Google Rolling Out Changes To Shopping Searches In Europe via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

Google has begun implementing changes to its search results in the European Economic Area (EEA) to comply with the European Union’s recently enacted Digital Markets Act (DMA).

The DMA, which took effect on March 6, aims to promote fair competition in the European digital market by imposing new rules on large technology companies designated as “gatekeepers.”

Independent SEO consultant Brodie Clark shared recent examples of these changes on Twitter, noting the quiet introduction of default ‘Products’ and ‘Product Sites’ tabs featuring organic merchant listing results and focused web pages, respectively.

SEO News: Google has quietly rolled out some major changes to their search results.

In the past, we have seen Google testing out different search menu tabs, focused primarily on changes related to either ‘Web Results’ or ‘Forums’ (a replacement of ‘Perspectives’).

Now seeing a… pic.twitter.com/xA77zweFlc

— Brodie Clark (@brodieseo) March 21, 2024

Previously Announced Search Features

In a February announcement, Google provided an early look at these new search experiences for Europeans.

According to the announcement, these updates are designed to present users with rich and relevant information while improving the visibility of aggregators, suppliers, and businesses.

The new carousel rich result may appear for travel, local, and shopping queries.

Accompanying these changes are dedicated ‘aggregator units’ that include links to aggregator sites across the web.

Compliance Reports Reveal Extent Of Changes

As part of the DMA’s transparency requirements, Google and other “gatekeepers” had to submit detailed compliance reports to the European Commission by March 7, outlining the measures they’ve taken to follow the new rules.

In its report, Google revealed it’s making the following changes to search results in Europe:

• Removing an unspecified series of features
• Introducing new features, such as opportunities for third-party vertical search services and direct suppliers
• Implementing new controls for cross-service exchanges of personal data
• Developing new Google-wide policy and compliance training
• Enhancing existing data portability opportunities

Looking Ahead

As Google and other “gatekeepers” continue to adapt their products and services to comply with the DMA, users in the EEA can anticipate further changes in their digital experiences.

The DMA is part of a broader effort by the European Commission to reform the digital landscape and rein in the power of large technology companies.

The coming months will reveal how effective the DMA is in achieving its stated goals.

Featured Image: Michael Derrer Fuchs/Shutterstock

Google Completes March Spam Update, Core Update Continues via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

Google has announced the completion of its spam update rollout, which began on March 5, alongside a core update.

The spam update, which took approximately two weeks to deploy fully, targeted scaled content production, expired domain misuse, and authority abuse.

The core update, which incorporates the “Helpful Content” evaluation into the core algorithm, is still ongoing and is expected to take around four total weeks to complete.

Spam Update Rollout Completed

On March 20 at 6:09 PDT, Google confirmed that the spam update rollout had concluded.

The announcement came via an update to Google’s Search Status Dashboard.

With this update, Google has implemented three new spam policies targeting scaled content abuse, expired domain abuse, and site reputation abuse.

While the first two policies were immediately enforced, the site reputation abuse policy will be effective starting May.

Impact On Websites & Search Results

The completion of the spam update rollout brings new clarity to the search landscape, as publishers and SEO professionals can now get an idea of the changes’ impact.

Early data from SISTRIX revealed significant gains and losses across various domains, with some websites experiencing a complete removal from Google’s search index.

Following introducing the new spam policies, Google issued numerous manual actions to address pure spam issues.

A study by Originality.ai found that 100% of the deindexed websites showed signs of AI-generated content, with half of the sites having 90-100% of their posts created by AI.

However, these manual actions are separate from algorithmic demotions.

The main difference is that manual actions are carried out by Google’s human reviewers and are accompanied by a notification in Search Console.

In contrast, algorithmic ranking updates, such as the March spam update, happen automatically and do not result in notifications from Google.

A website can be impacted simultaneously by both a manual action and an algorithmic update.

Core Update Still In Progress

While the spam update rollout has concluded, the core update, which began simultaneously, is still in progress.

Google has indicated that the core update will take a few more weeks to complete as it integrates the “Helpful Content” evaluation into the core algorithm.

As the core update continues, SEO professionals and content creators should focus on creating original, high-value content that resonates with their target audience.

Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, has urged patience and caution, emphasizing the importance of waiting for the update to be fully completed before making significant changes in response to ranking fluctuations.

I would let the update complete before deciding if there are any fundamental changes you might want to make. There might not be any to do at all.

Your site seems clean and nice. Going through the site, I see [steak pie] as one of your featured recipes. You’re in the carousel and…

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) March 15, 2024

Adapting To The New Search Landscape

With the spam update rollout now complete, website owners and content creators can begin to adapt to the new search landscape. This may involve auditing existing content, reworking AI-generated material, and prioritizing human creativity and editorial oversight.

As the SEO community continues to monitor the impact of both updates, it’s clear that Google remains committed to promoting original, high-value content and combating low-quality, spammy material.

The full impact of these updates will become more evident in the coming weeks as the core update completes its rollout and the search results settle into their new patterns.

Featured Image: Bayu Eka Y/Shutterstock

Google On Spammy Backlinks & Negative Impact On Rankings via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s John Mueller answered a question on Reddit about what to do about an increase in spammy backlinks that are perceived as having a negative impact on rankings. Mueller’s answer showed what publishers should focus on.

Noticing Spammy Backlinks

The person asking the question said that they had noticed an increase in spammy backlinks and that they associated it with a negative impact on their rankings. They also said that it was affecting their “overall credibility.”

They didn’t elaborate what they meant by “overall credibility” but perhaps they were talking about a third party site metric like Domain Authority.

This is what the person asked:

“I’ve noticed a significant increase in spammy backlinks pointing to my website, and it’s negatively impacting my site’s search engine rankings and overall credibility. Despite my efforts, I’m struggling to effectively remove these spammy backlinks.

Can anyone provide guidance or suggestions on the best practices and tools for removing spammy backlinks and restoring the integrity of my website’s link profile? Any tips or suggestions will be helpful.”

John Mueller Answers Question About Spammy Backlinks

Mueller answered that it’s not necessary to do anything about “spammy backlinks” because Google ignores them. He didn’t even suggest using the Disavow Tool, a tool that tells Google to ignore specific links that a publisher is responsible for.

Mueller responded:

“I’d strongly recommend focusing on other things – Google’s systems are really good at dealing with random spammy links, but – like users – they do get hung up on websites that aren’t awesome. Make your site awesome instead of chasing those links.”

About “Overall Credibility”

Third party metrics don’t offer insights into how Google sees a website. They’re just the opinion of a third party that can be used to measure one site against another.

My background in SEO goes back 25 years to a time when Google used to show a representation of PageRank on Google’s toolbar. I was an authoritative source of information that related data about the quantity of links and whether or not a site was indexed or not indexed. Yet even Google’s own PageRank tool didn’t accurately reflect the ability of a site to rank well.

Majestic’s Topical Trust Flow scores are useful because they communicate the kinds of links flowing to a website and gives an idea of what the backlinks say about a site.

But other than that, a third party “authority” metric is not anything I have ever used and will never use. Many SEOs with longtime experience don’t use those metrics.

Read the Reddit discussion:

Can anyone help me on how to remove spammy backlinks?

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Google Had Discussed Allowing Noindex In Robots.txt via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s John Mueller responded to a question on LinkedIn to discuss the use of an unsupported noindex directive on the robots.txt of his own personal website. He explained the pros and cons of search engine support for the directive and offered insights into Google’s internal discussions about supporting it.

John Mueller’s Robots.txt

Mueller’s robots.txt has been a topic of conversation for the past week because of the general weirdness of the odd and non-standard directives he used within it.

It was almost inevitable that Mueller’s robots.txt was scrutinized and went viral in the search marketing community.

Noindex Directive

Everything that’s in a robots.txt is called a directive. A directive is a request to a web crawler that it is obligated to obey (if it obeys robots.txt directives).

There are standards for how to write a robots.txt directive and anything that doesn’t conform to those those standards is likely to be ignored. A non-standard directive in Mueller’s robots.txt caught the eye of someone who decided to post a question about it to John Mueller via LinkedIn, to know if Google supported the non-standard directive.

It’s a good question because it’s easy to assume that if a Googler is using it then maybe Google supports it.

The non-standard directive was noindex. Noindex is a part of the meta robots standard but not the robots.txt standard. Mueller had not just one instance of the noindex directive, he had 5,506 noindex directives.

The SEO specialist who asked the question, Mahek Giri, wrote:

“In John Mueller’s robots.txt file,

there’s an unusual command:

“noindex:”

This command isn’t part of the standard robots.txt format,

So do you think it will have any impact on how search engine indexes his pages?

John Mueller curious to know about noindex: in robots.txt”

Why Noindex Directive In Robots.txt Is Unsupported By Google

Google’s John Mueller answered that it was unsupported.

Mueller answered:

“This is an unsupported directive, it doesn’t do anything.”

Mueller then went on to explain that Google had at one time considered supporting the noindex directive from within the robots.txt because it would provide a way for publishers to block Google from both crawling and indexing content at the same time.

Right now it’s possible to block crawling in robots.txt or to block indexing with the meta robots noindex directive. But you can’t block indexing with the meta robots directive and block crawling in the robots.txt at the same time because a block on the crawl will prevent the crawler from “seeing” the meta robots directive.

Mueller explained why Google decided to not move ahead with the idea of honoring the noindex directive within the robots.txt.

He wrote:

“There were many discussions about whether it should be supported as part of the robots.txt standard. The thought behind it was that it would be nice to block both crawling and indexing at the same time. With robots.txt, you can block crawling, or you can block indexing (with a robots meta tag, if you allow crawling). The idea was that you could have a “noindex” in robots.txt too, and block both.

Unfortunately, because many people copy & paste robots.txt files without looking at them in detail (few people look as far as you did!), it would be very, very easy for someone to remove critical parts of a website accidentally. And so, it was decided that this should not be a supported director, or a part of the robots.txt standard… probably over 10 years ago at this point.”

Why Was That Noindex In Mueller’s Robots.txt

Mueller made clear that it’s unlikely that Google would support that tag and that this was confirmed about ten years ago. The revelation about those internal discussions is interesting but it’s also deepens the sense of weirdness about Mueller’s robots.txt.

See also: 8 Common Robots.txt Issues And How To Fix Them

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Kues

Why Prediction Of 25% Search Volume Drop Due to Chatbots Fails Scrutiny via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Gartner’s predictions that AI Chatbots are the future and will account for a 25% drop in search market share got a lot of attention. What didn’t get attention is the fact that the claim fails to account for seven facts that call into question the accuracy of the prediction and demonstrates that it simply does not hold up to scrutiny.

1. AI Search Engines Don’t Actually Exist

The problem with AI technology is that it’s currently impossible to use AI infrastructure to create a constantly updated search index of web content in addition to billions of pages of news and social media that is constantly generated in real-time. Attempts to create a real-time AI search index fail because the nature of the technology requires retraining the entire language model to update it with new information. That’s why language models like GPT-4 don’t have access to current information.

Current so-called AI search engines are not actually AI search engines. The way they work is that when a user asks a question, a traditional search engine finds the answers and the AI chatbot chooses the questions and summarizes them. AI search engines aren’t really AI search engines. They are traditional search engines with a chatbot interface. When you use a so-called AI search engine what’s really happening is that you’re asking a chatbot to Google this for me.

2. Generative AI Is Not Ready For Widescale Use

The recent fiasco with Gemini’s image search underscores the fact that generative AI as a technology is still in its infancy. Microsoft Copilot completely went off the rails in March 2024 by assuming a godlike persona, calling itself “SupremacyAGI,” and demanding to be worshipped under the threat of imprisoning users of the service.

This is the technology that Gartner predicts will take away 25% of market share? Really?

Generative AI is unsafe and despite attempts to add guardrails the technology still manages to jump off the cliffs with harmful responses. The technology is literally in its infancy. To assert that it will be ready for widescale use in two years is excessively optimistic about the progress of the technology

3. True AI Search Engines Are Economically Unviable

AI Search Engines are exponentially more expensive than traditional search engines. It currently costs $20/month to subscribe to a Generative AI chatbot and that comes with limits of 40 queries every 3 hours and the reason for that is because generating AI answers is vastly more expensive than generating traditional search engine responses.

The economic feasibility of AI search engines rules out the use of AI as a replacement for traditional search engines.

4. Gartner’s Prediction Of 25% Decrease Assumes Search Engines Will Remain Unchanged

Gartner predicts a 25% decrease in traditional search query volume by 2026 but that prediction assumes that traditional search engines will remain the same. The Gartner analysis fails to account for the fact that search engines evolve not just on a yearly basis but on a month to month basis.

Search engines currently integrate AI technologies that increase search relevance in ways that innovate the entire search engine paradigm with applications such as making images tappable in as a way to launch an image-based search for text answers about the subject within an image.

That’s called multi-modal search, a way to search using sound and vision in addition to traditional text-based searching.  There is absolutely no mention of multimodality in traditional search, a technology that shows how traditional search engines evolve to meet user’s needs.

So-called AI chatbot search engines are in their infancy and offer zero multimodality. How can a technology so comparatively primitive even be considered competitive to traditional search?

5. Why Claim That AI Chatbots Will Steal Market Share Is Unrealistic

The Gartner report assumes that AI chatbots and virtual agents will become more popular but that fails to consider that Gartner’s own research from June 2023 shows that users distrust AI Chatbots.

Gartner’s own report states:

“Only 8% of customers used a chatbot during their most recent customer service experience, according to a survey by Gartner, Inc. Of those, just 25% said they would use that chatbot again in the future.”

Customer’s lack of trust is especially noticeable in Your Money Or Your Life (YMYL) tasks that involve money.

Gartner reported:

“Just 17% of billing disputes are resolved by customers who used a chatbot at some stage in their journey…”

Gartner’s enthusiastic assumption that users will trust AI chatbots may be unfounded because it may not have considered that users do not trust chatbots for important YMYL search queries, according to Gartner’s own research data.

are expected to become more popular, this does not necessarily mean they will diminish the value of search marketing. Search engines may incorporate AI technologies to enhance user experiences, keeping them as a central part of digital marketing strategies.

6. Gartner Advice Is To Rethink What?

Gartner’s advice to search marketers is to incorporate more experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness in their content, which betrays a misunderstanding what EEAT actually is. For example, trustworthiness is not something that is added to content like a feature, trustworthiness is the sum of the experience, expertise and authoritativeness that the author of the content brings to an article.

Secondly, EEAT is a concept of what Google aspires to rank in search engines but they’re not actual ranking factors, they’re just concepts.

Third, marketers are already furiously incorporating the concept of EEAT into their search marketing strategy. So the advice to incorporate EEAT as part of the future marketing strategy is itself too late and a bit bereft of unique insight.

The advice also fails to acknowledge that user interactions and user engagement not only a role in search engine success in the present but that they will likely increase in importance as search engines incorporate AI to improve their relevance and meaningfulness to users.

That means traditional that search marketing will remain effective and in demand for creating awareness and demand.

7. Why Watermarking May Not Have An Impact

Gartner suggests that watermarking and authentication will increasingly become common due to government regulation. But that prediction fails to understand the supporting role that AI can play in content creation.

For example, there are workflows where a human reviews a product, scores it, provides a sentiment score and insights about which users may enjoy the product and then submits the review data to an AI to write the article based on the human insights. Should that be watermarked?

Another way that content creators use AI is to dictate their thoughts into a recording then hand it over to the AI with the instruction to polish it up and turn into to a professional article. Should that be watermarked as AI generated?

The ability of AI to analyze vast amounts of data complements the content production workflow and can pick out key qualities of the data such key concepts and conclusions, which in turn can be used by humans to create a document that is filled with their insights, bringing to bear their human expertise on interpreting the data. Now, what if that human then uses an AI to polish up the document and make it professional. Should that be watermarked?

The Gartner’s predictions about watermarking AI content fails to take into account how AI is actually used by many publishers to create well written content with human-first insights, which absolutely complicate the use of watermarking and calls into question the adoption of it in the long term, not to mention the adoption of it by 2026.

Gartner Predictions Don’t Hold Up To Scrutiny

The Gartner predictions cite actual facts from the real-world. But it fails to consider real-world factors that make AI technology as an impotent threat to traditional search engines. For example, there is no consideration of the inability to of AI to create a fresh search index or that AI Chatbot search engines aren’t even actual AI search engines.

It is incredible that the analysis failed to cite the fact that Bing Chat experienced no significant increase in users and has failed to peel way search volume from Google. These failures cast serious doubt on the accuracy of the predictions that search volume will decrease by 25%.

Read Gartner’s press release here:

Gartner Predicts Search Engine Volume Will Drop 25% by 2026, Due to AI Chatbots and Other Virtual Agents

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Renovacio

Google Confirms: High-Quality Content Is Crawled More Often via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

SEO professionals have long discussed the concept of a “crawl budget,” which refers to the limited number of pages search engines can crawl daily.

The assumption is that sites must stay within this allotted budget to get pages indexed. In a recent podcast, Google search engineers debunked some misconceptions about crawl budget and shed light on how Google prioritizes crawling.

How Googlebot Prioritizes Crawling

“I think there’s a lot of myths out there about crawling, about what it is and what it isn’t. And things like crawl budgets and phrases you hear thrown around that may be quite confusing to people,” said Dave Smart, an SEO consultant and Google Product Expert, during the podcast.

So, how does Google decide what to crawl?

“You need to do it by looking at what’s known, finding somewhere to start, a starting point. And from that, you get the links and stuff, and then you would try and determine what’s important to go and fetch now, and maybe what can wait until later and maybe what’s not important at all,” explained Smart.

Gary Illyes from Google’s search relations team agreed with this framework.

“If search demand goes down, that also correlates to the crawl limit going down. So if you want to increase how much we crawl, you somehow have to convince search that your stuff is worth fetching,” he said.

The key, then, is to produce content that Google recognizes as valuable based on user interaction.

Focus On Quality & User Experience

“Scheduling is very dynamic. As soon as we get the signals back from search indexing that the quality of the content has increased across this many URLs, we would just start turning up demand,” said Illyes.

This means there is no fixed “budget” that sites must adhere to. Improving page quality and proving usefulness to searchers can overcome any assumed limitations.

No One-Size-Fits-All Approach

“We don’t have an answer for every site,” Illyes admitted regarding crawl prioritization. “If you improved that section, then probably it’s going to help a lot.”

According to Google, the bottom line is to Focus on producing high-quality content rather than trying to reverse engineer a non-existent crawl quota. Earning links naturally and better serving users will take care of the rest.

Hear the full discussion in the podcast episode linked below:

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