Don't miss April's Search, Social and AI updates and big changes.
Katherine Watier Ong
Enterprise SEO | Accomplished multi-industry digital marketer | CEO@ WO Strategies. Host of the Digital Marketing Victories podcast. Talks about #journals #.gov #associations, #SEO and #AI
What a month! We moved houses (still not unpacked, and the Digital Marketing Victories podcast is paused for a month or so), and AI’s role in online discovery & learning exploded. Related, I presented last month at the Digital Strategy Summit on: "How to use AI to Double your Marketing Output."?Check out my deck?and?register to download the associated resources.
Finally, I created a chatbot for a client’s website and mine. If you’d like to query the content on my site,?give it a spin here.
Let’s get into the updates.
Google Announcements and Updates
Google is working on a new search experience called Magi
Google is working on a new search experience powered by AI – with the?codename: Magi.?It aims to be more personalized - attempting to anticipate the searcher’s needs (delivering content without even searching). According to The New York Times, Google is developing other tools: an AI image generator called GIFI, a language learning system called Tivoli Tutor, and a feature called Searchalong - a chatbot in Google’s Chrome browser to answer questions about the current web page. In addition to developing new search tools under Project Magi, Google is also planning a more radical rebuild of its search engine.?
This activity at Google is partially triggered by the announcement that Samsung might drop Google and use Bing instead as its default search engine.
Google drops ranking systems & updates its ranking systems page
The SEO community got heated?around this one. Even though Mobile-Friendly, Page Speed, Secure Sites & Page Experience have been retired as ranking systems, that does not mean that they are not used as?signals in ranking. This is a part of Google streamlining their?page experience help page?and adding elements of page experience to their helpful content guidelines.?
Google’s new site crawler
Google has launched a?new crawler named GoogleOther?which will be used internally by various Google teams to crawl the public web. The documentation says the crawler is: “Generic crawler that may be used by various product teams for fetching publicly accessible content from sites. For example, it may be used for one-off crawls for internal research and development."?It uses the same IP address ranges as the other Googlebots. It is unknown whether this is used for Bard.
Bard gets coding capabilities
Google announced that Bard can now?help you code.
Google’s Reader Revenue Manager
A new feature that lets you?launch paid subscriptions?- as a part of Google’s Publisher Center. It’s free for every website that would like to establish a paywall.?
Google Human Raters reviewing chatbot answers
Google has shifted its focus for its human raters to review chatbot responses over search results. Raters are given a prompt along with two responses and they were instructed to pick the best response. All of this was?very little rater training.
Bing Announcements
Bing’s AI capacities increase the search engine‘s popularity
There are more than 100M daily active users of Bing, and Bing states that its first goal is to “drive more traffic to publishers in this new world of search.” Bing also walks through its concepts for?Chat advertising here.
New AI image creation in Bing
It’s?integrated into the Edge sidebar?- powered by DALL*E. They also extended the max length of chats so that you can have conversations about longer documents.
Here’s my first attempt at playing around with it - I give you a search engine bot crawling toward a pot at the end of the rainbow.
Microsoft’s AI-powered Canva creator
They announced?Designer, which is a Canva-like web app. In addition to images, it can generate written captions and hashtags relevant to social media posts, offering users several suggestions. It can also create animated visuals, complete with backgrounds and text transitions, powered by AI. It’s free for a preview period, and will be available for 365 subscribers.
Bing crawling behind paywalls
This was a rumor last month, and is now confirmed. Bing has now hinted that Bing will be adding more?robots.txt controls?around crawling, indexing, and serving for Bing Search vs. Bing Chat. and Bing should be able to announce something next month.
WhoIs Domain information a small ranking signal for Bing
You can see the?chat with Fabrice Canel from Bing here.
Bing Chat to pass referral data soon
In the following weeks, you will see impressions and click data in Bing Webmaster Tools, and soon you will see?referral data from Bing chat?in your web analytics.
AI Updates
ChatGPT Default mode now includes Browsing mode enabled for plus users
This means you can have a chat and generate answers on data after 2021. Here's?what that looks like.
TEDTalk: The inside story of ChatGPT's astonishing potential
This is a little thing, but over the years, it’s been harder to find Word Clouds that display each term by size depending on the volume per term, and I realized after?watching this video?that ChatGPT could do that for me.?I can’t wait to use AI to analyze file data, have it make charts from data, and extrapolate trends just by chatting with it. OpenAI last month launched a feature for ChatGPT that allows users to turn off chat history, which means you can choose which conversations will be used to train their models.
Worth watching: Demo of a Hands-free AI assistant
This is just cool, and I admit I just added this to the newsletter because I’m a wearable computer geek (check out my thesis). These are leaked videos of how you can verbally prompt a device in your breast pocket, and it will project details on your hand/wall/whatever.
Here are the leaked videos:
From a search perspective, your content would be featured if you were?optimizing it for voice search.
Was your website used to train Google’s Bard?
Washington Post?has created a database of the websites used to train Google’s AI chat, Bard. You can check if your website was included (mine was) and how many “tokens” were taken from your site. However, we don’t know what it means when you compare the token count.
Reddit wants to get paid for helping to teach big A.I. systems
Reddit is now going to be charging for its API, which was used to?train big tech’s AI projects.
Adobe Firefly can now assist with video editing
Whitehouse considering rules on AI tools
Frankly - finally. Let’s hope this effort goes somewhere otherwise disinformation on the Internet is going to further degrade our democracy.
Technical SEO
Googlebot Verification - Updated Documentation
They also?updated their documentation?to include more information about these crawlers:
These are the three categories of Google Bots:
You might want to check to see if these are whitelisted if you use Cloudflare:
Google updates Bot Documentation
There are 3 types of bots:
How EEAT might impact crawling & indexing
I agree with this quote in the?OnCrawl post:?“E-E-A-T can help Google to rank based on entities or domain and author level applied in the big scale without having to crawl all content. At this macro level, content can be classified according to the author entity and given more or less crawling budget.”
The article also references?Google’s patent?on how Google may use website representation vectors to generate quality scores for sites that impact crawling/indexing.?Bing has been even more transparent about how it evaluates the quality of the content BEFORE it bothers crawling.?
领英推荐
Content
Healthline Case Study
This?case study from Ahrefs?is worth a read and even highlighted tactics I wasn’t aware that Healthline is taking. I’ve always viewed them as one of the powerhouse brands in the YMYL space.?
Social Media
LinkedIn provides a peek into its feed algorithm
While sharing a?technical overview?of how it combats spam, it also revealed a bit about?how its feed algorithm works. Here are few insights:
SnapChat has an AI bot
It also has generative AI powered lenses. There is more?about the bot.
Reddit sees an increase in ChatGPT-generated posts
Most are caught and?blocked by moderators. Reddit is working on AI-detection tools for forums that want to root out this kind of content.
Twitter algorithm insights
On March 31st, Twitter open-sourced its recommendation algorithm. This is the first time a major social media platform has published its engagement calculation formula.?
You can?chat directly with the Twitter algorithm.?Here’s?a great explainer.
A few insights:
Local SEO
Yelp now has AI features
They announced that they are using?AI in their search results. Additionally, users can now add videos to reviews.
SEO Measurement
End of UA data
Google Analytics has finally?put a date?on the loss of historical data: For free customers, you will stop collecting data in Universal Analytics as of July 1, 2023. But you will still have access to view and export all previous data until July 1, 2024.
Research: “Direct” is mostly Dark Social
Great research from?Sparktoro and Really Good Data. This graphic is SUPER informative:
And this quote makes the impact crystal clear:
“If you’re a marketer or website owner reliant on analytics platforms (GA or anything else) to provide accurate, comprehensive information about where your visitors came from and how they found your website, we recommend revisiting those assumptions.”?
They recommend creating unique URLs for social media promotions so that you can track the impact.?
How to create a 404 report in GA4
SEMrush now lets you track more search features:
I think the exciting part is that you can see it in the overview reporting:
Big Query pricing is changing
A new BigQuery?pricing model is coming in July. There are two buckets of pricing in Big Query - one for storage and one for analysis. The analysis is going to go up 20%.
RegEx comes to GA4 events
GA4 Events can be modified by RegExGoogle Analytics 4 now lets you modify and create events using regular expressions.?More here.
RegEx in GA4 is different from UA
Here’s an example from?Charles Farina:
Say you wanted to find any source/medium combos from google or bing.
Most users in GA3 would search for google|bing
In GA4 you have to search for: .*(google|bing).*
Soft Skills
A better strategy tool than roadmaps
Tom Critchlow using?sequencing mapping instead of roadmaps?really resonated with me. Here’s the part that I thought was killer:
“...We start to realize that maybe a prioritized roadmap isn’t the real goal - what we need is something that can guide us, but has plenty of room for learning, refinement and experimentation along the way…Sequencing is like prioritization with more unknowns, a way of outlining what we need to learn.”
I also love that his work involves creating dashboards, as you manage what you measure - an approach I take with each client as well.?
Whiteboard Friday - Identifying Skills Gaps
A?well structured post?about how to set in place an SEO growth plan by Helen Pollit. Worth a watch.
Looking for Capacity-Building SEO Support?
For the first time in three years, we have the capacity for another enterprise client, as well as room for some coaching sessions. We work together to ensure your content can be found on Google, YouTube, and Bing.?
New Tools & Resources
Here are new (to me) tools that I discovered in April worth checking out:
Feedback & Suggestions
Would you like to share a great resource? If you want to be featured, have a great resource, want to sponsor, or provide feedback for this newsletter, just reply to this email and let me know.
That is all of the news and industry updates last month. I hope you’re enjoying the nicer weather like I do. Until next month! ??
Best,
Katherine