Apr 24 2024
Google Revised The Favicon Documentation via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google revised their documentation on Favicons in order to add definitions in response to user questions received about favicons and what to use. The updated version of the documentation is significantly better because it explains the difference between the legacy form of favicon and the latest version of it.

Favicon

A favicon is a visual representation of a site and when properly executed it can draw attention to itself in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and encourage more clicks. The favicon is linked with the “rel” HTML attribute, which shows the relation between a linked resource (the favicon) and the webpage itself. REL stands for relation.

Revision Of Documentation

Google’s support page for favicon was revised in the section about which kinds of favicons are recommended and adds more details that explains which are legacy and which are modern versions.

These Are The Changes

This section was revised and essentially removed:

Set the rel attribute to one of the following strings:

  • icon
  • apple-touch-icon
  • apple-touch-icon-precomposed
  • shortcut icon

The problem with the above section is the use of the word “strings” means text, but it’s needlessly jargony and not informative enough.

That section was replaced with this:

Google supports the following rel attribute values for specifying a favicon; use whichever one fits your use case:

  • icon
    The icon that represents your site, as defined in the HTML standard.
  • apple-touch-icon
    An iOS-friendly icon that represents your site, per Apple’s developer documentation.
  • apple-touch-icon-precomposed
    An alternative icon for earlier versions of iOS, per Apple’s developer documentation.

There is also a new callout box with the following information:

“For historical reasons, we also support shortcut icon, which is an earlier, alternative version of icon.”

Screenshot of new callout box

A “shortcut icon” is a term that refers to an old way of signaling the presence of a favicon by using rel=”shortcut icon” instead of rel=”icon” so what Google’s documentation states is that they will still support the non-standard way of linking to a favicon.

The new documentation is improved with wording that is more descriptive.

Read the new documentation here:

Define a favicon to show in search results

Compare it to the old documentation here:

Internet Archive: Define a favicon to show in search results

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Apr 23 2024
Google Explains A Weird Domain Migration Outcome via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s John Mueller offered an insight into why the domain name migrations between multiple language versions of the same website turned out vastly different even though the same process was followed for each of three websites.

Migrating To Different Domain Names

The person asking the question maintained three websites under three different country code top level domains (ccTLDs). The ccTLDs were .fr (France), .be (Belgium), and .de (Germany). The project was a migration from one domain name to another domain name, each within their respective ccTLD, like example-1.fr to example-2.fr.

Each site had the same content but in different languages that corresponded to the countries targeted by each of their respective ccTLD. Thus, because everything about the migration was equal the reasonable expectation was that the outcome of the migration would be the same for each site.

But that wasn’t the case.

Two out of the three site migrations failed and lost traffic. Only one of them experienced a seamless transition.

What Went Wrong?

The person asking for information about what went wrong tweeted:

“Hi @JohnMu,

AlicesGarden (.fr, .be, .de …) migrated to Sweeek (.fr, .be, .de …)

.FR and .BE lost a lot of traffic in Oct. 23

Other TLD performed well.

Redirects, canonical, hreflang, content, offer = OK
Search console migration = OK

What else could be wrong ?”

Original tweet:

John Mueller Tweets His Response

Google’s John Mueller responded that each site is a different site and should be regarded as differently even if they share the same content assets (in different languages) between them.

Mueller tweeted:

“I don’t know your sites, but even if the content’s the same, they’re essentially different sites (especially with ccTLDs), so it would be normal for a migration to affect them differently (and this seems to be quite a way back in the meantime).”

Here is his tweet:

Are Site Migrations Essentially Equal?

John makes an important observation. It may very well be that how a site fits into the Internet may be affected by a site migration, especially by how users may respond to a change in template or a domain name. I’ve done domain name migrations and those have gone well with a temporary slight dip. But that was just one domain name at a time, not multiple domains.

What Might Be Going On?

Someone in that discussion tweeted to ask if they had used AI content.

The person asking the original question tweeted their response: 

“Yes a bit of AI for short description, mainly in category pages, but nothing which could be deceptive from an end-user perspective.”

Could it be that the two of the site migrations failed and a third was successful because they coincidentally overlapped with an update? Given that the extent of AI content was trivial it’s probably unlikely.

The important takeaway is what Mueller said, that they’re all different sites and so the outcome should naturally be different.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/William Barton

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Apr 22 2024
Google Confirms Links Are Not That Important via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed at a recent search marketing conference that Google needs very few links, adding to the growing body of evidence that publishers need to focus on other factors. Gary tweeted confirmation that he indeed say those words.

Background Of Links For Ranking

Links were discovered in the late 1990’s to be a good signal for search engines to use for validating how authoritative a website is and then Google discovered soon after that anchor text could be used to provide semantic signals about what a webpage was about.

One of the most important research papers was Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment by Jon M. Kleinberg, published around 1998 (link to research paper at the end of the article). The main discovery of this research paper is that there is too many web pages and there was no objective way to filter search results for quality in order to rank web pages for a subjective idea of relevance.

The author of the research paper discovered that links could be used as an objective filter for authoritativeness.

Kleinberg wrote:

“To provide effective search methods under these conditions, one needs a way to filter, from among a huge collection of relevant pages, a small set of the most “authoritative” or ‘definitive’ ones.”

This is the most influential research paper on links because it kick-started more research on ways to use links beyond as an authority metric but as a subjective metric for relevance.

Objective is something factual. Subjective is something that’s closer to an opinion. The founders of Google discovered how to use the subjective opinions of the Internet as a relevance metric for what to rank in the search results.

What Larry Page and Sergey Brin discovered and shared in their research paper (The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine – link at end of this article) was that it was possible to harness the power of anchor text to determine the subjective opinion of relevance from actual humans. It was essentially crowdsourcing the opinions of millions of website expressed through the link structure between each webpage.

What Did Gary Illyes Say About Links In 2024?

At a recent search conference in Bulgaria, Google’s Gary Illyes made a comment about how Google doesn’t really need that many links and how Google has made links less important.

Patrick Stox tweeted about what he heard at the search conference:

” ‘We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.’ @methode #serpconf2024″

Google’s Gary Illyes tweeted a confirmation of that statement:

“I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that”

Why Links Matter Less

The initial state of anchor text when Google first used links for ranking purposes was absolutely non-spammy, which is why it was so useful. Hyperlinks were primarily used as a way to send traffic from one website to another website.

But by 2004 or 2005 Google was using statistical analysis to detect manipulated links, then around 2004 “powered-by” links in website footers stopped passing anchor text value, and by 2006 links close to the words “advertising” stopped passing link value, links from directories stopped passing ranking value and by 2012 Google deployed a massive link algorithm called Penguin that destroyed the rankings of likely millions of websites, many of which were using guest posting.

The link signal eventually became so bad that Google decided in 2019 to selectively use nofollow links for ranking purposes. Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that the change to nofollow was made because of the link signal.

Google Explicitly Confirms That Links Matter Less

In 2023 Google’s Gary Illyes shared at a PubCon Austin that links were not even in the top 3 of ranking factors. Then in March 2024, coinciding with the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update, Google updated their spam policies documentation to downplay the importance of links for ranking purposes.

Google March 2024 Core Update: 4 Changes To Link Signal

The documentation previously said:

“Google uses links as an important factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”

The update to the documentation that mentioned links was updated to remove the word important.

Links are not just listed as just another factor:

“Google uses links as a factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”

At the beginning of April Google’s John Mueller advised that there are more useful SEO activities to engage on than links.

Mueller explained:

“There are more important things for websites nowadays, and over-focusing on links will often result in you wasting your time doing things that don’t make your website better overall”

Finally, Gary Illyes explicitly said that Google needs very few links to rank webpages and confirmed it.

Why Google Doesn’t Need Links

The reason why Google doesn’t need many links is likely because of the extent of AI and natural language undertanding that Google uses in their algorithms. Google must be highly confident in its algorithm to be able to explicitly say that they don’t need it.

Way back when Google implemented the nofollow into the algorithm there were many link builders who sold comment spam links who continued to lie that comment spam still worked. As someone who started link building at the very beginning of modern SEO (I was the moderator of the link building forum at the #1 SEO forum of that time), I can say with confidence that links have stopped playing much of a role in rankings beginning several years ago, which is why I stopped about five or six years ago.

Read the research papers

Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment – Jon M. Kleinberg (PDF)

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

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Apr 22 2024
Google DeepMind RecurrentGemma Beats Transformer Models via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google DeepMind published a research paper that proposes language model called RecurrentGemma that can match or exceed the performance of transformer-based models while being more memory efficient, offering the promise of large language model performance on resource limited environments.

The research paper offers a brief overview:

“We introduce RecurrentGemma, an open language model which uses Google’s novel Griffin architecture. Griffin combines linear recurrences with local attention to achieve excellent performance on language. It has a fixed-sized state, which reduces memory use and enables efficient inference on long sequences. We provide a pre-trained model with 2B non-embedding parameters, and an instruction tuned variant. Both models achieve comparable performance to Gemma-2B despite being trained on fewer tokens.”

Connection To Gemma

Gemma is an open model that uses Google’s top tier Gemini technology but is lightweight and can run on laptops and mobile devices. Similar to Gemma, RecurrentGemma can also function on resource-limited environments. Other similarities between Gemma and RecurrentGemma are in the pre-training data, instruction tuning and RLHF (Reinforcement Learning From Human Feedback). RLHF is a way to use human feedback to train a model to learn on its own, for generative AI.

Griffin Architecture

The new model is based on a hybrid model called Griffin that was announced a few months ago. Griffin is called a “hybrid” model because it uses two kinds of technologies, one that allows it to efficiently handle long sequences of information while the other allows it to focus on the most recent parts of the input, which gives it the ability to process “significantly” more data (increased throughput) in the same time span as transformer-based models and also decrease the wait time (latency).

The Griffin research paper proposed two models, one called Hawk and the other named Griffin. The Griffin research paper explains why it’s a breakthrough:

“…we empirically validate the inference-time advantages of Hawk and Griffin and observe reduced latency and significantly increased throughput compared to our Transformer baselines. Lastly, Hawk and Griffin exhibit the ability to extrapolate on longer sequences than they have been trained on and are capable of efficiently learning to copy and retrieve data over long horizons. These findings strongly suggest that our proposed models offer a powerful and efficient alternative to Transformers with global attention.”

The difference between Griffin and RecurrentGemma is in one modification related to how the model processes input data (input embeddings).

Breakthroughs

The research paper states that RecurrentGemma provides similar or better performance than the more conventional Gemma-2b transformer model (which was trained on 3 trillion tokens versus 2 trillion for RecurrentGemma). This is part of the reason the research paper is titled “Moving Past Transformer Models” because it shows a way to achieve higher performance without the high resource overhead of the transformer architecture.

Another win over transformer models is in the reduction in memory usage and faster processing times. The research paper explains:

“A key advantage of RecurrentGemma is that it has a significantly smaller state size than transformers on long sequences. Whereas Gemma’s KV cache grows proportional to sequence length, RecurrentGemma’s state is bounded, and does not increase on sequences longer than the local attention window size of 2k tokens. Consequently, whereas the longest sample that can be generated autoregressively by Gemma is limited by the memory available on the host, RecurrentGemma can generate sequences of arbitrary length.”

RecurrentGemma also beats the Gemma transformer model in throughput (amount of data that can be processed, higher is better). The transformer model’s throughput suffers with higher sequence lengths (increase in the number of tokens or words) but that’s not the case with RecurrentGemma which is able to maintain a high throughput.

The research paper shows:

“In Figure 1a, we plot the throughput achieved when sampling from a prompt of 2k tokens for a range of generation lengths. The throughput calculates the maximum number of tokens we can sample per second on a single TPUv5e device.

…RecurrentGemma achieves higher throughput at all sequence lengths considered. The throughput achieved by RecurrentGemma does not reduce as the sequence length increases, while the throughput achieved by Gemma falls as the cache grows.”

Limitations Of RecurrentGemma

The research paper does show that this approach comes with its own limitation where performance lags in comparison with traditional transformer models.

The researchers highlight a limitation in handling very long sequences which is something that transformer models are able to handle.

According to the paper:

“Although RecurrentGemma models are highly efficient for shorter sequences, their performance can lag behind traditional transformer models like Gemma-2B when handling extremely long sequences that exceed the local attention window.”

What This Means For The Real World

The importance of this approach to language models is that it suggests that there are other ways to improve the performance of language models while using less computational resources on an architecture that is not a transformer model. This also shows that a non-transformer model can overcome one of the limitations of transformer model cache sizes that tend to increase memory usage.

This could lead to applications of language models in the near future that can function in resource-limited environments.

Read the Google DeepMind research paper:

RecurrentGemma: Moving Past Transformers for Efficient Open Language Models (PDF)

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Apr 21 2024
Google On 404 Errors And Ranking Drops via @sejournal, @martinibuster

In a Google Office Hours podcast, Google’s Gary Illyes answered a question about 404 Page Not Found errors that coincided with a drop in rankings.

Fake External 404 Errors

There are probably many reasons for 404 errors created by bots. One reason for those error responses could be that they are originating from automated scanners that are looking for files or folders that are typical for specific vulnerable plugins or themes.

Checking the the IP address and user agent of the bot that’s causing the 404 server error responses can also yield clues if those 404 responses are from automated scanning bots. If the IP address indicates it’s originating from a web host, or a Russian or Chinese IP address then it’s probably a hacker. If the user agent is an out of date version of Chrome or Firefox then that’s probably a hacker’s bot, too. That’s just one reason out of many.

Google Answers The Question

The person asking the question correlated a drop in rankings with 404 Page Not Found server responses.

This is the question that was asked:

“False 404 URLs hitting my website from external source, could this be related to ranking drop? What can I do to fix it?”

Google’s Gary Illyes responded:

“Fake 404s that Googlebot might’ve crawled cannot be reasonably attributed to a ranking drop. It’s normal to have any number of 404s on a site and you don’t have to fix them, though if you see in your analytics software that a larger number of actual users are also coming through those 404 URLs, I would personally try to convert them somehow by, for example, showing them some relevant content instead.”

Ranking Drops And 404 Page Not Found

Gary said that 404s are normal and unlikely to cause a drop in search rankings. It’s true that 404 errors are a common occurrence. In general that’s okay and most of the time there’s no need to fix anything.

404s That Are Generated By Actual Users

There are other cases where 404s are created by real people who are following a link from somewhere and getting a Page Not Found response. This is easy to diagnose by checking if the URL the site visitors are trying to reach closely resembles an actual URL. That’s an indication that someone misspelled a URL and the way to fix that is by creating a redirect from the misspelled URL to the correct one.

About The Drop In Rankings

Something that Gary didn’t mention but is worth mentioning is that there may be a small possibility that a bot did find a vulnerability and the 404s were caused by a scanner that was scanning for vulnerabilities before eventually finding one.

One way to check for that is to use phpMyAdmin, a server app, to view your database tables in the section for users and see if there’s an unrecognized user.

Another way, if the site is hosted on WordPress, is to use a security plugin to scan the site to see if it’s using a vulnerable theme or plugin.

Jetpack Protect is a free vulnerability scanner that’s created by the developers at Automattic. It won’t fix a vulnerability but it will warn a user if it finds plugin or theme related vulnerabilities. The paid premium version offers more protection.

Other trustworthy WordPress security plugins are Sucuri and Wordfence, both of which do different things and are available in free and premium versions.

But if that’s not the case then the ranking drops are pure coincidence and the real reasons lie elswhere.

Listen to the question and answer at 12:27 minute mark of the Office Hours podcast:

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Apr 20 2024
Google On Diagnosing A Deindexed WordPress Site via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s John Mueller answered a question about a WordPress site that was completely deindexed from Google Search after changing to a different web hosting platform. Mueller’s answer shows where to start investigating the reasons why that happens.

Dropped From Index After A Site Migration

A submitted question to the Google Office Hours podcast related that their site disappeared from the search engine results pages after they had migrated their site from WordPress to “self-publishing” and that the site was subsequently deindexed.

The question may mean that they were hosting the site on the WordPress.com managed WordPress platform and then migrated their site away to another web host, typically referred to as self-hosting.

Migrating a WordPress site to another web host takes a few relatively simple steps but it can go wrong at virtually every step of the process.

More on migrating a WordPress site later because it’s relevant to the question.

John Mueller Answers The Question

Mueller answered the question from the point of view of analyzing the website itself, which is the best place to start in this specific case. The reason is because the question implies that the site can still be reached online.

This is the question:

“After the site was transferred from WordPress to self-publishing, almost all publications disappeared from the index. The search results are ‘0’.”

John Mueller responded:

“If your website dropped out of the search results and is no longer being indexed at all, right about the time when you did a migration, then my guess is that your new website is somehow blocking search engines, or at least, blocking Google. I’d start by analyzing the data in the Search Console, and working forward from there.”

Search console may show the exact date that pages started dropping out of Google’s index and the reason why they’re dropping out. Typical reasons may be the pages are not found (404) or that Google was blocked from crawling by a robots.txt. Those are the starting points for identifying what’s happening on Google’s side.

Diagnose If WordPress Is Blocking Google

This kind of problem typically happens when a WordPress site is set to be hidden from the search engines, which means there’s a robots.txt entry that’s blocking search engines from indexing the site.

Google Search Console will tell you when this is happening through the Page Indexing Report which will show that the site is blocked by a robots.txt in the column of the report labeled “Why pages aren’t indexed”.

If that’s the case then you can actually see this to be the case in your robots.txt file typically located in the root of your domain, /robots.txt (example.com/robots.txt).

If the page is blocked by Robots.txt then it may be that a WordPress setting was applied at some point in the migration to block search indexing.

This is a setting that’s native to the WordPress admin panel that can be reached here:

Settings 🡪 Reading.

There you’ll find a setting called “Search Engine Visibility” with a checkbox labeled Discourage search engines from indexing this site.

Screenshot Of WordPress Visibility Setting

An image of a WordPress settings interface with options for a website, including blog pagination and search engine visibility, with an arrow pointing to the option WordPress search visibility settings

If that’s the case then untick that box and you’re done.

If there’s a robots.txt entry that’s blocking search engines but the above box isn’t checked then it could be another plugin doing that, like an SEO or migration plugin. If that’s not the case then maybe whoever was helping do the move inserted that entry in which case it’s an easy thing to download the robots.txt, edit the file in a text file editor then uploading it back.

Other issues could be a failure to update DNS settings to point to the new web hosting service or it could be something on the web host side. Starting the investigation at Google Search Console is good advice.

Listen to Google’s answer here at the 7:24 minute mark:

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Apr 19 2024
Google Answers Whether Having Two Sites Affects Rankings via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s John Mueller answered whether having two sites could negatively affect search rankings. His answer is surprisingly applicable to different ways of interpreting the question.

Can Having Two Sites Affect Rankings?

A person submitted a question to Google where they wanted to know if having two sites could negatively affect their rankings. The question as reproduced in Google is concise and also a little vague which leads to the outcome that the question can be answered in way that’s different from the way that Mueller answered it.

This is the question:

“My rankings have dropped due to Google finding out I have two websites. Is this correct?”

Google’s John Mueller answered:

“No. That’s not likely. Many people have several websites. Separate websites are not a problem.

The issue is often more indirect: if you work on a lot of websites, you’re not going to have a lot of time to make truly awesome websites everywhere. And, if you’re making websites that aren’t awesome, then that can be something which our algorithms pick up on when it comes to recommending your site to others.”

A Different Way To Answer The Question

John Mueller answered the question under the assumption that the two sites in the question are on different topics. He prefaced his answer by saying that many “people have several websites” which is true.

But many people don’t have multiple websites on the same topic. The person asking the question was vague about whether the sites were about different topics, too.

It’s very possible that the sites are on the same topic, in which case it makes sense why they may be concerned that Google found out about the two sites because it could be seen as trying to game Google. After all, who worries about having multiple sites on different topics?

If the sites were on the same topic then the answer to the question is somewhat different.

One of the important considerations when one person controls multiple sites on the same topic is that they’re doing it for ranking purposes which is not a good starting point for any website.

I’m not saying there’s something corrupt about the practice but I am saying that it’s not really the best starting point for creating signals of quality. It’s not a matter of someone thinking that they’re going to create multiple high quality sites for users, right?

Another reason why people create multiple sites for ranking (and not quality) is because people feel if they split up a topic into subsidiary subtopics they can create stronger sites about those related subtopics as opposed to one site with multiple related subtopics.

But what almost inevitably happens is that they wind up running multiple related sites that could be stronger together as one authoritative website.

I asked Bill Hartzer of Hartzer Consulting (Facebook profile) if he thought multiple sites on the same topic could affect rankings.

Bill agreed with me and shared:

“A lot of people, after building a website that ranks well, will think that they can simply create another website on the same topic and “make double the money” or get “double the traffic” and it’s simply not true.

Companies will also have one main website, but they’ll create a separate website on a separate domain name for each of their products or services. Over the past 10 years or so, that hasn’t been a good strategy. While it’s good to register the domain names of your products or services, it’s better to combine all those websites into one main, more authoritative website.

Typically if they’re on the same topic, one website, the original site, will continue to rank well. But the second website doesn’t rank as well. In most cases, it’s always better to combine the websites into one website.”

Multiple Sites And Rankings

John Mueller is right that publishing multiple sites (on different topics) could compromise a person’s ability to focus on one site to make it outstanding, remarking that there’s an indirect negative effect on rankings. He is also correct in saying that it’s unlikely to have a direct negative effect on rankings.

Changing the question to whether there’s an effect on ranking if the multiple sites are on the same topic, then the answer becomes more nuanced but follow a similar trajectory as Mueller’s original answer that it detracts from being able to create one outstanding site and can lead to a person creating multiple middling sites.

But that’s not necessarily a foregone conclusion when a person is creating  multiple sites on different topics. It’s absolutely possible to create multiple sites on different topics and to be successful at it. It might be hard for one person alone to pull it off but it’s not difficult to do when multiple people are working on the websites creating content and focusing on promotion.

Watch/listen to the Google SEO Office hours at the 33 second mark:

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Apr 19 2024
Google Answers If Changing Web Hosting Affects SEO via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s Gary Illyes answered if switching web hosting platforms could result in a negative outcome for rankings and SEO. It’s a reasonable question because migrating a site to a new web host involves multiple technical factors that can go wrong and have an immediately negative effect.

What Does Changing A Website Host Entail?

Changing web hosts can be complicated but if the site is just a regular WordPress site then migrating to a new host is relatively easy, especially if you use plugins.

But even doing a manual migration isn’t that difficult if you’re already familiar with administering website database with apps like phpMyAdmin and know how to use an SFTP software.

Gary Ilyes’ answer refers to doing it “by the book” which is actually quite a lot and can be overwhelming if you’ve never done this before.

Does Changing Website Hosting Affect SEO?

The question that was asked is:

“My company is considering switching hosts for our website. Would switching have a negative and lasting effect on our SEO rankings?”

Google’s Gary Illyes responded:

“If you do things by the book, meaning the website keeps being resolvable and the actual downtime is minimal, changing hosts should not have negative effects on your pages’ rankings in Google’s search results.”

Two Things To Be Mindful Of

Gary Illyes’ answer assumes that the new web host is as good as the old web hosting platform. Obviously, downgrading the web hosting may come with minor to major negative outcomes.

Gary mentioned two factors to be mindful of:

  1. Website domain resolves
  2. Downtime is minimal

1. Website Is Resolvable

This is a reference to how the domain name is translated to an IP address that matches where the website itself is hosted. This typically means obtaining the Name Servers (NS) information from the new website hosting platform where the site files are and updating that at the domain name registrar. Additionally, the A Record (Address Record) should reflect the correct IP address for the new web hosting space (and other entries related to email).

2. Downtime Is Minimal

Believe it or not your website can be down for weeks and it won’t permanently lose rankings as long as when it comes back everything is exactly the same as it previously was. I know this from personal experience as I’ve been operating websites for 25 years. For example, there were a couple times when one or another of my websites went down due to hard drive failure at the dedicated web host, incorrect settings causing 500 errors and from taking having to take a website offline to fix hacked files.

A site can recover from being down for weeks and in my experience it’ll take a couple weeks for Google to recrawl and add all the webpages back into the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Listen to the answer on YouTube at the 7:58 minute mark:

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Apr 19 2024
Meta Integrates Google & Bing Search Results Into AI Assistant via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

Meta’s AI assistant, powered by the new Llama 3 model, will now incorporate real-time search results from Google and Bing.

This integration marks a step forward in AI assistant capabilities and their potential impact on the search industry.

You can access Meta AI within Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and the newly launched Meta.ai desktop experience.

Google & Bing Search + Meta

Meta is integrating Google and Bing results directly into its AI assistant.

Instead of relying solely on training data or a single search engine, Meta’s AI assistant intelligently selects and displays results from either Google or Bing, depending on the query.

This provides users with a more comprehensive and diverse range of information.

Based on my limited testing before writing this piece, I could only get Meta AI to search using Bing. I’m uncertain about the criteria or conditions that would cause it to use Bing versus Google for web searches.

Here’s an example showing that it’s capable of providing up-to-date information:

Screenshot of a smartphone displaying a notification from Meta AI about the Google core update. The message details the update's gradual rollout, its focus on improving spam protections, and enhancing content quality in Google & Bing

Seamless Search Across Apps

Meta’s new search experience allows you to access relevant information without switching platforms.

For example, while planning a trip in a Messenger group chat, you can ask the assistant to find flights and determine the least crowded weekends to travel.

A screenshot of a smartphone messaging app named Screenshot from: about.fb.com/news/, April 2024.

Meta is taking a multi-pronged approach to make its AI assistant a consistent presence across its family of apps:

  • Integration into the search boxes of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger
  • Appearing directly in the Facebook main feed to respond to posts
  • A new meta.ai website where users can log in to have continued conversations
  • Real-time text-to-image generation with an “Imagine” feature in WhatsApp
  • Future integration with Meta’s VR headsets and smart glasses

More information about these initiatives is available in Meta’s announcement.

Implications For Search Engine Optimization

Integrating Google and Bing search results into Meta’s AI assistant has potential consequences for SEO.

As AI chatbots become increasingly popular for finding information, visibility in the integrated search results will become more valuable for publishers.

SEO strategies may need to evolve to accommodate traditional search engines and AI assistants.

This could involve a greater focus on satisfying conversational queries that mirror how users interact with chatbots.

A Shifting Landscape

Meta’s move to integrate search results from Google and Bing into its AI assistant highlights the evolving nature of the search industry.

As the lines between traditional search and conversational AI continue to blur, companies are vying for dominance.

Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has expressed ambitious plans for the AI assistant, aiming to make it the most intelligent and widely accessible AI tool available.

With the release of the powerful Llama 3 model and incorporating search results from leading search engines, Meta is positioning itself as a top contender in the AI chatbot market.

FAQ

How is Meta’s AI Assistant changing how we interact with search engines?

Meta’s AI assistant is transforming the search engine experience by integrating Google and Bing search results, simplifying access to information across multiple platforms.

Users can search directly through Meta’s AI assistant within Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. This integration enables real-time information retrieval and a conversational interface that aligns with how users increasingly prefer to find and interact with content online.

By catering to conversational queries and reducing the need to switch platforms, Meta’s AI assistant may shift the focus of SEO strategies toward satisfying these user interactions.

What new features does Meta’s AI Assistant offer?

Meta’s AI Assistant provides various unique features to create a seamless search experience alongside live search results from Google and Bing.

These features include:

  • Integration into the search functions within Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.
  • The ability to interact with posts directly on the Facebook feed.
  • Access to the meta.ai desktop experience for continued conversations.
  • Real-time text-to-image generation through the “Imagine” feature in WhatsApp.
  • Planned future integration with Meta’s virtual reality headsets and smart glasses.

Featured Image: Screenshot from about.fb.com/news/, April 2024

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Apr 18 2024
2024 WordPress Vulnerability Report Shows Errors Sites Keep Making via @sejournal, @martinibuster

WordPress security scanner WPScan’s 2024 WordPress vulnerability report calls attention to WordPress vulnerability trends and suggests the kinds of things website publishers (and SEOs) should be looking out for.

Some of the key findings from the report were that just over 20% of vulnerabilities were rated as high or critical level threats, with medium severity threats, at 67% of reported vulnerabilities, making up the majority. Many regard medium level vulnerabilities as if they are low-level threats but they’re not and should be regarded as deserving attention.

The WPScan report advised:

“While severity doesn’t translate directly to the risk of exploitation, it’s an important guideline for website owners to make an educated decision about when to disable or update the extension.”

WordPress Vulnerability Severity Distribution

Critical level vulnerabilities, the highest level of threat, represented only 2.38% of vulnerabilities, which is (essentially good news for WordPress publishers. Yet as mentioned earlier, when combined with the percentages of high level threats (17.68%) the number or concerning vulnerabilities rises to almost 20%.

Here are the percentages by severity ratings:

  • Critical 2.38%
  • Low 12.83%
  • High 17.68%
  • Medium 67.12%

Authenticated Versus Unauthenticated

Authenticated vulnerabilities are those that require an attacker to first attain user credentials and their accompanying permission levels in order to exploit a particular vulnerbility. Exploits that require subscriber-level authentication are the most exploitable of the authenticated exploits and those that require administrator level access present the least risk (although not always a low risk for a variety of reasons).

Unauthenticated attacks are generally the easiest to exploit because anyone can launch an attack without having to first acquire a user credential.

The WPScan vulnerability report found that about 22% of reported vulnerabilities required subscriber level or no authentication at all, representing the most exploitable vulnerabilities. On the other end of the scale of the exploitability are vulnerabilities requiring admin permission levels representing a total of 30.71% of reported vulnerabilities.

Permission Levels Required For Exploits

Vulnerabilities requiring administrator level credentials represented the highest percentage of exploits, followed by Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) with 24.74% of vulnerabilities. This is interesting because CSRF is an attack that uses social engineering to get a victim to click a link from which the user’s permission levels are acquired. If they can trick an admin level user to follow a link then they will be able to assume that level of privileges to the WordPress website.

The following is the percentages of exploits ordered by roles necessary to launch an attack.

Ascending Order Of User Roles For Vulnerabilities

  • Author 2.19%
  • Subscriber 10.4%
  • Unauthenticated 12.35%
  • Contributor 19.62%
  • CSRF 24.74%
  • Admin 30.71%

Most Common Vulnerability Types Requiring Minimal Authentication

Broken Access Control in the context of WordPress refers to a security failure that can allow an attacker without necessary permission credentials to gain access to higher credential permissions.

In the section of the report that looks at the occurrences and vulnerabilities underlying unauthenticated or subscriber level vulnerabilities reported (Occurrence vs Vulnerability on Unauthenticated or Subscriber+ reports), WPScan breaks down the percentages for each vulnerability type that is most common for exploits that are the easiest to launch (because they require minimal to no user credential authentication).

The WPScan threat report noted that Broken Access Control represents a whopping 84.99% followed by SQL injection (20.64%).

The Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) defines Broken Access Control as:

“Access control, sometimes called authorization, is how a web application grants access to content and functions to some users and not others. These checks are performed after authentication, and govern what ‘authorized’ users are allowed to do.

Access control sounds like a simple problem but is insidiously difficult to implement correctly. A web application’s access control model is closely tied to the content and functions that the site provides. In addition, the users may fall into a number of groups or roles with different abilities or privileges.”

SQL injection, at 20.64% represents the second most prevalent type of vulnerability, which WPScan referred to as both “high severity and risk” in the context of vulnerabilities requiring minimal authentication levels because attackers can access and/or tamper with the database which is the heart of every WordPress website.

These are the percentages:

  • Broken Access Control 84.99%
  • SQL Injection 20.64%
  • Cross-Site Scripting 9.4%
  • Unauthenticated Arbitrary File Upload 5.28%
  • Sensitive Data Disclosure 4.59%
  • Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) 3.67%
  • Remote Code Execution 2.52%
  • Other 14.45%

Vulnerabilities In The WordPress Core Itself

The overwhelming majority of vulnerability issues were reported in third-party plugins and themes. However, there were in 2023 a total of 13 vulnerabilities reported in the WordPress core itself. Out of the thirteen vulnerabilities only one of them was rated as a high severity threat, which is the second highest level, with Critical being the highest level vulnerability threat, a rating scoring system maintained by the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).

The WordPress core platform itself is held to the highest standards and benefits from a worldwide community that is vigilant in discovering and patching vulnerabilities.

Website Security Should Be Considered As Technical SEO

Site audits don’t normally cover website security but in my opinion every responsible audit should at least talk about security headers. As I’ve been saying for years, website security quickly becomes an SEO issue once a website’s ranking start disappearing from the search engine results pages (SERPs) due to being compromised by a vulnerability. That’s why it’s critical to be proactive about website security.

According to the WPScan report, the main point of entry for hacked websites were leaked credentials and weak passwords. Ensuring strong password standards plus two-factor authentication is an important part of every website’s security stance.

Using security headers is another way to help protect against Cross-Site Scripting and other kinds of vulnerabilities.

Lastly, a WordPress firewall and website hardening are also useful proactive approaches to website security. I once added a forum to a brand new website I created and it was immediately under attack within minutes. Believe it or not, virtually every website worldwide is under attack 24 hours a day by bots scanning for vulnerabilities.

Read the WPScan Report:

WPScan 2024 Website Threat Report

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Ljupco Smokovski

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