Tips Tuesday – Poland Referral Spam, Ranking Factors, OpenAI Search Engine

Hello Happy Site Owner!

Tips this week include:

• New Looker Studio tutorials in the works
• YouTube video taking off – follow up
• Massive referral spam from Poland
• One more reason to get rid of Spectra Blocks
• Ranking Factors Workshop coming up
• Can you rank on Reddit?
• Featured snippets disappear from Google Search
• Why to check your metrics regularly
• Is Google killing independent review sites?
• OpenAI is creating their own search engine – and why it will fail
• What will kill Google Search
• Does your site need a Generative AI Policy?

BlogAid Happenings

New Looker Studio Tutorials in the Works

The beta testing for the new Looker Studio metrics is going great!!!!

The testers say they look forward to jumping into their metrics now. And they are finding so much more info the easy, time-saving way.

This week I’m using their feedback to create more tutorials on how to use the reports in general, and then how to glean specific, actionable info to help you do better with your content marketing. 

I’m also on-boarding my 3rd beta tester who tracks her email campaigns and also has a Shopify store. We’ll be looking into creating reports in Looker to help her easily see her metrics for those things, and track her marketing efforts all the way to conversion easily.

And, I had conversations with several clients over the past week who are super excited about becoming affiliates for this product too.

I’ll keep you posted.

YouTube Video Taking Off – Follow Up

Remember last week when I mentioned that one of my Heartwood Art YouTube videos had taken off, and how many comments I was receiving, including about half of them being folks who made sure I knew there were other ways to do things?

Well, I checked the metrics for the month on just that video yesterday and was stunned!

• 3600 hours of watch time
• 450 new subscribers
• 2600 new Likes

Keep in mind that this is a 3 year old video and that I have not even published a new one, nor a new post on that site in 2.5 years.

But, I have a couple of projects finished that I can post, if I can ever find the time to complete the video editing and do the voiceover. Those demo videos are a slog. Such posts, with content, video, and still images, take about 20 hours. That’s why I switched this blog back to a hobby site.

But, this has encouraged me to get active with it again.

And now that wood prices have fallen since Covid coop up days, I can afford to start building some of the stuff I had planned for the house again too.

Security Tips

Massive Referral Spam from Poland

One of my clients posted in our Hub group that many bloggers were screaming about the massive referral spam traffic they were seeing in GA4.

Turns out that it is all from Poland.

My site audit clients and I are not having any issues with it because that is just one of many bad bot countries we have set to challenge at Cloudflare.

That knocks those bots out before they ever hit our hosting, much less our sites.

Our hosting resources aren’t being chewed up by bots.

And our analytics don’t get borked from such things either.

Come get your audit, get in the Hub, and stop being in panic mode every time something hits security or Google makes a big change.

Speed Tips

One More Reason to Get Rid of Spectra Blocks

I was doing a site audit for a new client last week, and we had all caching/optimization turned off so we could see all of the issues that needed addressing.

We found a whopping wad of JavaScript files being loaded.

JS is VERY heavy on site load time.

Turned out that 90% of those JS files were from the Spectra Blocks plugin.

You’ll want to see my Find My Blocks tutorial to help you quickly locate where the Spectra Blocks are in use. And then switch to native WP blocks or Kadence Blocks if you need even more styling.

And I have a tutorial on the Limit Modified Date plugin so you can update your posts/pages without borking your SEO.

But a client let me know that this plugin is no longer being supported and may or may not work well when using Gutenberg Blocks.

He suggests using the Change Last Modified Date plugin instead.

I had hoped to have time to check it out and make a tutorial for you on it if I found it worked well, but I ran out of time this past week.

So, I’ll be checking into it this week.

Main thing is, get off Spectra Blocks.

Even if you use a caching/optimization plugin, it is having to work way too hard to overcome all that JS stuff.

SEO Tips

Ranking Factors Workshop Next Week

Ranking on Google has been turned on its head in the last 6-8 months.

In the DIY SEO course, I’m totally revamping the Ranking Factors workshop because of it.

We’ll be meeting live next week to discuss what will help you get to page 1 of Google now.

And yes, there are still ways to get to page 1.

Can You Rank on Reddit?

Have you noticed that Google is showing conversations from Quora and Reddit on Page 1 of Search more often now?

Google is pretty serious about getting real answers from real people in replies to queries.

They are so serious about it that Google is now paying Reddit more money for more crawl access.

So, one of the ways you can get featured in Search is to be active on Quora and Reddit and provide the best answers to the questions asked there.

Featured Snippets Disappear from Google Search

Search Engine Land reports that as of Feb 15, all Featured Snippets were removed from Google Search.

Nobody knows if it is a glitch or intentional.

So, if you keep up with your metrics and see a post suddenly fall from Position 0, this may be why, and there’s nothing wrong with your post.

Check Your Metrics Regularly

Too many site owners see a rapid decline in traffic, but they don’t dig into their metrics on a regular basis, so they have no idea why.

And their knee-jerk reaction is that they must have been hit in a Google algorithm update and/or that they need to tweak something in their posts.

The LAST thing you want to do is tweak a post that had super high ranking.

The FIRST thing you need to do is check your metrics, and keep up with the news of big changes with search, like the one above, to help determine the cause.

But if you don’t check your metrics regularly, it’s going to be harder for you to see what changed, as you won’t be familiar with how you were doing before the traffic drop.

Is Google Killing Independent Review Sites?

The folks over at House Fresh say that big sites with big domain authority are using junk review posts that are getting to the top of Google.

And they say that Google ranking these junk posts at the top of search is killing off smaller, independent review sites that actually have far more helpful content.

Read their post on David vs Digital Goliaths for more. 

It’s a long read, but it’s worth it for any blogger who is trying to compete with big, domain authority sites.

And it is just more proof that Google’s ranking factors need some serious tweaks to improve search quality and to be in alignment with what they preach to us about the need to create great content that is actually helpful to readers.

OpenAI is Creating Their Own Search Engine

OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, announced that they are building their own “web search product”.

It will be partially powered by Bing, which is owned by Microsoft. And of course, Microsoft is a heavy investor into OpenAI.

The idea is to build something that will compete directly with Google.

Yeah, good luck with that.

THE reason that Google still dominates search is because they have the infrastructure to crawl the entire web. That includes the millions of new URLs added every day.

Microsoft simply doesn’t have that kind of infrastructure. 

In fact, Microsoft petitioned WordPress to make something that pings all search engines when a new post or page is published on a site. WP refused, so Microsoft developed their own plugin called IndexNow. The problem with it is that it doesn’t work well because it doesn’t respect noindex and noarchive settings in SEO plugins.

This is exactly why Yoast SEO refused to incorporate it for so long. (They have since included it, but it still doesn’t work well.)

But, I still believe that it’s better to use the ping service in Cloudflare for this, as it only pings search engines other than Google and does respect the SEO settings.

Bing has maybe 1/4 of the URLs crawled/indexed as Google. That’s why you get far deeper results when you search with Google, and why it is still the dominant search engine.

Even though OpenAI crawled the internet up to 2021, it will never catch up to the current internet, even with Bing’s help.

So, even if OpenAI does build their own search engine, don’t expect it to kill Google.

What Will Kill Google Search

Younger folks are turning to TikTok and other social media for searches, and they are not using Google.

Every platform on the internet knows that you have to attract new users if you hope to survive, and those are going to be the younger folks.

So, Google is losing this battle year over year.

On top of that, Google Search is an ad-based model.

And as their search results continue to get worse, that ad model is not going to pay them what it used to.

Plus, Google is desperately trying to catch up in the public-facing AI race, where ChatGPT is the undisputed leader.

Google has been using AI in-house for decades. And their AI models are actually more powerful than just about anything else out there – powerful enough to scare governments that any privately owned entity could have exclusive access to that much info on people and data.

But, with great power comes great responsibility and Google is taking that VERY seriously.

That has everything to do with why Google lags behind OpenAI in releasing AI chatbots and such. And it’s making them fall behind.

So, Google is doing what it can to consolidate AI into Search. And it will still be ad supported, at least on the free version.

So, we’ll see if anything can kill Google besides Google.

AI Tips

Does Your Site Need a Generative AI Policy?

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