SEO Expert Insight: February 2023 News Round-up

Another episode of our SEO Expert Insights, hosted by our Co-Founder, James Owen.

Discover the latest news from March 2023. James talks about DuckDuckGo entering the AI race, Google Bard citationsA citation is a mention of your company, product, or service in an online publication. Citations increase the ranking of your site on search engines, GA4 migration, and Google introducing AI to Google docs and Gmail.

Video Transcription

Part 1: Google Launches Bard

The first news story is ‘Google launches Bard, its answer to ChatGPT’.  ChatGPT was launched at a back end of 2022. It was invested and partly funded by Microsoft which owns Bing, and they’ve gone ahead and launched ChatGPT within Bing search engine. Google has then gone ahead and launched bard in response to what Bing has done with ChatGPT. In my last 16 years I haven’t necessarily seen anything that Bing has done first in that Google copies. A bit of sensational news that Bing has done something and Google actually has to react to and is on the backfoot.

So this story is on Search Engine Land, which talks about Google’s Bard, AI piece of technology. Although Google has been building AI into their Google algorithm updates for many years I don’t think this is really in their workflow or in their plan to build an AI element into the search engine result pages. This news article piece is discussing what potentially Google bard may look like within a SERP. There are issues, of course, with this and obviously what Bing is doing with their ChatGPT, where they’re going to be giving out free information and there’s an issue around citation of that content.  So essentially making sure that when you type in ‘Best Restaurant in London’, for instance, the AI will respond with some results, some content and essentially the citations won’t be clickable or won’t even be seen within the response, which is going to lead to no clicks and no traffic to the actual publishers. So this is really an attack on publishers who are putting out the content. The whole point of their website is to generate ad revenue through clicks and through genuinely good quality content. So this will be an uphill struggle for both Google and Bing on how to appease everyone, ensure that they’re still going to be given good answers to people’s queries, but also link off to the publishers and the owners of the content.  But the news piece goes on to discussing what Google Bard is, as I said, it’s a proper AI service. It’s powered by the Lambda, which is the language model and dialogue application.  This is not something new.  As I mentioned before, they’ve been doing it a long time; they started launching it in 2021. It’s their new, next generation language and conversation capabilities. Again, I don’t think it’s anything on their roadmap, they’re going to launch it within their SERP. This is a general response to what Bing is doing with ChatGPT.

This kind of news story is an ongoing, moving story, and we’ve actually gone ahead in creating a blog piece of content where we talk about what AI is, how it has impacted our lives, and essentially any updates with hour Google and obviously Bing are going to be using it within their SERP.

Part 2: Unconfirmed Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update

So the next news piece to talk about is the ‘unconfirmed Google search ranking’. Every update around February 14th, happily named Valentine’s update. This is part of a string of Google updates we had around the 4th, 8th and 9th of February 2023. It is unconfirmed so we don’t actually know what Google was trying to achieve from it.  However, the news piece that is on Search Engine Roundtable, talks about just general SEO chatter and kind of rumour mill stuff, which is kind of interesting to see what everyone’s been seeing in terms of impact, QR ranking decrease/increases, loss of traffic, so on and so fourth.

What is interesting, and I think everyone should be following is there are rank trackingRank tracking is the process of monitoring how well your website is ranking for various keywords in search engines. tools that have Google tracking tools built in that allow you to see, looking at a whole industry and also tell you when there’s volatility within a SERP.

So the ones that I kind of monitor is Rank Ranger’s one, which I think is good, and also our friends over at SEMrush, they have one called the Semrush Sensor.  What’s really good about the Semrush Sensor is the fact that you can actually look into different industries and see the volatility of a different industry that you may be in as well, so that is really useful.  Other things that you could be doing as well to monitor updates is to sign up to our newsletter so you get the latest updates from our blog.  Also we’ve got a landing page on our website dedicated to Google updates.  We’ve got a history of the last couple of years and we update it each month.

Part 3: Google February Product Reviews Update 

Okay, so this is the third news piece that we’re going to be talking about today, which is a ‘Google February 2023 Product Review Update’.  This kind of goes along with a string of updates that Google’s been doing around product reviews over the last 12 to 18 months.  Essentially we should be going back that far.  This news article can found on Search engine Journal and essentially the updates have been around refining what Google requires to be seen in your source code that they can then show within SERP.

The update is refinement of their guidelines, which essentially talks about the guidelines, the updates, the languages and rollouts. The Search Engine Journal article then goes on to discuss the languages that is going to be updating to and will affect, and also, how long it’s going to take to roll out the update, which is going to be a two week rollout and completed March 7, 2023.

Quite interestingly, if your site is affected by an update, and what you should do, it’s best to sit tight and wait until the update is over and essentially make changes to adhere to the guidelines afterwards.  The article then goes on to talk about the Product Review System and then linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. off to the Google search central page.

Part 4: Google Bard – Sites Used To Train It

So the fourth news story we talk about today is ‘Google Bard AI – What Sites Were Used To Train It‘. This article can be found on Search Engine Journal. Essentially the article talks about what data sets and websites help train Google Bard AI.  It’s interesting because, just for a general topic, you may want to optimise your website down the road. Obviously there’s nothing out there right now, but maybe you want to update and optimise your website so Google does start to pick up your content to be shown within the AI section of the SERP, so you can get the link from Google, the site host link, and also traffic that way as well.  An interesting conversation, or angle, to lay down the track for publishers and blog masters, people doing their own blogs and general webmasters.

So this article basically talks about Google dataset, what websites have Google gone and crawled and basically learned the data on. What’s interesting, it goes on to discussing data sets themselves, and there’s actually a link to a relevant PDF.  Like most things from Google, it is long, arboreous and probably not worth your time to reading.  However, this article from Search Engine Journal has broken down the most important bits and pieces.  Essentially there’s different data set mixes, as listed in the article, and interestingly they touch on the C4 data mix and the different types of websites that they’re kind of crawling.

So the top 25 websites by number of tokens in C4 dataset, by going down this list, you can see Wikipedia and NY Times, LA Times, The Guardian, Forbes, Huffing Post, Washington Post… up to around the 15th point they’re all kind of publisher, content heavy. Also see booking.com [18th], which is a booking platform for hotels and travel, and a few of the others are more commercial intent versus publishing and government stuff as well.  So that’s quite interesting they’re using quite publishing-heavy and content-heavy websites along with some more commercial intent as well.  Then it goes on to basically give you a split of TLDs, and would expect ‘.com’ to be the top one, ‘.co.uk’ is in there as well which is kind of surprising.  They’re doing the English language, but they are also looking at other languages including Russian, Dutch, Italian, so on and so fourth.

In the article it doesn’t discuss the different types of languages.  From the information, we can see, 12.5% of the English language is Wikipedia. They’re also looking at PDFs, as English web documents, and also non-English web documents.  50% of dialogue data is from public forums, that’s interesting, as that’s kind of user generated content as well.  It’s more points of view and people’s opinions and less factual, perhaps. It’s interesting to see the mix of data they’re using to basically train their AI, and I guess this is a moving story that essentially down the road we might be able to optimise our own websites to be picked up for the Google AI to be shown in the SERP.  If that’s maybe something you don’t want to do, you’d have to put a no-follow in your robots txt file for the AI bot to not come and crawl your website to basically use your publishing content. A good mix of data there; gives you an idea of the kind of publishers and also the commercial intent.

Part 5: Google Ads – New Features

The fifth and final news story we’re going to talk about is the ‘Google Ads new feature for performance Max campaigns on Search Engine Journal.  So we talk about AI and how it’s going to affect organic and publishers and so on.  What we haven’t discussed actually for Google SERP it is split into organic and other snippets, including Google business for example.  But also the commercial element for Google, how they make money is through Google Ads. How is this going to affect Google Ads moving forward?

It will be really interesting to see how Google interacts all these elements to ensure that the AI content within the SERP is useful, you can still get traffic from it, but also, there’s an element of ways still to earn money through clicks.  So we’re keen to see how this continues to evolve and how Bing is doing it. I think Bing is slightly ahead of the curve, obviously they brought it out first, but Google may do a better job of Bing in long haul, but time will tell.  So, this Google Ads new feature for Performance Max campaigns, this article just talks about the upgrade and the updates to Google AdWords.  Essentially the highlights of the article is Google has introduced new features to help digital marketers improve performance of their performance max campaigns.  The new feature includes campaign level brand exclusions, paid feeds and easier video creation.  Additionally, new reporting insights enable advertisers to see conversions, conversionA conversion is a desirable result on a website that leads to an action such as completing an order, filling out a form, or simply clicking on a link. value costs, number metrics as assisted group level. Basically, giving us more data to churn through and improve our campaigns, which is obviously fantastic.

It goes on to one of the new features Google is rolling out, campaign level exclusions, which will find added control for performance max campaigns.  Advertisers can now exclude their brand terms and choose from a list of other brands to exclude. Again optimization, higher conversions, hopefully lower CPCs.  This feature will help to block traffic from most brand misspellings and brand searches in foreign languages.  The exclusions will also ensure performance max campaigns won’t serve for brand inquiries for advertisers wanting to avoid search and shopping inventory.

The article then touches on page fees, expected in the coming months, to help advertisers further refine their results from search inventory.  This feature allows advertisers to send traffic to specific website landing page URLs and can also use labels in group URLs by a theme to help you manage your Google campaign for traffic conversions and lower CPC.

Easier video creation to make it easier to provide high quality video ads, Google will integrate video creation tools really into performance max campaigns set-up and editing workflows.  Previously this feature was only available in Asset Library.  Advertisers who have always wanted to create video ads but lack the resource or time to do so, can now take a launch of this feature.

Finally, the article goes on to discuss New Reporting Insights to help advertise and evaluate their results.  Google introducing new reporting and insights.  Again, this essentially just see conversions, conversion value and cost, and varies other metrics asset Group level.  Essentially, traffic conversion, lower CPC for the advertiser, more clicks for Google and higher ad revenue for them.