October, 2023

SEO – What is trending, and what are the most recent updates in October 2023?

The digital world is very dynamic, and every day relevant events occur within its scope that it is important to know, to avoid falling into obsolescence. In that sense, being informed and knowing what is trending is a recommended strategy. And the thing is, if you don’t know, for example, what is happening with the market leaders or which technological innovations have worked best, you could lose excellent opportunities or, on the contrary, make regrettable mistakes. For this reason and to support you, here you have updated information on relevant events in the SEO field, presented by Al-Andalus Digital Marketing Agency.

Apple Search, the Possible Rival of Google

At the moment, Apple would not be looking to develop its own search engine that competes with Google’s. And it is actually quite convenient for Apple to maintain this nutritious alliance with Google. This, according to statements made by Eddy Cue, senior vice president of Apple services, during the federal trial that is taking place, motivated by possible monopolistic practices. And Apple’s partnership with Google is very beneficial to customers.

Why is this Relevant?

For the US Department of Justice, thanks to this situation, Google is strengthened in its dominant position in the “Search Engine” market, paying Apple to be the default search engine on its devices. This situation would lead to unfavorable conditions for other search engines in the market, which would be left competing in an unfavorable situation.

Apple's Search Engine: Just a Strategy or Reality?

About every two years, rumors arise regarding a possible Apple Search. In some cases, it is indicated that Apple is oriented towards the search for other options. There is even talk about the possibility that the company is preparing its own service or search engine. In any case, under any scenario, the most recent information available indicates that there are at least four years left before we can speak with confidence about the existence of Apple’s own search engine.

Microsoft: Our AI partnership with Meta consolidates and expands

Bing has taken another step towards its partnership with Meta, and they are starting to row in the same direction. They work integrated into Meta AI chat experiences, thus providing the option to search for information in real time.

Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president and head of consumer marketing at Microsoft, spoke about expanding the AI partnership with Meta. Last week, he reported on their vision for how they are integrating their own experiences as an AI co-pilot to collaborate with people and help them do virtually any task. He also expressed that, as part of this vision, Bing is essential to these experiences, ensuring that they are based on the most up-to-date web information and data available.

There is great interest and motivation to expand these alliances, to continue helping to deliver powerful and practical AI experiences, in the products that are most in demand by users. In this way, the way we work is transformed, thanks to the fact that AI is providing new forms of connection and expression. This, motivated by the power of generative technologies.

Blocking the GPTBot. Some Interesting Statistics

OpenAI practically caused a true revolution in the technology industry, with the launch of its ChatGPT. This is a chatbot trained to interact with users in natural language. Thus, there are many who have already adopted it as a basic work tool, aimed at increasing the productivity of their daily work. But there are also many who do not like, and rather dislike, the idea that ChatGPT is being trained, using the content of countless websites, without the prior and express consent of their owners.

Additionally, OpenAI uses a web crawler known as GPTBot. This is responsible for obtaining information from the various websites it accesses, automatically. It does so with the purpose of training the company’s different language models, such as GPT-4, among others. This is a fairly common practice and is one of the methods used by Google to access information related to the content of any website.

Now, according to an updated analysis carried out by Originality.ai on 1,000 websites, the number of websites that have blocked OpenAI’s GPTBot is shocking. The statistics presented are very interesting.

26% of the 100 websites with the highest number of visits already block GPTBot. The number of famous websites blocking ChatGPT has increased by 3.5 times in the last month. Of these, Pinterest, Indeed and other large ones stand out.

At least 26 of the 100 most popular websites (and 242 of the 1,000 most visited) already block GPTBot, the web tracker that OpenAI launched on August 7. That implies an increase of 250% compared to the statistics released last month. At the time, only 69 of the 1,000 most popular websites had blocked GPTBot, according to updated analysis presented by AI content and plagiarism service Originality.ai.

Why is this Relevant?

Currently, many people have a dilemma about whether it is convenient to block ChatGPT. That has been a big dilemma for much SEO. ChatGPT does not cite or follow links from its sources. However, it is undeniable that the fact that search engines crawl content and visit pages implies a clear benefit: these sites get traffic through direct links and/or citations. Even so, more famous websites have chosen to block GPTBot. This is probably motivated by the fact that they do not want OpenAI to use their data to train their models. At least, without this entailing any benefit for them.

ChapGPT Expands Boundaries and Capabilities

OpenAI claims that ChatGPT users already have the ability to explore the web.

This was announced this Wednesday by OpenAI, supported by Microsoft Corporation. The artificial intelligence startup reported that its latest navigation feature would allow websites to regulate the way ChatGPT can interact with them.

“Browsing is available to Plus and Enterprise users today, and we will soon expand it to all users. To enable it, choose Browse with Bing in the selector below GPT-4″

Additionally, OpenAI also made an announcement earlier this week regarding a major improvement. Through this update, ChatGPT would be allowed to have voice conversations with users, as well as interact with them through the use of images. This would bring it quite close to other well-known and popular artificial intelligence assistants, such as Apple’s Siri (AAPL.O).

ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history earlier this year, reaching 100 million monthly active users in January, before being replaced by the Meta’s Threads app.

Advanced SEO Industry News

Google seems to always be in the eye of the hurricane. For some it turns out to be the solution to all their technological problems and one of the best tools they always have. For others, Google is more than a villain that takes advantage of its millions of users to extract the information it requires. But what is the reality? Here you will find the most relevant news in this regard, so that you can form your own criteria, present by Marketing Services.

What does Google Really use “Clicks” for?

In the ongoing antitrust trial between the United States and Google, the controversy over Google’s misuse of Clicks comes to the fore again. There are many hypotheses that have been presented in this regard, especially when statements about the classificatory use given to clicks come to light.

For many working in the SEO writing industry, this could be true. In this sense, they have quickly expressed the opinion that this is practically definitive proof, to confirm that Google has not been honest with respect to the true use it has been making of clicks or click rate, during its 25 years.

Although Google monitors each click in the searches carried out by its users, this does not imply that the clicks will necessarily be used as a direct ranking element. Among other things, because, just as it employs experts to evaluate the quality of its search results, it also uses click data to perform experiment evaluation and personalization.

Why is this Relevant?

Because while Google uses clicks, it may not be specifically for direct ranking purposes. And although the clicks are easy to manipulate, they may not be very reliable. In addition, there are many pages and queries that do not have a minimum required number of clicks to provide relevant information and obtain data that allows an evaluation or conversion to be carried out, to a ranking signal that is useful for Google.

Google's Useful Content Update: Implementation Completed

In what is its first useful content update of 2023, it is safe to say that Google has concluded as planned. This process lasted approximately 14 days. It started on September 14, 2023, and ended on September 28. It is aimed at detecting content created to obtain good positioning in searches and not, aiming to primarily help humans. Furthermore, it will apply to all languages and globally.

What The Impact of Google's Useful Content Update, September 2023

Apparently, this update first affected SEO content designed to seek good positioning in search engines, as a priority. And, although it is interesting to determine whether this type of content is also useful, it is important to know what the contractor’s intention was: to create useful content or content that achieves good positioning in search engines?

Implementation Of Google's Useful Content Update Completed. What You Should Know

Once Google’s recent useful content update has been completed, as well as its corresponding implementation, this September 23, it is important to know some details about this topic.

You must know what this update consists of and how it works.
Google’s useful content update is wide-ranging.
If a site’s traffic decreased significantly during this update, it is quite likely because the site in question has been classified as containing “useless” content in general.
Regarding the classification, Google considers that it could be eliminated.
In order to provide more information regarding the way this useful content update works, Google provides and refers to its documentation, called “Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content”.
In its document “Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content”, Google expresses the convenience of being aware of its quality guidelines, specifically those known as EEAT, an acronym for “Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness”. These are used by Google Quality Raters, and their comments help Google measure the success of the updates made to its algorithm.
Recently, the guidelines for Quality Raters were also updated, indicating that raters provide Google with examples of what could be considered useful and unhelpful results. In this way, it is quite likely that these are the ones that train the useful content system. In that sense, it is very important to understand what Google’s quality rater guidelines, known as QRG, for their acronym, consider useful content.
From this perspective, perhaps this update has been made with the intention of privileging first-hand experience. This is because it has been observed that UGC (User Generated Content) sites containing human conversations work well. However, it is likely to involve quite a bit more than that.

There is also the option that Google has not really rewarded anything, and that what happened was that the system was more efficient when detecting which pages handle or may have content without originality or contribution to knowledge.

The truth is that Google’s evaluation model regarding what content is most likely to be considered useful for a search engine has changed.

So, What is Recommended to Do?

Some sites can probably be recovered. It is necessary to detect which keywords caused the ranking to drop. Look at the content that started to overtake the site in the rankings. You have to pretend to be a search engine. What do you want to find? Would you really like to always reach that page? Why did Google consider information from a competitor more useful than information from another site? What makes it original? Are they things that would drive people to find your content so useful that they decide to bookmark it or share it with others?

Maybe some sites will recover by learning how to create content that demonstrates true knowledge about a topic and is of such quality that people will seek it out because it is so useful. But some sites will not recover. Many of the affected sites ranked well, more because of their knowledge of SEO, than because the content was the best option for search engines. If real-world companies with real customers outrank you, their first-hand experience will be difficult to improve. But not impossible… perhaps it is possible to generate content that is even more useful and innovative!

With Google-Extended, It Is Possible to Block Bard and Vertex AI Via Robots.txt

Google introduced Google-Extended, its novel “independent product token”, intended to control whether Bard, Google’s conversational artificial intelligence tool and Vertex AI, a machine learning platform for creating and deploying chat and search applications, powered by generative AI, can access the content of a certain site.

With Google-Extended, web publishers can decide whether their sites help improve the Bard and Vertex AI generative APIs, making these AI models more accurate and capable over time. This way, publishers will be able to choose and control access to these APIs on their sites, through Robots.txt.

Why is this Relevant?

As background, 242 of the 1,000 most popular websites decided to block GPTBot, OpenAI’s web crawler, considering that it used their content to train its AI. Bard and Vertex AI generative APIs are now given the option to partially or fully block. Thus, they can decide whether to help Google improve its artificial intelligence products. Will this be convenient?