Speaker 1: 0:24

All right, Some major, major major events in the SEO world.

Speaker 2: 0:28

Oh really.

Speaker 1: 0:29

No, not really. Actually some big events, so we've been away. While we were away, google was rolling out a core update. So a core update. They do this. As you probably don't remember, google rolls out updates all the time.

Speaker 2: 0:44

Yes, I do remember that.

Speaker 1: 0:45

Like dozens and maybe even hundreds of updates per year. A core update they typically do once or twice a year and it's a much bigger update. It generally applies to not the little things that you're doing on your website, like not your tags and not even your pages, but your general approach to SEO. They are updating the methodology they use to rank websites, so it's a much deeper update. That's why there's not as many of them, and so, as a result of a core update, some websites are going to see a dramatic decline in traffic and other websites might see an increase in traffic. Now this update just completed. On March 27th. It completed the rollout.

Speaker 1: 1:33

Oh very recent, Very recent. So I haven't seen personally any sites be negatively affected by this Yet. Yet my consultant clients probably will not be affected by this. It's very rare because they're pretty much doing the right stuff in terms of SEO, I would hope. Yeah, right, the types of sites that are going to be affected usually are, unfortunately, like small business owners, people who are doing their own SEO. You may have gotten some bad SEO advice. You may just be approaching it wrong. Those, in my experience, are going to be the sites that are hit negatively. So this episode, I'll go over the guidance that Google gives how to figure out if your site has been negatively affected. Yeah, Because one thing that happens during these updates and I guess especially the buzz has happened a lot with this last update is tracking tools get messed up.

Speaker 1: 2:30

So tracking tools are. You know, there's tons of SEO tools out there to tell you where you're ranking and do all this stuff for you. That's technically against the rules, Like Google, like those tools are going against Google guidelines. So often when there's an update, those tools get sort of I'm going to say thwarted. They just get messed up because what they're doing Google's trying to prevent what they're doing anyway because it's scraping data. So when you think about it, those tools are, they're just querying Google over and over and over and over and they're going through all the pages. That sort of thing costs Google money, because Google their big expense is probably computing power and the more people who are doing that running, say, thousands of searches per second, which you can do it's going to increase the demand on Google's resources. They don't want you to do that. Google doesn't want you to do that. So when there's a big update like this, a lot of times these tools get messed up, Relying on an outside tool to track your rankings.

Speaker 2: 3:28

Other than.

Speaker 1: 3:29

Other than Google. Yeah, you may or may not be able. You're probably not getting accurate information to begin with, but you may not be able to identify if you have been hit by this. The way to identify if your website has been hit by this is to use Google Search Console.

Speaker 2: 3:45

Okay.

Speaker 1: 3:46

And that's the tool you should be using to track your rankings.

Speaker 2: 3:48

And that's what you've been saying all along it is the only tool you should be using.

Speaker 1: 3:52

It is straight from the source.

Speaker 2: 3:54

So why are these other tools there?

Speaker 1: 3:56

They make money, they make money.

Speaker 2: 3:58

Are they telling people that they have better rankings than they do? Yeah, oh.

Speaker 1: 4:02

Oh, I don't know.

Speaker 2: 4:04

I don't know about that?

Speaker 1: 4:05

Probably not, but this sort of thing used to be okay. I remember years ago and these other tools there weren't that many of them, which is the reason that they were kind of considered to be okay and as they grew, Google made a decision we don't want this. It's just getting out of hand. And I used to use one of these tools called oh man, I don't even remember what it was called, but it was really really good kind of stop allowing this that tool that I was using said that they had to make a big decision.

Speaker 1: 4:39

Everybody doing that in the industry had to make a big decision. Do we keep doing what we're doing and fight Google and try to escape Google, or do we go along with Google's guidelines and kind of be on their team? The website I was using decided to go along with Google and they said so we're no longer going to provide ranking information. Lots of other companies still do try to do that. Just understand you're not going to be getting accurate information.

Speaker 2: 5:05

Good to know.

Speaker 1: 5:06

Or at least not as accurate as you would be getting. It might be pretty accurate, but better information would come from Google Search Console.

Speaker 2: 5:12

Google it.

Speaker 1: 5:12

So that's how you determine if your website is hit from a core update like this and what you are looking for.

Speaker 2: 5:18

Yeah, wait, how do you do it?

Speaker 1: 5:20

So you look at the number Go to. Google, google Search Console, and you look at your number of impressions in Google Search Console. Yeah, if you don't know how to do that, you should visit my site, where there's a guide on how to do that.

Speaker 2: 5:32

Can you put a link in the podcast?

Speaker 1: 5:34

I will put a link in the podcast link in the podcast. I will put a link in the podcast and you look at the impressions over time and you should look at probably the last at least three months and you will see a fairly dramatic decline in the number of impressions.

Speaker 2: 5:47

If you were hit?

Speaker 1: 5:48

If you were hit starting, the earliest possible would be mid-March. Oh, so it's very recent, yeah, and it's possible that it won't even be evident yet. That's the thing. Like this is so new that you might not notice, okay, but it's certainly a good idea to go check and also to get in the habit of checking Google Search Console to see how you're doing.

Speaker 2: 6:08

Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 6:08

See how your website is progressing. If it is progressing, hopefully it is. You're listening to this, that's right. Okay, so what does Google say you should do if your website?

Speaker 2: 6:20

is a hit by this. What do you do?

Speaker 1: 6:22

And the guidance, unfortunately, is pretty vague because it's not a specific thing. They come right out and they say there is no single action you can take. It is nothing, there's nothing wrong with your pages. You might have perfect technical SEO with your pages. You might have perfect technical SEO, but what it means is that you are not creating what Google would consider reliable, helpful, people-based content. Remember helpful content? There was an update. They literally called helpful content.

Speaker 1: 6:50

We talk about it to no end on this podcast like making your blog a resource, making it useful, making it valuable to people.

Speaker 2: 7:57

Yes, that is doing SEO, and that's a place to come home to.

Speaker 1: 8:01

Sure, if you're writing your blogs and you're creating your content because you think it's good for SEO and you're doing it based on what you're guessing is good for SEO. I will tell you that's bad SEO. That is what Google is trying to eliminate.

Speaker 2: 8:16

They want it to come from the heart.

Speaker 1: 8:18

I mean, when you think about it, if you were Google, would you want to? And you have your customers, right? Your customers come to you, they search for things and you send them to websites. You want those customers to keep coming back. Yes, so would you send those customers to websites that are just creating shit for SEO?

Speaker 2: 8:34

No.

Speaker 1: 8:35

You wouldn't. And again, the reason why the core updates are, I think, more frequent is because the rise of all these AI tools and they're going to do everything for you, and so Google has. We talked about this in an episode late last year. Google literally did hundreds of thousands of tests to identify AI generated content, so Google is on top of this. I think this is it's a pretty dynamic time in SEO right now because AI is changing a lot of this. It's there's a lot of new crap out there.

Speaker 2: 9:06

Yeah. So what you're saying also is that all of these blogs, slash tools, slash sites, slash software that say just plug in these words and we'll write your blog for you.

Speaker 1: 9:18

Pretty terrible. Usually. Yeah, if that's how you're creating your blog, all you're doing is scraping together little bits from other websites, because that's all AI is doing it's just getting other bits from websites on the internet. So Google does go a little bit beyond that. However, google has a what they call a quality rater guideline, and it is what they give to people who they hire to identify what a valuable website looks like. So Google doesn't make the decision. Google doesn't necessarily decide automatically. This is we think this is what a helpful website looks like.

Speaker 2: 9:54

Okay.

Speaker 1: 9:54

What they do is they hire, or have hired in the past, tens of thousands of people and they call them quality raters and they give them a guideline, which is like a PDF that's, I think, like 2000 pages long, how to evaluate websites and then, based on the information they get from those people, they kind of reverse engineer their algorithm Google does, so that they can identify what people report as being good websites. That's kind of how Google works.

Speaker 2: 10:22

My scrambles, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 10:23

That's OK, it's you don't. You don't need to remember. Ok, that was just some fun information for me. So Google does give a a bunch of questions that you should ask yourself. Ok if you were hit by a core update? Now, this is also just good SEO, okay. So you should be asking yourself these questions regardless. I'm going to read off some of these questions, but there's literally way too many. You can go and read that 2,000-page PDF if you'd like. It's fascinating information.

Speaker 2: 10:52

Oh, my goodness.

Speaker 1: 10:54

I can't even make it to page five, but there are summaries of them different places. You could do a Google search for something like Google quality rater guideline questions.

Speaker 2: 11:06

And rater is R-A-T-E-R. Rater, rater, yeah Not raters of the lost art.

Speaker 1: 11:11

Correct. Correct, but here let's cover some of these questions.

Speaker 1: 11:14

Okay. So Question number I'm just I'm going to number these, even though I'm just doing a few of them. Does the content provide original information, reporting, research or analysis? So right there, if you're using AI to generate your content, I would say the answer is no. Now then ask yourself are you providing original information, reporting or research, or are you just regurgitating something else you saw online? Does the? This is question number two. Does the content provide a substantial, complete or comprehensive description of the topic? So this would be. This would be like content hubs. I don't know if we've really talked about content hubs. I have a lesson on content hubs. I'll link that below too.

Speaker 1: 11:58

Oh very nice. Content hubs are a way of structuring your hopefully resourceful blog information into topics. So lots of blogs are just random, they just have all you might have a bunch of. You might have a topic really well covered on your blog, but it's not structured to be a what we would call, in this point here, a comprehensive description. So a content hub would be structuring it different. So you're so it's. That is, more of a guide on a particular topic, like, let's say, you have a blog on, like, the best parks in Brooklyn to take pictures of your kids, so a comprehensive guide would probably cover a bunch of the different parks. Now each blog article would be a single blog, a single article but they'd all be under the content hub.

Speaker 1: 12:44

Yes, you would have parks yes, exactly that's exactly so that that would be a what we google just described as a substantial, complete or comprehensive description of the topic.

Speaker 2: 12:55

Okay, okay already, just those two things make me ready to go to sleep yeah, so I'm gonna look for something that's a little more exciting.

Speaker 1: 13:03

Okay, so those are two relating to topics. Okay, so Google actually breaks these questions down into the different categories. Those were probably the most boring. Oh my gosh, Okay, good we have a couple more categories I'm going to go through. I'm just going to read one from each category. Okay, expertise questions. Okay, so this is relating to your expertise when you create something. Okay, expertise question number one yeah, does the content present information in a way that makes you want to trust it?

Speaker 2: 13:32

Oh, okay, okay.

Speaker 1: 13:33

So this goes along with a whole bunch of other stuff. That's a big topic in itself. But if there's something that makes you look more trustworthy like a badge, an award, you can link to any sort of credentials or anything that would make you. If you were looking at your site, what would make you think, oh, I trust this person because of X, y, z, whatever that X, Y, Z?

Speaker 2: 13:55

Aren't there so many badges that you just buy People?

Speaker 1: 13:57

just buy them there are, so look for the most trustworthy. Oh okay, not just any badge. I can create a dozen badges in the next half hour, but is there something that would make you look more trustworthy?

Speaker 2: 14:11

Okay.

Speaker 1: 14:12

Are you a member of your city's business council for small business Right? That would make you look pretty trustworthy.

Speaker 2: 14:20

Yeah, yeah, better bureau, business, business.

Speaker 1: 14:23

I think their days are gone. Oh, they keep sending me emails, exactly. Another question is the content written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well. So this is kind of the same thing Show like not only that you're trustworthy, but that you have the right experience. Okay, you can be trustworthy, but if you're a car mechanic talking about photography, you don't have the right experience.

Speaker 2: 14:49

Correct, you don't have the right expertise.

Speaker 1: 14:52

I'm sure the next section, presentation and production questions, so how your website is put together. Question number one does it display well for mobile devices when viewed on them? Okay, that's pretty important. These days I'm going to assume most people listening are on Squarespace or Wix or ShowIt or whatever and that you've got taken care of. But do look at your website on a phone.

Speaker 2: 15:14

Yeah, it's different.

Speaker 1: 15:16

I have experienced many, many, many, many times when dealing with new clients and we look at their website on a mobile and the response is like oh shit, and just nobody has ever looked. I've done that myself, actually.

Speaker 2: 15:31

Yeah, if I was a client, oh dear.

Speaker 1: 15:34

Yeah. What is the impression that you have if you look at somebody's website on mobile and it's just a jumbled mess? Do you trust that company?

Speaker 2: 15:41

No, you think get your shit together yeah exactly so do that. I'm trying. I'm not talking to you, I'm still trying.

Speaker 1: 15:48

Okay, question number two from presentation and production, production. One more time Production Is the content mass produced or outsourced to a large number of creators. I would throw AI production into this category.

Speaker 1: 16:05

You got to be. If you're using AI to generate, it's hard to harp on AI a lot, but if you're using AI to generate your content, at least create a draft, creates the core yourself and then use AI to polish it and make it. You know, flesh it out, make it look a little better. To polish it and make it. You know, flesh it out, make it look a little better, present a little better. Don't do the reverse.

Speaker 2: 16:27

Don't use AI to create the core concept. Oh really.

Speaker 1: 16:29

Yeah, don't do that.

Speaker 2: 16:30

Oh, because that's what I've done.

Speaker 1: 16:31

Well, what you could do is use AI to like.

Speaker 2: 16:34

Just start a first draft.

Speaker 1: 16:36

Not even start a draft, but like give you ideas, do some brainstorming, don't create the draft. Create the draft yourself If you're not creating your own. If you're not creating the draft, then your draft is just a mix mash of other websites, information.

Speaker 2: 16:51

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 16:51

Okay, that's not what you want to do no. And the final section. Here. I'm just going to take one question from this. This is comparative questions, so comparing your website to others.

Speaker 2: 17:02

Okay.

Speaker 1: 17:03

And the question that I'm going to take here is going to sound familiar.

Speaker 2: 17:06

Christian.

Speaker 1: 17:07

Mack, Does the content seem to be serving the genuine interests of visitors or does it seem to solely exist by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?

Speaker 2: 17:18

Okay, Dun, dun, dun dun.

Speaker 1: 17:20

Yeah, okay, so if I haven't drilled that point home enough, there it is again. I am not doing my job.

Speaker 2: 17:27

Yeah, because whenever I do use AI, it's so cliche.

Speaker 1: 17:33

Yeah, I mean AI. As great a tool as it is, ai is not an experienced expert in anything aside from collecting information.

Speaker 1: 17:44

Right, if you wanted to write a paper on how AI creates responses, then I would probably use I would ask to do that, but other than that, like you're the expert here, ok, so the, the information, the content, the idea, the concept has to be coming from you. You are the expert. Use AI as a tool to polish it, not the reverse. Ok, the concept has to be coming from you. You are the expert. Use AI as a tool to polish it, not the reverse.

Speaker 2: 18:04

Okay, that's good to know.

Speaker 1: 18:05

Okay, so go check Google search console.

Speaker 2: 18:08

Yes.

Speaker 1: 18:08

I would say, check it now. And because these things core updates are, they don't roll out quickly, the effects might not be seen quickly. Check in a few weeks, in a month, see if you've been hit.

Speaker 2: 18:18

Hope you haven't.

Speaker 1: 18:19

Hope this helps. And again the reason that I say there no. And again the reason.