Do You Make 35,000 Decisions Each Day? - digital surfer wave 194

SEO

Google June 2024 Spam Update Released

This global update, rolling out over a week, doesn't introduce new changes but reinforces existing guidelines. Google said on LinkedIn: "It's a normal spam update, it's not the algorithmic part of reputation abuse. We'll inform when that happens."

Is Google S.E.O. Gaslighting the Internet?

Kyle Chayka at The New Yorker dives into the inner workings of Google Search, exposing contradictions between Google's public claims and its internal practices. Through the story of HouseFresh, an independent site hit hard by recent algorithm changes, he discusses how Google's shifts are favoring big brands over niche sites, including the leaked Google Docs that contain a smallPersonalSite attribute.

He also covers that Google reached out to HouseFresh and Retro Dodo to discuss how they create their content. Google said they were apologetic, but didn’t commit to any changes.

How Sites With Less SEO Win Google + 4 More SEO Tips

Cyrus Shepard dives into why some sites succeed on Google despite having less SEO optimization. He explains how focusing on user experience and content quality can sometimes outperform over-optimized SEO tactics. Cyrus also shares additional tips to boost your SEO game without falling into common pitfalls.

SEO Ripples

• Google has an AI Overviews FAQs page now because so many people are asking about it. The biggest thing is you can’t turn it off. There are actually 3 questions out of 10 that cover disabling or removing it 🤣 

• Lily Ray explores the shifts in SEO visibility brought about by Google's 2024 updates. Her analysis dives into how eCommerce and user-generated content sites are being favored over traditional review sites. And of course, user-generated content platforms like Reddit and Quora are gaining more visibility.

• If you’ve been following along with some of the drama this past week from when Lily Ray showed slides of people who have talked about Parasite SEO, she shares an audio snippet from her talk so people can hear what she actually said. We don’t know if there’s a call back after this section, but there it is. People who had shared the slides seem to have deleted it already on X and Facebook.

• More missing image thumbnails in Google Search results. Google suggests it's a quality issue rather than a technical one on Google’s or the website’s side. “Google not deeming those sites quality enough to show those image thumbnails." He says to focus on overall site improvement and ensure structured data is correctly implemented to potentially resolve the problem.

• Fabrice Canel from Microsoft highlighted a unique aspect of Bing's reporting. Bing Webmaster Tools can show a clickthrough rate (CTR) over 100%. If a user clicks on your search result multiple times from the same set of search results, each click is counted separately, leading to a CTR that can exceed 100%. This contrasts with Google Search Console, which caps CTR at 100%.

AI

Introducing Runway Gen-3 Alpha

Runway shows off its latest model, Gen-3 Alpha, boasting improved video generation capabilities. This new model improves fidelity, consistency, and motion, paving the way for advanced video creation tools like Text to Video and Image to Video. It's designed to offer fine-grained control and expressive human character generation. The generation of humans are the best I’ve seen from an AI generator. Here’s a compressed example (view on site for best quality):

Claude 3.5 Sonnet Launched

Claude, they introduce their newest model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which surpasses competitor models in intelligence and speed, setting new industry benchmarks. Claude 3.5 Sonnet also introduces Artifacts on Claude.ai, allowing users to interact with AI-generated content in real-time and collaborate seamlessly on projects.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet excels at writing high-quality content with a natural tone and has improved coding proficiency. It surpasses Claude 3 Opus in graduate-level reasoning, undergraduate-level knowledge, and coding skills.

My Take: Claude 3.5 Sonnet is my favorite version now. Claude 3 Opus had become my primary version after ChatGPT 4/4+/4o versions continue to decline in quality. I haven’t changed all our internal AI agents over to Claude’s API yet though because the OpenAI API still gives good output with our agents, but I’m going to fully test Claude’s API output now for its quality and lower pricing than gpt-4o.

Introduction To LLMs Text Embeddings For SEO With Examples

In a new series, Vahan Petrosyan breaks down the basics of text embeddings and how they can scale your SEO efforts. Learn the fundamentals of vectors and how text embeddings represent semantic relationships between words. Learn about cosine similarity vs. euclidean distance. Use LLM embeddings for keyword clustering, internal linking, and detecting duplicate content.

There’s also a nice WP Plugin for internal linking example that’s homemade. The end of this series will be the WP Plugin.

AI Ripples

• See how @electrik_dreams created a 10-panel comic book on ChatGPT 4o explaining “Gravitational Waves.” What’s even more impressive is it was done in one-shot.

• OpenAI acquires Rockset, a leading real-time analytics database provides world-class data indexing and querying capabilities. Search Engine anyone? Including your own internal-use one.

• Victor Tangermann dives into the murky waters of AI startup Perplexity, uncovering how the company's chatbot fails to properly credit original sources while making significant factual errors. He discusses how Perplexity's AI sidesteps content creators' protections and questions the integrity of its so-called "accurate" answers. And you might’ve heard that Forbes is threatening Perplexity with legal action.

• OpenAI shuts down VIC, the AI chatbot that was running for mayor in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Maggie Harrison Dupre discusses the controversy surrounding VIC's campaign and OpenAI's decision. OpenAI previously said it does not allow politicians or political groups to use its tech to create campaign materials.

MARKETING

How to Create an AI Marketing Persona: 8 Prompts For Deep Insights

Andy Crestodina shares a great guide on creating an AI marketing persona using ChatGPT. This article provides actionable prompts to craft a persona that accurately reflects your target audience's needs, goals, and challenges. By personalizing the AI's responses, you can gain deep insights into your customers' motivations and decision-making processes.

Nailing SEO and Marketing: 8 Project Management Software Companies You Can Learn From

Abril Lombardi dives into the strategies of eight project management software companies to reveal how they consistently shine in a crowded market. Discover insights like Asana's focus on backlinks and multi-language content, Monday.com's industry-specific integrations, and ClickUp's educational courses.

CONTENT

20 Effective Product Page Examples (+ Best Practices)

Ankit Vora’s latest article on Backlinko is packed with insights to help you improve your product pages and boost conversions. He dives into 20 effective product page examples, each showcasing standout designs, interactive elements, and user-generated content that can inspire your own pages.

Contact Us Page Examples: 44 Designs For Inspiration

Shelley Walsh from SEJ showcases inspiring Contact Us pages to help you revamp your own. From clear call-to-actions to user-friendly designs, these examples demonstrate how to make a compelling and efficient contact page.

Branded vs. Non-Branded Keywords: What’s the Difference?

Sydney Go dives into the differences between branded and non-branded keywords, offering tips for leveraging both to boost your online visibility. She covers why targeting both types of keywords can improve your SEO and PPC campaigns, helping you capture users at various stages of their buying journey.

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

An E-E-A-T Checklist for Auditing How Your Site Demonstrates It

James Brockbank shares a useful 89-point checklist to help you audit your website’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). This free resource is a must-have to help your site’s credibility and align with Google's Quality Rater Guidelines. James breaks down brand-level, content-level, and author-level signals, providing actionable steps to improve areas where your site might be lacking.

Build a Custom Named Entity Visualizer with Google NLP

Greg Bernhardt’s guide walks you through setting up a framework to process your text content and create visuals that label and color-code entity types. This is a great tool to understand entity relationships in content better. The tutorial is pretty straightforward, but gets technical, especially if you’re not exposed to coding much.

CASE STUDY

How Recent Google Updates Punish Good SEO: 50-Site Case Study

Cyrus Shepard shares his 50-site case study that reveals surprising trends and correlations, challenging conventional SEO wisdom. He analyzes data to understand why “informational” sites that follow best practices are being penalized. Here are some surprising takeaways:

• Anchor Text Variety: Sites with more diverse anchor texts saw significant traffic drops 😲 

• Page Updated Frequency: More frequently updated pages didn't fare as well. 774 days vs 273 days 😲 

• Highly Clickable Title Tags: Catchy, clickbait-style titles were correlated with traffic losses. Listicle formats were particularly associated with losing sites 😲 

• Heavy Schema Usage: Overuse of structured data markup was linked to poorer performance 😲 

My Take: Those are some very interesting findings. Cyrus does say multiple times that “correlation is not causation” and it’s a “very small sample size.” These case studies are difficult to do, even at a 50-site scale. It’s all good to know, but for me, I wouldn’t throw away best practices suddenly.

AI Overviews Research: Comparing pre and post-rollout results on 100K keywords

Yevheniia Khromova and SE Ranking explore how AI-generated snippets have evolved over time. They analyze 100K keywords to see how AI Overviews have changed since their initial rollout. Some of the highlights:

• AI Overview Presence: Only 8.71% of keywords now show AI Overviews, a significant drop from 64% before the rollout.

• Text Length: The average length of AI Overview text has increased by 24.59%, now at 4,342 characters.

• Link Count: AI Overviews typically feature fewer links post-rollout, with the most common number being 4 links after expanding the overview.

• Page One Preference: 84.72% of AIOs link to at least one domain from the top 10 organic search results.

• Niche Analysis: The Relationships niche leads with 26.62% of keywords triggering AI Overviews, while Healthcare and Legal niches see less than 1%.

• Keyword Complexity: Longer queries, especially those with ten words, are more likely to trigger AI Overviews.

AI Overview Tracking in Google Search Console [SEO Experiment]

Brodie Clark dives into the nuances of tracking AI overviews in Google Search Console. With 867 impressions gathered in GSC, he explores the challenges and insights of this new feature. Learn about the experiment's setup, limitations, and findings, including the current inability to track URL inclusions within AI overviews and the potential implications for your SEO strategy.

He does conclude that AI Overview data is being recorded within GSC, but it’s also unlikely that the data will ever be shown through an AI overview filter.

Glenn Gabe also talks about The Maddening Adventure Of Tracking AI Overviews In Google Search Console.

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