November Insights: SEO & AI Shake-Ups, Google's Latest Moves, and Must-Try Marketing Tools!
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
Hi there,
I hope that my US subscribers had a great Thanksgiving and that everyone is successfully planning for the holidays this month/ahead with minimal stress. Unfortunately, SEO and the AI space are not giving us much breathing room this month, with multiple updates that we’ll cover below.
While I mention resources I’ve discovered at the end of this newsletter every month, I also wanted you to know that I’ve updated my AI marketing tools resource with new tools I’ve discovered over the past few months and have added custom GPTs that I’m using to the AI in SEO workflow resource. Feel free to check it out.
Now, let's get on with the updates.
New Podcast Episode
Curious as to the soft skills involved in SEO product management or need writing improvement tips? This episode with Adam Gent is for you.
New Blog Post
My take on Google's SGE that might go live in December and recommendations for brands for the Perspectives and other social media posts in Google search that are live now.
Google Announcements and Updates
November Core Update
More about the update here, and it created significant ranking changes in search. They also rolled out a review system update.
Google and Canada reached an agreement
Google and the federal government have reached an agreement in their dispute over the Online News Act that would see Google continue to share Canadian news online in return for the company making annual payments to news companies in the range of $100 million. More here.
Google Search Notes are public and can show in Google's search results
These notes are crawlable, indexable, and visible in Google Search. More here.
Check out the comments:
This means that brands should monitor these comments and provide feedback to Google if they are inflammatory. You can set up a Google Alert with this as the query: site: content.ucp.usercontent.goog "[domain.com]"
Follower count live in Google search result for social profiles
This is just another sign that Google is taking integrating social media into search seriously.
All Google search rater experiments are done on mobile devices
Thank you, DOJ trial and Cyrus, for pulling out that tidbit for us. We also have this slide about the top 3 ranking factors and a full list of interesting slides. Keep in mind these documents are from 2016. My big takeaway is that Google has been building search by watching user interactions and being trained by our user behavior every time we search. Google won’t detail what user signals are or how they are used.
Will search quality raters be replaced by LLMs?
An interesting article by Dawn Anderson highlights Bing’s current use of LLM for relevance labeling and where the rest of the industry is in adoption. One of the references that she mentions is this:Large language models can accurately predict searcher preferences - using LLMs to predict what results a user would click on instead of click data.
Bing Announcements
Bing now creates AI-generation captions for some search result snippets
More here. Bing said you can block these AI-generated captions using the NOCACHE or NOARCHIVE tags. Bing Search also respects MAXSNIPPET and NOSNIPPET meta tags; find further information in Bing’s documentation on meta tags.
Microsoft Patent On Web Site/Content Reliability Scores
The patent explains how Bing can figure out a reliability score for a website or portion of the content on a website to block content, rank content, provide a content warning, use a portion to answer a question, etc.
AI Updates
Bing Chat is now Microsoft Copilot Studio
Microsoft rebranded Bing Chat as Microsoft Copilot and launched Copilot Studio. Copilot Studio is available in Microsoft 365 (sign up here). It now runs on GPT-4 Turbo, and it allows you to build your standalone Copilots.
Amazon introduces Q, its own Chatbot
And Amazon employees promptly warn that it’s leaking user data and severely hallucinates.
Stats and the State of Generative AI Q3 - 2023 Edition
This report has great stats, and I think the number of organizations with no employee policies is crazy.
OpenAI announces custom ChatGPTs
You can find the announcement here, and AIPRM has a list of marketing ones that combine instructions and extra input into a ramped-up GPT experience. The ones that I’ve played with or are on my radar are in my SEO workflow resource.
If you’re playing around with building your own GPT, be careful of the files you upload for PII reasons. There’s a security issue where people can download the files users uploaded.
To fix it, this was recommended when you build one:
Earnie 4.0
Earnie 4.0 is Chinese tech giant Baidu’s answer to ChatGPT. According to a recent announcement from the company, Earnie 4.0 has reached 70 million users in just three months — astonishing growth.
Technical Elements of LLMs - Brittany Muller’s second chapter is live
Enhance your understanding of LLMs and read it here.
Recommended by LinkedIn
How AI is going to reshape organizations
This article from Wharton Interactive is worth a read so that you can start to envision how your current organization’s work process can morph from what it is today into what it will be with AI assistance.
Using ChatGPT’s custom “GPTs” for keyword research
Paul outlines how to create a custom GPT that includes an API to keyword research data, which will allow you to get accurate keyword volumes while using AI chat AND have AI help you predict keyword volume trends.
AI Laws and SEO
This great article covers the EU AI Act, the Biden’s AI order and how it might impact your SEO work. The important takeaway is that not all LLM models are compliant. Stanford Research recently published a paper titled “Do Foundation Model Providers Comply with the Draft EU AI Act?”, which identifies various indicators for EU AI compliance and for your SEO work to be compliant. Ideally, you would use a generative AI solution that is EU AI Act-friendly or respects these criteria. Here’s how the models fared (Bloom is the most compliant).
The EU AI Act imposes fines for non-compliance, with the heftiest fines imposed for violating the prohibition of specific AI systems, up to 40,000.00 EUR or 7% turnover. The lowest penalties are for providing incorrect, incomplete, or misleading information, up to 5,000,000 EUR or 1% of annual worldwide turnover.
Technical SEO
Additions to organization structured markup
The Organization Schema Markup now includes name, address, contact information, and business identifiers (like NAICS code or GSI Global location number). Google Search Console Reports and Rich Results testing tool can validate this new markup. The markup goes on just your homepage or your About page.
Discussion forum and profile page markup are now available
You can view the new markup here. This functionality allows Google to show “first-person perspectives from social media platforms, forums, and other communities” within the search results. Google Search Console Reports and Rich Results testing tool can also validate this new markup.
New course info structured data
You can find more details here.
Updated/New video structured data
They have added the uploaded time and timezone. There is also new learning video structured data that can help searchers find your video with a rich snippet when looking for academic learning content.
Google: "Focus on Technical SEO and High-Quality Content First"
I’m saving this Google quote for later, as it’s the approach I’ve recommended for at least 15 years.
Google safety crawler is now in the Googlebot list documentation
This crawler looks for malware and other abuse-type crawling and ignores robots.txt rules.
New Robots.txt report in Google Search Console
Content
Content optimization with entities case study
This interesting case study shows that Google initially ranks your content based on entity optimization and then adjusts your ranking based on user interaction.
Google to recipe bloggers: "We've heard complaints, make it easy to access recipe"
I’m just sharing this update as an online recipe searcher, I personally can’t wait for Google to turn this warning into an algorithm update so that we can all get to the recipes easier.
Social Media
Meta announces video editing and image generation
Called emu. You can check them out here.
Video Optimization
Creators will soon have to disclose the use of gen or risk suspension
Read the AP article here; the new rules will start in 2024.
New YouTube experiment with AI and music
YouTube launched a Dream Track experiment in YouTube shorts, where you can get a unique soundtrack for your YouTube short. See the demo video here.
SEO Measurement
GA4 reports are now sampling data
Check out the X thread from Charles Farina.
Ahrefs now has an AI assistant in Keywords Explorer
For now, this feature does not consume credits. Demo video here.
New Tools & Resources
New tools I discovered in November that are 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’s it for this month. I hope you have a great holiday season, and I look forward to updating you on the various December updates next year!
Katherine
Very informative👐The patent explains how Bing can figure out a reliability score for a website or portion of the content on a website to block content, rank content, provide a content warning, use a portion to answer a question.