribe? You’ll still learn lots each week in newsletter. Sign up here so I can send you an email each week when it’s ready:

I can’t believe it is finally happening! After many months of hinting, I am happy to announce that The Search Bar, a community for SEOs is now operational. 

I have invited in a few people so we can work out the kinks and see how it is working before opening it up to more. So far the feedback is really good. It has been a joy to watch conversations unfold.

If you are a friend of mine wondering why I haven’t invited you yet, reach out to me! If you are a subscriber who can’t wait to join, as soon as I’m ready to open it up more fully I’ll be paid newsletter subscribers the first chance to join. Eventually it will be open to the public.

The section for discussing SEO and AI news is free to all to join. Then there are areas for deeper discussions on all sorts of topics including ChatGPT/Bard prompting. These are paid and private. I am still determining the price, but it will be fair.

I will share much more soon!