Tips Tuesday – GPTBot, AI Video Tsunami, Delete Content for SEO, AI Masterclass
Hello Happy Site Owner!
Tips this week include:
- Masterclass on leveraging the power of AI to tell your story
- Should you block the GPTBot from crawling your site?
- What happened when CNET removed a bunch of posts to game Google
- Why not to do bulk redirects
- You can now migrate a site with the free version of UpdraftPlus
- What’s going on with the uproar over Zoom’s new Terms of Service
- Why I’m excited about content links coming to YouTube Shorts
- Who is predicting a tsunami of AI videos coming
- Why the TikTok AI label mandate is so important
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Thank you for using them to support all of the free and helpful content you get here on BlogAid.
BlogAid Happenings
Change of Office Hours
Y’all know that creating videos takes a bit more time than writing a blog post. And I do both, and now do it for 2 sites – BlogAid and AI Discover Hub.
A little over a month ago I got bad bug bit on my face and that made me stop doing videos for about 3 weeks. And since then it has been a whirlwind of getting ready for so many speaking gig opportunities that suddenly popped up.
But now I need to get back in that groove of making video content, and I need to dedicate time to doing it so that I can batch make them more than just once a week.
For the most part, I do client work in the morning, and all my other admin work in the afternoons. But I’m also answering emails and such all day long to keep projects in motion.
I’ve come to realize that flipping gears so much between tech mindset and creative mindset is just not productive.
I already have Monday and Saturday set for half-day availability. Monday afternoon is when I produce Tips Tuesday. And Saturday is the weekend, which is a time many of my clients are free, so I need to leave at least half a day open.
I will now be adding Wednesday to the list of half days so I can get into creative mode for a few hours at a time mid week and ensure I can batch make more videos to get more news out to you in a timely manner.
Site Services Update
The waitlist for site services such as audits and such is about 3 weeks now and that will likely hold through the end of September.
This is the busy season when site owners want to get all of their ducks in a row and ready for the holiday season of traffic.
If you’re due for an audit checkup before October, now is the time to get in your request.
If you’re ready for your first site audit, see how deep the checks are and all the perks you get by becoming a BlogAid site audit client.
I would like to also add that my schedule is a bit jumbled. Several clients have experienced illness or such in the family and have postponed their audit checkups. That’s okay. You take the time you need with your family. The site will wait and I’ll be here when you’re ready.
If you are already on the waitlist, we may start on your project sooner than originally projected.
AI Tips
AI Summit Was Mindblowing
Thank you to all my folks who came to the AI Advantage 3.0 Summit last week.
The speakers were amazing and our minds were blown with all of the super ways folks are using AI to be more productive and save time and money, plus all of the amazing things they are creating with it.
We have a bunch of new folks in the AI Images for Profit course.
And I’ll be doing another webinar for folks who want to see more about creating AI images, as we only got to scratch the surface at the summit.
Be sure to get the AI Discover Hub News for date and times for the next webinar.
Masterclass – Leveraging the Power of AI to Tell Your Story
These are the things I find hardest to write:
- My bio
- About page
- What sets me and my offerings apart in a way that captivates and inspires
Guess what?
AI can help with all of those things!!
No more staring at a blank page.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked AI to suggest ideas – even just titles.
And then – 2 seconds later – I’m giddy with excitement over what it spit out.
I’m typing up a storm – and that page isn’t blank anymore.
Telling our stories is all about being relatable while conveying your expertise.
It’s EXACTLY why you trust me to help you.
Ready to tell your story and see results?
The AI Success Club masterclass, Leveraging the Power of AI to Tell Your Story, will show you how to quickly generate all kinds of versions of your story that you can use on your website, landing pages, emails and across social media.
It all happens Thursday, August 24th at 3pm eastern / Noon pacific.
You’ll get real-world examples, hands-on training, and expert insights from AI Success Club Co-Founders Andy O’Bryan and Denise Wakeman, you’ll discover how AI tools can enhance your narrative, making it more relatable, engaging, and impactful.
See you there!!!
AI SEO Tips
Should You Block GPTBot?
You may have heard that ChatGPT was only trained on info from books and on the internet up to 2021. And, that it does have access to the internet via version 4 or via Bing CoPilot.
But, having access to the current internet and being trained on it or 2 different things.
That’s where ChatGPT5 comes in.
OpenAI has released a new GPTbot to begin crawling the web anew to train its new LLM (Large Language Model), which will be version 5.
You can block the GPTbot from crawling your site.
But you may not want to.
READ: Should You Block GPTbot? for my take on it, and where to get info about blocking it if you decide to do that.
I sent an email to all BlogAid DIY SEO course members over the weekend with additional info and a tutorial on how to add the block, if they so choose.
I do not plan to block that bot on any of my sites. But you will need to read up on it and decide for yourself, as it depends on the kind of content you create.
You should also read that article for why me and all of my site audit clients block 20-30 other bots that chew up hosting resources and give our info to our competitors to beat us at SEO.
SEO Tips
CNET Removes Old Posts to Try to Game Google
In the BlogAid DIY SEO course there is a whole series of workshops on how to do a content revamp properly.
And one of the things discussed is why not to remove too many old posts at a time as it could give Google a bad impression of what’s happening on your site.
Just like BlogAid and AI Discover Hub, CNET covers tech.
And it doesn’t take very long for articles to outlive their usefulness because tech changes all the time and info becomes obsolete.
For example, I just released a video tour on What’s New in WordPress 6.3.
In less than a year from now, that post will never show up in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) because nobody will be searching for it.
WP 6.3 will be old news.
And it really doesn’t matter if that post is on my site anymore or not. It doesn’t do an SEO thing for me at that point.
If I removed that post, nobody would miss it except for Google because that post ranked recently. So, I tend to leave up posts like that for a couple of years until they are good and dead with Google, as far as ranking, and when search volume drops to near zero.
But, if I removed 50 or more old posts like that over the course of a few weeks, Google would certainly take notice of it!!!!
Well, that’s the sort of stunt CNET pulled recently.
They removed thousands of posts in just a few months in an effort to improve their rankings.
It backfired on them because some of those posts were still considered authoritative.
Google has a LONG memory, and it knows when you make drastic content changes to your site like this.
The folks at Gizmodo got hold of a CNET internal memo about the practice that said:
“Removing, redirecting, or refreshing irrelevant or unhelpful URLs “sends a signal to Google that says CNET is fresh, relevant and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results.”
Danny Sullivan of Google, tweaked this to CNET:
“Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn’t like ‘old’ content? That’s not a thing! Our guidance doesn’t encourage this.”
Chris Rodgers, who is the CPO of the SEO agency CSP, said this about it all:
“If you’ve got content that’s fallen off in traffic and ratings and search engines have deemed is not valuable for users, that’s content you need to look at.”
With fewer irrelevant pages on your site, the idea is that Google’s algorithms will be able to index and better focus on the articles or pages a publisher does want to promote.
Don’t Just Redirect
While Rogers says that deleting without a redirect should be a last resort, that is not the case, in my opinion, which is backed up by how well my DIY SEO course members do with the strategy I teach.
First of all, they don’t have a gazillion outdated posts that were written by staff members who are pro SEO writers, like is the case with CNET.
These bloggers have posts that were created back when they first started and they are not well written for online content scanning, much less SEO standards.
They are better writers now. And they have niched down more too.
So, it’s often better for them to simply delete that ill-performing post and take the 404 instead of doing any sort of redirect.
And most definitely do not redirect to your home page or to a category page.
That jerks the chain of both the reader and Google and nobody wants to land on something that is not what was clicked.
That’s why there are so many workshops in the DIY SEO course dedicated to making a plan for a proper content revamp where you know the choices and the consequences of those choices before you start deleting or republishing or doing any other sort of revamp to your content.
Webmaster Tips
Migrate Sites with Free Version of UpdraftPlus
This was a super smart move by the makers of UpdraftPlus.
It used to be that you needed the premium version or a paid add-on to the free version to be able to use UDP to migrate a site.
But now they have included it in the free version.
More webmaster designers will use it now, and that will introduce a lot more site owners to UDP.
READ: UpdraftPlus Free vs Premium for why me and my peeps still prefer the premium version of the plugin.
Video Tips
Uproar Over Zoom Terms of Service and AI
I believe this USA Today article is as balanced a report as I’ve read about this Zoom PR fiasco.
The whole statement in the Terms of Service (ToS) has been clarified, but the publicity damage is done, thank in large part to the social media platform X running crazy with it.
Go read the whole article for yourself.
Zoom later clarified by saying they won’t use our audio and video without consent. But that also means you can’t use their AI features.
Here’s what I think.
Every conference meeting type service will have to include AI features to offer transcripts and summaries.
If they don’t, then businesses will flock to services that do.
At this time, you can’t stop participants in the meetings from using a 3rd party browser app to record the session with AI to get those transcripts and summaries. That’s the loophole that is being overlooked right now.
If you think Google and Microsoft aren’t doing the same thing with their Zoom alternatives, you might want to dig a little deeper into both their ToS and privacy policies, especially the latter.
I have zero intention of leaving Zoom at this time. It offers the best integration with my online scheduler for my client meetings as well as group meetings and webinars at the price point they offer. Not to mention that most participants are already familiar with how Zoom works and it’s easy for them to join and participate in meetings.
Content Links Coming to YouTube Shorts
Marketers will love this major announcement from YouTube.
Coming in late September you’ll be able to link your YouTube Shorts videos to longer form content.
I have been intentionally making most of my videos to be 1:01-1:29 seconds in length. That’s over the 1:00 minute mark for Shots and under the 1:30 minute mark for Instagram.
Shorts does nothing for me as far as SEO or monetization.
But, when these links hit, I will most certainly be jumping on the bandwagon with short, teaser clips that can take folks to the longer content.
At this time, I don’t plan to make 4-5 minute videos and then use AI to chop them up into shorter clips. But, I can see where that would be advantageous down the road.
Tsunami of AI Videos Coming
AI video creation is improving at a mindblowing pace. I’m not kidding.
What you could create just 6 months ago wasn’t very realistic at all.
What you can create now using just a single, still shot is not far from real looking. It still has AI artifacts and fuzz, but those things are likely to be gone by the end of the year or first quarter of next.
In an interview with The Information, Tara Walpert Levy, YouTube’s vice president of Americas, announced that AI editing tools are coming to YouTube.
She also said they are preparing for a tsunami of AI created videos.
And so do I.
In fact, after I finish creating the course on AI Images for Profit, a course on making AI videos will be next.
TikTok Mandates AI Label
Folks, the deep fake videos are getting so real now that TikTok is getting ahead of the AI video tsunami by requiring content creators to self label their content as AI generated.
TikTok even has a new toggle to make it easy to do.
And if you don’t do it, and get caught, you’re banned from TikTok.
I expect all social media platforms to follow suit in short order or be at extreme risk of heavy lawsuits for spreading misinformation.
I also expect AI generated video to become some of the most entertaining and most watched videos on the platform too.
And I hope these platforms use that label to make the videos searchable, like a master hashtag or such.
