Tips Tuesday – What Google’s Up To, Holiday Deals

Hello Happy Site Owner!

Tips this week include:

• A week of Thanksgiving
• Big shout out and thank you to Sarah Gooding of WPTavern
• BlogAid Holiday Deals
• Status on the WP 6.4.1 Update
• A whole section devoted to Google’s bigger picture with all the algo updates

A Week of Thanksgiving 

It’s a big holiday gathering time in the U.S. and a lot of folks are preparing their celebrations, or for travel, or to receive guests. Many of us are gearing up for the holiday sales push as well.

With it being a short and busy week, we’ll have a short list of tips today too. In fact, it’s all on one topic – SEO, and the new game that is afoot, plus how I’m going to help us get ahead of this curve. But I have a few thank yous to say first.

Thank You!

I am so thankful for you and the trust you put into me for helping you create and maintain a fast, secure site that gets found, read, and acted upon, and an online business that makes you money.

Thank You Sarah Gooding!

During her 10 year stay at WPTavern, Sarah has become my all-time favorite WP reporter.

Her daily news articles quickly became my go-to source for keeping abreast of WP news and what was happening in the whole WP ecosystem.

You can read her farewell post here, along with her hand-picked top posts.

Thank you so much, Sarah! And we wish you well in your next venture.

BlogAid Holiday Deals

I’ve got HUGE discounts for you this year on the things you need, including:

• DIY SEO course – save $100
• Webmaster Training – save $190
• Site Audit – save $100
• Consults – half off
• AI Images for Profit – first month for $1
• AI Success Club – 25% off plus $900 worth of bonuses

See the Holiday Deals page for all the details.

And tell your blogger buddies about these deals too!!

Site Services Update

The waitlist is running about 2 weeks.

If you have a site audit checkup due in December, now is the time to put in that request.

Consults and other live sessions are on-demand anytime. Request yours now.

WP 6.4.1 Update

I’m updating test sites this week. It’s likely I’ll be sending update instructions to my site audit Hub members as well as my Webmaster Training members next week.

SEO Tips

Google’s Bigger Picture

Google rolled out a new thing last week that I believe gives us a clearer picture of what they are up to when combined with all the recent algo changes and the Helpful Content Update.

Google Search Notes

Please take a minute to watch this YouTube video on Google’s new Search Notes.

They make it look like they want to connect searchers with expert content creators.

It’s an opt-in experiment on Google Search Labs – read more here.

They are basically trying to emulate popular forums such as Reddit and Quora.

But it won’t be moderated like those forums. Google has some type standard in place, but don’t expect real moderating.

And I think that is going to turn it into a spammer’s heaven.

See how it works, with screenshots here.

I will be opting in to try it.

Hidden Gems Algo Update

Here’s another clue as to what Google is up to.

They quietly released a new algorithm that seeks out what they call Hidden Gems.

Basically, they are looking for authors with authority on certain topics.

This thing is ALL about the author.

Verifying Authors

Remember the G+ social platform?

The main reason Google started it was to have their own digitally verified identity of authors.

In the DIY SEO course I even had a section on how to set up that authorship triangle between your G+ profile, your posts, and your About page.

I will be creating a new version of that for the course soon.

Real People Giving Real Help

When you combine:

• Review site algo update – to get rid of spammy reviews
• Helpful Content Update
• Search Notes
• Hidden Gems

it all adds up to one thing.

Google wants to turn Search into a forum where real people help other real people.

This way, seekers get answers right in Google and never have to leave the platform.

I believe it will be like Featured Snippets on steroids, replete with juicy engagement.

And they will use all of that engagement to find the folks who really do know what they are talking about and really do help seekers.

What About Existing Forums?

Google has long crawled:

• Twitter
• Reddit
• Quora

Those are all forums that have verified real people asking and answering questions and posting their expertise.

But Reddit has decided to insanely raise the price of their API to deter Google, OpenAI, and others from crawling it to train their AI models.

Elon, who was an early investor of OpenAI, has decided to build his own AI called xAI Grok, and he will train it on Twitter data.

It will cost Elon next to nothing to grab the data they already store and throw it into the training model.

It costs Google and OpenAI millions to crawl and evaluate Twitter posts.

The Biggest AI Wins

If Google can get folks to use Search as a forum, they can start gathering their own data for their AI, just like Elon is doing with Twitter. Plus, it doesn’t cost Google much to run something that already exists compared to running something like G+.

Google will soon have everything it needs to start serving up well vetted answers to search queries.

There will be no need to cite specific sites of the experts who provided those “best” answers if they don’t want to either. Lack of citations is something they already got a slap on the wrist for when Bard first rolled into their AI search.

And if Google wants to keep folks on Search, they won’t link out to anything. This is akin to TikTok and Instagram only having links in bios.

After all, who would want to read through a forum of discussion or click links to anywhere if they can get a trusted answer by just asking Google – sort of like millions upon millions of folks do with ChatGPT right now?

I Don’t Work for Google

I’ve been saying this since 2014 when Google launched Featured Snippets.

Do y’all remember when they would have an excerpt from one post and an image from another post?

And do you recall when they started giving the whole answer in the snippet so that there was no reason to click over to the post, even if there was a link?

The whole point of Featured Snippets was to make Google THE go-to search engine to get a quick answer.

While there, folks would also see ads – and Google gets paid.

Then the culture changed and folks started watching more videos.

So, Google began featuring YouTube videos in Search.

At least YouTube creators get paid for that watch time. And again, Google makes money from the ads run in those videos too.

No such “creator fund” is being considered for all the text content we create that they will feature.

We Need Clicks

At least with the Featured Snippet, we do get a link for a potential click.

And sometimes we get a link in the “People Also Ask” section.

And we definitely get a way to grab subscribers and have links in YouTube videos.

So, what do we need to do with this new focus on forum experts?

I’m digging into that right now and making a plan for us.

And it will be a “if you can’t beat ‘em, then join ‘em” plan where you can win at this game.

I also believe it will help us recover faster from the Helpful Content Update too.

This will be the new focus of the DIY SEO course for the rest of this year and 2024.

Get your big savings now, and get ahead of this curve. No coupon needed.