Melissa Rice (00:00:00):
Welcome, everyone-
Casey Markee (00:00:00):
There you go.
Melissa Rice (00:00:02):
… to the final episode of SEO for Bloggers for 2024. We’re thrilled to have you with us as we close out the year on a high note and gear up for the successful 2025. Today we’re joined by our talented panelists, Casey Markey of Media Wyse, Andrew Wilder of NerdPress, and our very own Arsen Rabinovich of TopHatRank. Me, I’m Melissa Rice, you know this face already. Okay, together we’ll be unpacking the latest Q4 algorithm updates and sharing practical SEO strategies and providing a clear vision of what’s ahead for your blogs in the coming year. There’s been so much, well, there is going to be so much opportunity on the horizon. I know some people have had some pain points this year. But whether you’re recovering from the recent updates or writing the momentum of growth, good for you. We’ll want to equip you with the tools and the confidence you’ll need to thrive in the new year.
(00:00:50):
So, as a friendly reminder, at the end of this episode, we’ll be holding the Q&A. To submit your questions, we just ask that you type the letter Q, followed by your question. That way we can get you queued up and get them answered by the end. Let’s kick this thing off, I guess. All right, Arsen, I’m going to you first. What specific differences are you seeing in this Q4 compared with previous updates? And I’ll follow up after you answered that initial question, because I’ve got a follow-up.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:01:22):
Right, right. So, we are seeing recoveries, not anything super major, but a lot of blogs, and I visited with some actually yesterday, where content that was affected in the March update that hasn’t been touched or improved is seeing recoveries. In some instances we’re seeing improvements to 200, 300 keywords per day. And that’s what we’re seeing improvements, that keywords moving into decent positions. It’s a mixed bag. I’m sure Casey seeing something maybe different or similar, but it’s a mixed bag. We also have our clients who we’ve improved the website, we’ve improved the overall health of the website, we’ve improved page level signals. We’re seeing improvements there too. So, it’s a positive thing. We’re not seeing too many sites being actually affected negatively, but at least for now so far it’s either a plateau or improvements from this.
Melissa Rice (00:02:20):
Okay. Can you let us know how some of these bloggers saw growth during the time? I mean, what did they do to win?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:02:28):
Right. So, like I said, some cases nothing was done at all. And we can attribute that to Google testing different types of results. Google saying that, “We tried these types of posts, we’ve tried roundups instead of articles in one single item articles,” or vice versa. And now in this update we’re making these changes and we’re seeing these improvements. So, it’s hard for us to, at least right now, because we still haven’t had enough time with it, to say, “This specific thing works.” At least for us right now we’re approaching it from a perspective of, “Let’s make the improvements across the board and be very much diligent with making sure that we’re covering everything that needs to be covered, ruling out everything that we can possibly rule out, and then we’re going to see results.” So, I can’t really tell you, “We did this one specific thing and it worked,” because we can’t really at this point.
Melissa Rice (00:03:25):
Sorry guys, I know everybody was curious. Can’t pinpoint it. Casey, second question. What is the best approach to recover content affected by the Google court update?
Casey Markee (00:03:38):
Well, I was going to recommend annual sacrifice, but I’ve decided that we’re going to go another route today. Especially because again, this is a friendly, friendly show here. But I want you to start, I want to start off by pacing over some resources here. Google is really clear that they have had there their information, their recommendations on the core updates have not changed and you can see that it’s all the same old spill, high quality content. Do and understand how to do a self-assessment. I mean, provided both of those links there. Core updates are really all about Google trying to provide the best quality experience it can for users. Now, it’s pretty hilarious, as I know many of you saw the creator summit that they had about a month and a half ago now. And there was a lot of angst, would be the word I would use, that came out of that with Google specifically telling those in attendance creators that, “I don’t understand it. We looked at your sites, we don’t understand what happened, we can’t figure it out.”
(00:04:36):
It’s pretty hilarious, because again, as Arsen said, there have been some recoveries where nothing has been done to the site, it has just been bounced back. And when you continue to add all of this machine learning into the algorithm, you are not going to be able to control all the inputs, as well as being able to understand and vary and query the output. So, that’s kind of what Google is doing. They’re continuing to refine the inputs so that we can find out why we’re having all these false positives. If you’ve got 50 bloggers that were invited and they’re considered noticeable and very visible false positives, you can extrapolate that out and understand that there’s probably 50,000 to 100,000 other sites out there that are in that same bubble.
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So, in many cases, even though Google is saying, “Hey, we want you to do this and we understand and we know what high-quality content looks like,” here they are publicly saying, “We’re getting it wrong and we’re still continuing to refine that so we can return the best possible results we can for our users.” But as always, we want to go directly to the documentation that Google provides. The two resources I’ve pasted over shows what Google expects to see in a highest meets need site, and it also provides a list of assessment questions that all bloggers should be using to review.
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And there are questions that Arsen and I use when we do our own audits. We know those questions by heart. When I have an audit with someone and I’m grading a live recipe on their page, I’m using a lot of information, including those assessment questions, to provide you unvarnished feedback on what you did and did not do correctly on that recipe. And then we have to extrapolate that and take all those giveaways, all that feedback back and apply it on a site-wide level. So, my advice is, definitely start with the two resources and go from there.
Melissa Rice (00:06:16):
Okay. Then Casey, what changes do you see coming for Google in 2025 and how should anybody prepare?
Casey Markee (00:06:25):
Well, that’s a good one here. I’m going to go ahead and share another article from Google’s CEO. How do you pronounce his last name? Is that Pichai, Pichai? I always pronounce it Pichai. Sounds good.
Melissa Rice (00:06:35):
Yeah.
Casey Markee (00:06:36):
We’ll just go ahead and do that and I’ll paste it over here. We’ll just call him Sundar. That’s always a nice, Sundar, the Barbarian, one of my favorite shows. This is a great resource here and it exactly answers the question. What or we to expect from Google in 2025? And you’re going to find that, Sundar does a good job leading into what he expects Google to do. And he says, “Buckle up, because if you loved AI before, you’re going to love the 10 times more AI stuff that we’re going to push it out in 2025. It’s going to be AI overuse for everything and you’re going to love it.” So, if you’re on the call, hey everyone, just take a drink. Did you a drink for that? Didn’t do that. If you’re on the call and-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:07:19):
On a call.
Casey Markee (00:07:19):
… you’re looking at what we’re doing in 2025, you should just be leaning into, you’d be steering heavily into AI overviews. So, that’s what we’re going to see. We’re going to see a lot more of an increase in passage indexing. We’re going to see a lot more of an emphasis on Google and returning information on conversational search. You’re going to see the expansion of AI overviews. You’re going to see that carousels are going to shrink. We’re going to showing less of those recipe carousels above the fold. You’ll probably, my prediction is that Web Stories, kaput. I suspect that you’re not going to see Web Stories much at all, period, probably about the second quarter of 2025. Google just didn’t mention Web Stories one time, even only they even lowered their mentions of discover by 50% in the most recent Q3 call to investors. So that says something, maybe that’s just not a concern for them.
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They’re more interested in pushing resources to Google Lens, which is fascinating and fantastic for food bloggers specifically who are visual. Google Lens is certainly something you want to read up on and we’ll have more information on that probably in the future, good times. But I would definitely look at that. I would buckle up. I would go ahead and lean into that. And when we’re trying to think about how we want to hit these users, what you need to think clearly about is how users search on their phones with ChatGPT and Gemini. Because we need to think more about FAQs. We need to answer the question more succinctly. And we need to only go into more detail when it makes sense. We just do not need to be writing these incredibly long recipe posts because your ad company told you that longer posts are better because we can stuff more ads into it. I can’t tell you how many audits I have every week where we’re still getting that as an actual recommendation from the ad companies. Please do not fall for that.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:09:08):
Sorry, I’m going to quickly, quickly cut in. We’ve been seeing this. If you look at the search results right now, if you go and you search for even a braised chicken recipe, you’re going to see that the top ranking posts are all much, much shorter. You’re not seeing ingredients and instructions as content on the page anymore. It’s all in a recipe card.
Casey Markee (00:09:28):
Longer is not necessarily better. So you have to look at it that way. Now, you also have to understand that there also is a cognitive bias when we’re looking at the search results. Now more than ever, because we’re seeing all these large brands get returned at the top of the search results. And those large brands don’t have to do the things that we, smaller brands, especially those right here I’m looking at, I’m looking here at the bloggers I recognize, and there’s dozens of dozens of you in that middle tier, between 45 to 200,000 sessions a month. You can’t do what you’re seeing in the search results and be successful. You’ve got to put those ingredient photos. You’ve got to understand that column blocks are useful for step-by-step photos. You’ve got to understand that you have to show your expertise and you have to include those recipe notes and recipe cards.
(00:10:14):
That is the only way you’re going to have any chance of competing with the big sites who can get away with murder, and that’s not you. So, the reason that we continue to do these recommendations, labeled ingredient photos, step-by-step photos, expert tips, FAQ blocks, is because we have the clarity information or we have the heat maps that show that users are stopping and interacting with those elements on the page. And that’s what we want. We want to increase the time on site as much as possible. Because now we know based upon the Google leak, what a surprise. It’s actually a ranking factor. So, we really have to work on making sure that we increase our time on site, that we really work on making sure that we’re asking, that we’re meeting the needs of users and only detailed recipe posts do that. We just don’t need to write a novel to present that information.
Melissa Rice (00:11:03):
Arsen, Kate asked if you could expand on your last comment?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:11:09):
Oh yeah, just look, it’s there. It’s not rocket science. Google some of your most competitive keywords and just take a look what’s living at the top. Casey linked to the guidelines from Google for the self-assessment. There’s so much to be learned from that. There’s so much gold in that. And I recommend everybody reads that. It’s just Google has said … The things that we’re noticing. And again, if you search for something like a braised chicken recipe, you’re going to see that every single result on that page is a little bit different. It’s not the same type of recipe or very similar recipe from 10 different sites. They’re all different. Look at those results, learn from them. Click into the first result, click into the second result. Notice the difference. Notice the difference with who’s ranking at the top versus who’s ranking towards the bottom of the page. And you’re going to start noticing that Google is prioritizing or preferencing. I mean, there’s also the human layer, but preferencing the uniqueness, a unique perspective on the recipe, not the same thing over and over from 10 different sites.
(00:12:23):
The first result is cooking tasty or something like that from Victor, he talks about using proper braising cookware, the first thing that he’s talking about there. He’s providing a unique perspective. Learn from that. Take a look.
Melissa Rice (00:12:39):
Andrew, what’s the best way to figure out if a blogger was impacted by the recent algorithm changes? I mean, considering it overlapped with the Thanksgiving traffic, can you elaborate for us how someone might figure that out?
Andrew Wilder (00:12:53):
Sure. I mean, Thanksgiving traffic generally is like builds, builds, builds, builds, builds. And then the day before Thanksgiving is like bonkers, right? Where everybody’s scrambling to figure out a recipe and then it tapers off starting on Thursday morning. So, you know that pattern’s going to be there. So, if your pattern doesn’t match that, maybe that’s a good sign. But more importantly, it probably makes sense to look at your year-over-year stats and look at how your site performed Thanksgiving time last year and see what the pattern was. And you can probably get a good idea there. And if you do see some anomalies, that’s when you want to start drilling in and looking at individual URLs. Were there any specific posts that were year-end or Thanksgiving related that might not have performed as well? Because as with all of these things, once you look at all the traffic combined, that’s one picture you really have to drill down, especially because for most of you a few posts are driving the majority of your traffic. So, you really want to drill in and look at those posts.
Melissa Rice (00:13:46):
Arsen, how can smaller sites recover from traffic and visibility losses, particularly when competing with these large scale publishers and crazy AI-generated content?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:13:56):
So, Google is getting much better at pulling AI-generated content. I’m seeing that over and over and over again. As far as smaller sites being able to compete, you’re still able to compete, you just have to be much, much better. And again, keep in mind, as the ecosystem, as the search ecosystem changes and more tools are introduced, like AIO, AIO reviews, humans will change the way they interact and the way they engage with the platform. The way we search is going to change over time. We’re going to adjust to it. So, really having a proper content strategy from a perspective of it’s not just word plus recipe like chicken, a braised chicken recipe. You have to provide something unique. You have to provide something that’s going to make you stand out. Some ways for you to establish expertise and show that you own the small domain.
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So, not targeting queries that you can look at the results and it’s like, “I have no chance of being here.” But maybe there’s a variation of this keyword that I can start ranking for. Maybe I can provide a unique version of this braise. Maybe I can make it dairy free, maybe I can make it gluten-free, whichever way, and start building that authority and that trust around that topic. And the more of that you do, the more Google will see, “Oh, this blog does have a lot of braising recipes and there is some authority around this topic,” and you’ll slowly be able to … So, you don’t have to be a giant, giant site, you just need to show authority.
(00:15:33):
And again, you can see this in search results. Google is not only throwing in really big publications, Google will also throw in, we saw for I think Venezuelan arepas recipe, we saw Latin American internship program website ranking on page one. It’s just like not even a recipe card on the page. So, there is opportunities. You just have to be much smarter and we’re going to talk about long-tail keywords a little later, but you have to be much smarter at selecting your topics.
Melissa Rice (00:16:01):
Awesome. Casey, too much candy corn, what’s going on over there? We got background noise. Sorry about that guys. But moving on to, Casey, the next question is for you, what are the first findings from the November update, and are there any new best practices to consider?
Casey Markee (00:16:22):
Well, the most recent update on November 11th and completed about 24 days later on December the fifth, so it wasn’t nearly as long as we thought. But per Google, “The update was designed to continue our work to improve the quality of our search results by showing more content that people find generally useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on search.” Good times. Basically the same spill that they’ve been saying for quite a while. I’m going to pace that over for you guys so you can print that out and start throwing darts at it over the Christmas holiday. But basically the main findings have been, it was pretty muted. Overall, most of my colleagues thought it was very minor in comparison to past updates. That being said, the food and drink niche, this update was twice as volatile when compared to the August update data that we can see.
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And you can actually see this if you take a look at this graphic put together from Semrush sensor volatility data. And I’m going to go ahead and pace that over, and that’s a good way for you to get an idea of how the niches individually shake out. And you can see what the volatility was for food and drink. Now, with these updates, what we’re always seeing is that we have a lot of the clients who seem to be confused about whether they were hit by the update or whether they were benefited from the update. And the reason that is, is because of where Thanksgiving fell on the calendar this year. We had a lot of bloggers contact me saying, “Oh my gosh, I think I got some recovery.” And we found out that it wasn’t, it was just a seasonal increase. It was not a core update increase. And that’s very easy to confuse.
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So, I would just remind all of you attending today, go in and do a simple year-over-year review of your Google Search Console. You’ll know very clearly where the seasonal drops and where the seasonal flows are so that you can make sure that, “Hey, no, unfortunately this is just a regular seasonal uptick. This isn’t necessarily anything because of the core update.” Most bloggers who’ve been affected by the core update will tend to see those increases quickly. Very seldom do we see, okay, here’s the last four days of the update and all of a sudden you get an update there, you get an increase. Very seldom do we see that. So go in, I think Melissa could probably find and paste it over, you have the ability to do a traffic drop audit? We cover that in detail. Please do that every time.
(00:18:49):
The dates of these updates, we know again that this update started on November 11th and we know again that it ended again on December the fifth. So, use that information specifically to see if you see any noticeable ebbs and flows. And then of course, take how late Thanksgiving was this year out of the equation and see what you see.
Melissa Rice (00:19:09):
Right. Andrew, should the focus be on producing new content at this point or updating [inaudible 00:19:17] winners in Q4 and can you elaborate on why?
Andrew Wilder (00:19:20):
You sound so excited as you asked that question.
Melissa Rice (00:19:30):
Well, then let’s, you know. We’ll go back and forth on this option.
Andrew Wilder (00:19:31):
I think, can you all say it with me? It depends. What? If you’ve got hundreds of posts and many of them aren’t ranking or ranking well, you’re probably going to get better ROI on your time and effort by working on improving those posts than by creating lots of new content. I feel like we’ve reached peak food content on the internet. So, by creating more, all you’re doing is diluting things more. That’s my personal opinion. Most sites have probably 80% of their traffic from 20% of their posts. So, look at those other 80% and say, “Hey, can I do something with those to improve them?” And in terms of the question that said, proven winners, we always say, if it’s a unicorn, if it’s in the top three, don’t touch it. But if you can find those posts that are on page two, ranking 10 to 20, those are the ones you can really get a bigger lift on. But if you’re still starting out, you’ve only got 40 or 50 posts, maybe you might want to be adding more content, so there it depends.
Melissa Rice (00:20:32):
I just want to set a reminder, you guys, if you want to add a question that we can answer later, please put the letter Q ahead of it so I can star that. And then of course, everybody, thumbs up the questions you’d really like to see answered so we can answer them in order of demand. Andrew, a follow-up question for you. Are long-tail keywords still effective or are there better strategies to focus on for driving search engine traffic?
Andrew Wilder (00:20:57):
I’m glad you asked. I think long-tail keywords are probably more important than ever actually. How many of us are going to rank for barbecue ribs? Not very many. As we get more specific, as users are more sophisticated, as AI is helping drill down onto more search results that are more specific, I think those long-tail very specific posts that have specific ingredients, specific dietary needs or whatever it is. As you’re more specific, you’re going to help the search engine connect the people to what they’re really looking for. So, I think the trend is going to be more personalization in search in general. AI makes that a lot easier for Google and others. So, to me that screams long-tail, and it really becomes about your niche and being more specific to your users or for your users.
Casey Markee (00:21:49):
I would just add very quickly onto that, the whole purpose, long-tail might as well be colloquial for conversational. And that is where search is going and search has been going for the last decade, conversational search. You’re pulling out your phones, you’re asking them directions somewhere. You’re asking them for a takeout recommendation. You’re asking them, “Hey Google, could you tell me the reviews on this horse bridle from a smart final or whatever it is, smart circle.” That’s where we’re going, and those are the kind of queries conversationally that we have to optimize for. And so when we write a complete post, we want to write it in a colloquial very conversational way so that it’s easier for Google to pull that information out, which is literally how the AI overviews are being generated. That’s the definition of passage indexing. So yes, long-tail exists, but it’s not really long-tail, it’s more conversational search these days.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:22:44):
Right.
Andrew Wilder (00:22:45):
Well, yeah, I’ve been finding … I mean, one of the challenges Google has always had is people put in very few words, so it’s trying to figure out what their query intent is. So, when somebody searches foaming hand soap, they don’t know if you’re trying to buy it or make it, or you have-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:23:00):
Learn about it.
Andrew Wilder (00:23:02):
And I’ve found, actually in my own usage, I’m using ChatGPT for search now that it can browse the web a lot more. Because I have generally tricky problems I’m trying to get solved that there isn’t necessarily one article for, so I’m having it to analysis. And what I’ve noticed in my own usage is, when I go back to the search engine, I will say, DuckDuckGo is my default instead of Google. But when I go back to the search engine, I’m finding I’m actually writing a full question now, instead of just putting in a couple of keywords.
(00:23:28):
And I didn’t deliberately tried to change how I search. I just finding it’s becoming more conversational, and I think more and more people are likely to start doing that. There’s probably going to be more voice search. I just talked to somebody who has a conversation with ChatGPT every day on her commute. So, the voice stuff is going to be happening much more as it becomes more conversational. So, I think that all speaks to how it’s just going to be a broader scope of searching now.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:24:00):
And it’s, again, it people adjusting to the platform, it’s people adjusting how they retrieve information. And that discovery journey is not going to be shortened, where you don’t have to go query by query by query, and I talk about this when I say I’m trying to find a bike for my kid. Usually that would be multiple queries. What’s the best bike for my kid based on his parameters? Where can I find this bike? Reading reviews, finding deals we can set. Now you can load that entire process into ChatGPT or an answer engine and say, “I’m looking for a bike for my kid. He’s this tall, he has this kind of instinct. He’s an aggressive rider, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Give me the results where I can buy them based on reviews and best deals.” And now you have all of this just provided to you. You don’t have to spend 40 minutes to an hour.
Melissa Rice (00:24:53):
And what are we going to do with all that extra time?
Andrew Wilder (00:24:59):
We’re [inaudible 00:24:59]. We’re going to use the time to go back and edit our old posts, of course.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:25:03):
Right, right, right.
Melissa Rice (00:25:04):
Of course. Good one. Good one, Andrew. Casey, do you have any insight on how to remove a site-wide classifier? Are there specific steps or guidance you could share with us?
Casey Markee (00:25:18):
Well, I just pasted it in basically what Google specifically says. Which is of course the long useless information that they always provide, which is, make sure that you’re focusing on high quality, diverse content, blah, blah, blah, that reflects the full range of topics, blah, blah, blah. Honestly, respectfully, the only way that you could get a site-wide classifier removed these days specifically is to make sure that your site is so embarrassingly awesome that Google’s embarrassed not to rank it. To do that, that means you have to really go in and look at the content, look at the user experience, look and fix all technical issues. Make sure that you have something that Google views is worthy of indexing. I cannot tell you how many sites have come to us in the last six months. We’ve seen these site-wide suppressions going on, and they’ve just taken bad advice or they have ads every two paragraphs, or they’re running intrusive interstitialis which pop up on the first click from Google and cover the entire screen.
(00:26:11):
Or they have allowed Mediavine to take over their jump buttons and jump everyone to another link that they have to click to continue to get to the recipe card. Or they are writing a post that has every iteration possible for lamb mutton when that is not necessarily what the user’s looking for. You have to understand that there is … It is never been harder to be a food and lifestyle creator than it’s now. We do not need another sugar cookie recipe. We do not need another lamb shanks recipe, so unless your recipe is so ridiculously awesome that it has a unique twist, it’s going to be very hard for especially newer content like that to get through the noise and rank. And we’ve already covered how important conversational search is. If you haven’t gone in and had a blog survey of your users to find out actually what they want, I can’t … That’s something that we recommend twice a year. But to get a site-wide classifier off, when it is done, and by the way it’s incredibly hard, is you have to literally change everything you’re doing.
(00:27:11):
When bloggers come to me and they’re like, “Man, Casey, I got hit by the helpful content update and then I got hit again in March and my goodness, here it is August and now the November update is completed. I still haven’t recovered.” Well, most likely it’s not a mistake. When we look and we do the site, we see that they’ve got 1,100 posts and only 150 of those posts are actually generating traffic. Or we’ve got five fruit salads when Google’s never going to rank more than two if that. And you’ve linked by easy fruit salad for every one of those five, therefore destroying your internal linking and cannibalizing your reach. There are just many, many examples of that over thousands and thousands of queries where what you know just is not what you need to know to get your site moving. So please, we try to give you as much free information as we can, but really that’s the difference between treating your blog as a business and treating your blog as a hobby.
(00:28:06):
Those that treat their blog as a business, they literally farm out everything. They’re having Andrew do their technical support. They’re working with Ashley and doing content briefs and optimization. Maybe they’re going and working with Arsen or myself and having a full technical and a content audit. I believe that we absolutely have to do those things. There was this talk recently about how SEO audits are useless, and I just had to laugh my arse off about that. Because I have a whole list of these incredible table filled with free gifts I get everywhere from bloggers who bought second homes or put their children through college or done other things that have changed their bottom line stack in life. And that’s our goal here. We don’t do it because we really want to see ourselves in likes. We do it because we are trying to change the lives and the trajectories of the bloggers, especially everyone who’s visited and invested their time today. We’re giving you our best a guess, and that’s our goal.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:29:04):
I do it for Andrew’s cool hat. That’s what I do it for.
Casey Markee (00:29:07):
And we do it for Andrew’s hat too.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:29:10):
I want to add to that, so there’s certain old-school SEO pride. I’m still seeing over optimization, and we’ve been, I think our first episode in 2019, and this was after the November 2019 update where a lot of bloggers were affected, if you’ve been around this long enough to remember. We’ve been talking about overall, we’ve been saying, “Don’t stuff your headings.” We’ve been saying this. Casey and I and Andrew have repeated this over and over and over again. And I still see it. Arsen, I was affected in March. I look at the post and just like simple assessment and, “Oh, my God, why are you doing this? We’ve told you not to chase that green light in Yoast.” Linking out willy-nilly, just because you have a post that’s performing very well, you don’t need to link that post to every other post on your website. You’re creating confusing contextual signals.
(00:30:02):
All of these things are bad. Stop doing them, and little by little you’re going to notice that there’s improvements. Because the way the helpful content system works is it tries to understand manipulative SEO practices. And as soon as it understands it, it uses AI to learn that and then it feeds the machine learning process, which then teaches the classifiers that, “Hey, everyone who’s doing this, we need to classify them.” You have to start, and I put this in the comments. We have to optimize for the user. We have to have to become an answer engine. We have to provide uniqueness. We have to stop following a specific formula that everybody else is following, because that’s a footprint and that machine learning process is going to learn from it. Also, Casey, Casey’s been saying this over and over, the user testing that really understanding how to keep a user on your site. We haven’t talked about this, Casey, we haven’t talked about the human layer, right? How Google learns from engagement with the search results. How when people click on the first result and then bounce back and then Google learns and moves things around.
(00:31:04):
You want to keep the user on your site. You want to sell your post right away. Casey says this all the time, “Sell it on the reason why they should be here.” Take me jump to recipe button. That should be prominent. It shouldn’t be buried. You want that engagement on your page. Google sees when somebody clicks on your site and then clicks back, and over time you’re going to start noticing that those signals, your posts are going to start slowly aging out of those positions. Go ahead, Casey.
Casey Markee (00:31:27):
Yeah, and that concept that Arsen is talking about, it’s called pogo sticking, and pogo sticking is a known behavior that Google tracks, that they track at scale. If I’ve got a site and I’m looking for holiday fruitcake, homemade fruitcake, and I go through three recipes and I don’t find what I want on the first two, guess what? And I clicked on the carousel, you’re going to be dropped to the second or third level to the carousel very quickly.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:31:53):
And Google notice how you refine your query. Also, you didn’t see anything and that’s why one of the main reasons we’re seeing Reddit come up closer at the top of the results, right? Because people searched for potato soup recipes, saw that all 10 are creamy potato soups. That’s not what I’m looking for, so I’m going to either refine my search, by the way, little secret sauce, look at the bottom of that search result page, look at the other queries that Google is populating-
Casey Markee (00:32:16):
The related searches.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:32:17):
Exactly. That’s going to kind of tell you, give you an understanding what people are not finding there. That’s how you become a little bit unique. But keeping in mind that even the pre-click data, you’re ranking, you’re in the top three positions. You’re holding good positions, but your click-through rates are declining. Google will learn from that. You’re not getting clicks, your title, whatever the reason. You have poor risk, poor star ratings, you’re not getting the clicks. You’re going to start seeing that your positions are starting to slide. That human layer is so, so strong.
Casey Markee (00:32:50):
It’s totally okay. Use clarity, use heatmap tools. What’s the one that we used to use? Crazy Egg. Crazy Egg is still a fantastic platform. You can go in and have them … Hotjar. Hotjar is still very popular. You can go in and buy credits on Hotjar and it will literally go in and take 1,000 sessions from your Google Analytics and provide you very quick information. And then it’ll leave AI to pull all the characteristics together. Here’s how many of those people use the jump to recipe button. Here’s how many of those people got jumped down to that arrival unit, good old Mediavine taking over your jump to recipe button, got jumped down to that arrival unit and immediately left the page. There’s a lot of them.
(00:33:33):
Also, there’s things like Print Paths. We love Print Paths actually, but we’re going to … Won’t really get into that today. But we’ll talk a little bit about that. But there’s lots of things that you can do to make your pages more sticky, and that’s our goal. What is it about my recipe that’s better than the millions of others out there? Am I getting people on my page of keeping there because my information is useful, or am I taking the, I’m going to make this page so incredibly long and difficult, I’m going to trap them so maybe that way I can skew my RPMs a little bit? And trust me, there’s plenty of bloggers who do that and it’s not successful. And we want to try to push back against that as much as we can.
Andrew Wilder (00:34:06):
I think one of the metrics that would be really good for everybody to be watching in their analytics is session time or bounce rate time, bounce rate. Everybody focuses on page views and sessions, and that’s because ad revenue is focused on that and you’re looking at how many people. But that’s quantity, not quality. And as we go forward, it’s really going to be about quality of the visit. All this stuff with AI is already going to hopefully be pre-screening people, so there’s going to be a lot less of users clicking through, seeing that post isn’t what they want, and bouncing back, all that back and forth for users. That’s what Google wants to get rid of and AI can help that, and then if they get to the right post they’re going to spend time on your post and spend more time. So, just to reiterate everything that Casey and Arsen are saying, I think to me that’s the focus of 2025 is, how can you really provide value for the people who do get to your site and keep them around and get them into your orbit and then have them coming back?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:35:01):
I’m going to add two points to this. The first thing is 100% right. You want to effectively be able to predict why the user is there and what they need to learn and the primary focus of why they’re there, so they’re there for the recipe. You want to give them that. You want to provide a unique perspective, but you also want to think next steps. And just going beyond how to serve, how to store, how to reheat, all that’s the basics that’s related to the topic that they’re there for. And a lot of times I’m seeing this again in search results, it’s a unique recipe like Venezuelan arepas, include a link. Like, “Here’s a brief history where you can learn more about why they’re called this,” and all of that. You don’t have to write that on your site, but you can provide those next steps, those are all positive signals. And I forgot what the second thing I was going to say, but I’ll remember later.
Casey Markee (00:35:45):
And I’ll just add, I know we need to move on here. Again, we’ve got plenty of examples here in the chat and we appreciate you bloggers who’ve gone in and said … Again, there are many of success stories. There’s hundreds of success stories on this call right here in this chat. I always get emails from bloggers who are like, “I’m so thankful for this and I can’t believe my traffic’s up 400% year-over-year, or I’ve now … Because we’re doing so well my husband has quit his job and now he’s helping with my business. That’s our goal for every blogger. I say this and I hope everyone on the call has had an audit can testify to this. I tell them, I want my audit to be the greatest investment you’ve ever made, period. That’s the goal. My goal is for you to put me on your Christmas card list, to send me cookies to say in a year and a half –
Arsen Rabinovich (00:36:30):
[inaudible 00:36:30] candy corn.
Casey Markee (00:36:32):
… to say, “Hey, this is where things change for me.” And we do that. That’s why we do the webinars for free and we do all this stuff is for you to have not only the best information but the correct information. Because you’re just not going to get that everywhere else.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:36:45):
I remembered my second point, sorry. So that user signal, those user, the user behavior, those signals are so important that we are changing our products, because we’re seeing, we can look back at the data and we can see that, hey, these posts were getting really, and even in the Google leaks, Casey, the language was last. It wasn’t clicks, it was last meaningful click in that API leak, the documentation, it was last meaningful click. The click needs to be meaningful. That’s what they’re looking for. It doesn’t matter if there was 10 clicks, 100,000 clicks or one click, as long as they’re meaningful. We’ve changed our audits, we’ve changed the way we monitor content performance to now look at pre-click and post-click data. To look at click-through rates, to look at dwell times, to look at why we’re seeing a decline in click-throughs or clicks, but we’re retaining good positions and good impressions. All of that information is super important for you to understand so you can make adjustments before your posts start to decline.
Melissa Rice (00:37:46):
I’m going to move forward. Arsen, we’ve spoken about users, we’ve spoken about content. What can publishers do? How do you recommend showcasing EEAT on a food blog if bloggers don’t have formal credentials but rely on their years of cooking and recipe testing?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:38:02):
Just that. Absolutely, talk about that, right? But you still want to show that there’s some kind of, if you’ve been doing this for a while, there’s probably some kind of recognition where you were on some podcast, you were on some interview, you’ve contributed content to other publications, you’ve worked with brands, all of those are credentials. Those should be listed on your about page. Just having your sidebar little about photo and the little blurb, that’s not enough. That’s never enough. Your content should have a byline. That byline should link not to your archive where you’re showing all of the posts that you wrote, that should link to your about page. Your about page should have the proper markup on it. Telling Google that, “Hey, this is an about page about this person and all of the places that I’m linking to, where I went to school, where I was interviewed, where I’ve contributed content to.”
(00:38:46):
All of that should be linked out and in the same as you want to connect, this is you’re doing this to connect entities for Google, for Google to understand you are who you are. That’s why you want to link to your socials. And on your social you should have information about you being a food blogger. The more of those connectors you create around the web for yourself, the more you put yourself out there, the easier you’re going to start seeing. You’re going to have this blossoming effect. There’s going to be more trust in your content. Now, at the same time, what we’re noticing and what we’ve seen from Google and what we’ve seen from Google’s, the self-assessment stuff, there’s a lot of emphasis on the quality of the content and the trust in the content.
(00:39:20):
So, if you’re writing about a topic that you haven’t covered before, or it’s a recipe that’s not something that’s like you traditionally write about American food and now you writing about Thai cuisine, you want an opening paragraph explaining why people should trust you. “This is a dish that I’ve made a gazillion times. I grew up with a Thai a roommate,” whatever. Present that in the first paragraph, tell them why they should listen to you about this. A lot of times for travel bloggers we’re seeing, we’re seeing you’re updating your content, you’re changing your about date, create a little blurb, what you’re updating at the top of the post, why this content was updated. We updated this content to adjust, if it’s itinerary for trip to adjust for road closures or there’s a new toll or whatever, give them that. All of that is super, super important to showcase expertise and trust. We want to continue doing that.
Melissa Rice (00:40:06):
Yeah, more information. Okay, Casey, do you know how Google will address the AI-generated content inserts moving forward and what strategies bloggers can use to stay competitive?
Casey Markee (00:40:21):
So, the first thing is to understand Google’s stance on AI, and I’ve pasted over the full guidelines so that anyone who’s interested can read those, and I urge all of you to do just that. Google is not against AI content. Google believes that content should be high quality and highest meets needs, and AI is a great way to do that. You just has to be good. You just can’t use AI content to publish content and expect to be successful. They’re interested in making sure that the content that you publish has value. A lot of people take shortcuts with AI. Or they don’t necessarily set up AI correctly by going into ChatGPT. Now, I’m going to go ahead and paste over some information here, and I think it’s going to be very helpful for you, and if it’s not, then you can lie to me and say it is.
(00:41:06):
But what it is, is the thing about AI specifically is that you can use AI to write your recipes. You can use AI to write detailed guides, treatises, whatever you want to do, but you have to set it up correctly. What I’ve done here is I’ve provided a link to a list of known extremely terrible AI words that are still generated in most responses that you can go ahead and have removed from all of your replies. And this is fascinating. This is a great way for you to immediately 100% improve your outputs on ChatGPT, Gemini, anywhere else, especially ChatGPT. You’re setting up a custom engine like you should be doing. And this will provide you a way, it’ll go a long way in humanizing your content, making sure that the content reads like a real person wrote it. No one says, but therefore, or here to more, or remember to do that, or various words here that you’ll find over and over again.
(00:42:04):
My son Blake is a junior in college right now and he has used ChatGPT to just revolutionize his ability to get through his classes, but he did it after I trained him for a couple of hours on how to set it up correctly. Once he was able to do that, it was like taking the parking rates off. He was able to pull to put in his notes, have full summaries of his lectures. He was actually able to upload custom words. I had him upload his last five or six essays so that ChatGPT could learn what his writing style was and then it spat out all of the answers that he needed in the future like he wrote them. Saves him a ton of time, and that’s what I do. I hardly ever write anything 100% myself. I have a custom ChatGPT that’s set up that I’m continuing to train, so that I can go ahead and have that export out information to save me what is my most valuable resource my time. And I would urge all of you to do the same thing.
(00:43:03):
But yes, ChatGPT is something that you should use. AI is something you’ve got to lean heavily into, and the bloggers who are able to do that effectively are the ones that are going to have the most success in 2025.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:43:14):
Really cool thing to do, especially if you want to check, because Google is against clickbait titles and it’s a part of the classifier, and if you really want to check, ChatGPT does a really good job. You can easily add, ChatGPT can extract all of your page titles, post titles, and you can say, “Hey, are any of these clickbait?” And I’ve tested it, it does a really, really good job. Are any of these clickbait according to Google? Does a really good job at identifying them and telling you why.
Casey Markee (00:43:38):
I was disappointed to see that Moist was on the list though. Terrible.
Andrew Wilder (00:43:42):
I think it’s important to take this list with a grain of salt. I mean, word also is there and wall and unlapped, so.
Melissa Rice (00:43:49):
I use the word therefore, am I?
Andrew Wilder (00:43:51):
A lot of people do that. Are you a robot?
Melissa Rice (00:43:55):
I don’t know, but I second what Casey said. My son is 13 years old and I’ve taught him how to use ChatGPT. And when he really needs some support and really looking into anything, I’m like, “This is how you use it,” and it’s never too early, I feel like.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:44:09):
Oh yeah, there is too early.
Melissa Rice (00:44:15):
He’s monitored on my account, but my point is, I tell him college level thinking, college level-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:44:22):
Right, right, right.
Melissa Rice (00:44:23):
All right, Arsen, this is going to be the last question until we move into our Q&A, but for sightseeing traffic decreases year over year, what’s the number one thing they should focus on in 2025 to bounce back?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:44:36):
Okay, so I’m going to say this. I’m going to say that you should focus on understanding why you’re losing traffic year over year. I think that’s very important, because I’m seeing people make the same mistakes over and over and over again, and you really have to evaluate your content. You have to understand which content is not performing, and why, and it could be not because you’re doing something wrong. It could be just, again, the environment, the ecosystem has changed and Google just does not want this type of content. If you continue to produce that or you continue to rely on what feels good from a content or topic identification perspective and how you’re going to approach writing the content, just blindly working without really understanding what’s happening out there, you’re going to continue seeing these declines.
(00:45:22):
Also, sites with a lot of content or anything that’s a decent amount of content. If you’re not paying attention to your best performers or how the balance of like, “Hey, I have hundreds of posts, how are they doing for me? What’s happening?” I’d rather have, and Casey, correct me if I’m wrong, I’d rather have a smaller website where majority of the content was less pages where majority of the content is doing well and is really active and it’s really concise and I’m really focused around specific topics and they have good structured organization, than the giant 3,000-page website where only maybe 300 of those are doing anything for me.
Casey Markee (00:46:03):
Again, that’s the best, literally that is the best statement that you guys are ever going to have as a takeaway today. That the days of you, your site is not a book where you need to keep adding pages to the book over and over again. That’s going to hurt you. You have to think lean and mean. It’s just like in our content garden example that we’ve used as a metaphor for years. Everything that’s generating traffic, those are your flowers, everything that’s generating no traffic, those are your weeds. Just like in a real garden, if you do not pull those weeds, they will strangle the resources that are allocated for the flowers. So, you’re either going to turn those weeds into flowers or you’re going to start pulling those weeds so that the flowers have plenty of room to grow, and that’s the exact way to approach content auditing.
(00:46:45):
It’s okay, you don’t need all that content. If you’re not sure what to do with it, just know index it, come back to it later. Google is totally 100% fine with that. We know index something, we’ve immediately removed it from algorithmic consideration. We’ve removed it from any sort of a site-wide filter, that is going to provide an ability for Google to understand and find and assess your site based upon the now live content that is a lot easier for it to find and crawl.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:47:09):
And when you know index stuff, you don’t have to worry about updating internal links. Google will still crawl through those pages, it’s just not going to index them. They’re not going to be considered for indexing. So, it is, it is from a tactic perspective very smart to do this. But again, keeping an eye, and it’s not just, again, don’t get focused on the word traffic, it’s meaningful traffic. Because if a post is getting clicks but those clicks are doing nothing, they’re just bouncing back, those are not quality clicks. That post is in trouble.
Melissa Rice (00:47:39):
All right, I really like that garden metaphor, Casey. It’s for a brain like mine I like that. Pull the weeds. You know what I mean?
Casey Markee (00:47:50):
Exactly. Yeah. And again, just kind of adding to what Arsen said, we’re going to keep Melissa on the call as long as possible. AI is not something to be feared, okay? I know a lot of you might be with Raptive. Raptive unfortunately has started a new trend where when they’re onboarding new bloggers they immediately block all the AI bots for you. I’ve had this happen multiple times to bloggers over the last 90 days. They are not communicating, “Hey, by the way, thanks for joining Raptive. We’ve uploaded a robots.txt file for you and we’re blocking all these AI bots.” Absolutely terrible approach. We do not want to do that. We absolutely don’t want to want to block Google-Extended, which is an option in there too. Google-Extended will tank you. That means you absolutely will not qualify for AI overviews or anything else, but if you want to block AI bots, you better have a really good reason, because there are bots out there that are crawling all of your content that is not even on that robots file, that is not remotely going to be reliable for you.
(00:48:51):
So, if you wanted to try to 100% block all the bots, there’s a whole list of about 120 that I’m happy to send you. But again, it would do you no good, because they have that information, and that information is going to help you build more traffic, especially with Google leaning in heavily in 2025 and with now we just had the announcement that there’s an option with Gemini that they can actually go over and pull information from ChatGPT now if you’re not pleased with the response. So, we really want to make sure that we’re not blocking those AI bots. If your goal is to make this a business and not a hobby, I get that a lot of creators feel that they should be remunerated for this. I get it, I agree. Blocking the AI bots is not going to do it, so find another way.
Melissa Rice (00:49:35):
Embrace it. All right, here we go. Are we ready?
Andrew Wilder (00:49:41):
Ooh, that’s fancy.
Melissa Rice (00:49:42):
All right.
Casey Markee (00:49:43):
That is really nice.
Melissa Rice (00:49:48):
I’m going to sift these as the most up liked. Let’s see. Going with making sure I’m getting everybody in here. We’ve got one more to add, starting with Tammy’s question. Tammy, you’re always at the top, I just want to say, you’ve got good questions.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:50:04):
Good questions, Tammy.
Melissa Rice (00:50:07):
Yeah. Tammy asks, “Are you saying that if I want to write my own content rather than using AI I will be at a disadvantage?”
Arsen Rabinovich (00:50:16):
No, that’s not what we’re saying.
Casey Markee (00:50:21):
No, and I replied to that directly into the chat. I’m just saying that you want to have more time with your family, AI is the way to go. You can automate a lot of your chats. You can do a lot of things faster. I’m sure you have a system. Imagine cutting that system in half by automating some of the elements. You could do that. You just have to go and play around with AI a little bit.
Melissa Rice (00:50:39):
All right, very good. Next question from Andrea. She asks, “What do you think of the Mediavine, BigScoots companionship?” Are there any cons, guys? What are we thinking? A lot of people-
Andrew Wilder (00:50:51):
I’m guessing I should take this one, so I don’t know of any cons right now. So far it’s in its infancy and what it really means at the moment is if you sign up for this posting is that you’re going to get BigScoots’ version of Cloudflare Enterprise from them. If you’re with NerdPress, we’re already providing Cloudflare Enterprise, you’re getting the benefits of the added security, the HTML caching, the various performance benefits of Cloudflare Polish. We’ve actually got a couple features that they don’t have, like Argo. Over time however, and I’ve talked with Eric at Mediavine directly about this, their plan is to add more features at the Edge at Cloudflare that do give you some advantages. So, they’re starting with some cookie stuff. I mean, this is all about the third-party cookies going away. So, they’re looking at Cloudflare workers, which is just basically little scripts to be able to set cookies and do some of that with ad.
(00:51:46):
They have a long roadmap apparently. I’m not privy to all of it, but I’ve seen some high-level conversations about it. I think over time they’re looking at doing some cool ad tech stuff, which should be beneficial, and I’m also talking to them about maybe getting that into NerdPress’ Cloudflare Enterprise. So, at the moment I’d see, if you’re with NerdPress, I don’t see any benefit to moving at the moment, and we’re already talking with Jordan and Eric at Mediavine about how we can get those features in as they roll them out. And if at some point we find that it’s more beneficial for you to be on the BigScoots Cloudflare Enterprise for any reason, we’ll be upfront about that. I don’t think there’s an urgency to move. If you don’t have CDN HTML caching or Cloudflare Enterprise of some kind right now, I think it would be a better move, and we’ll see what they’re actually able to roll out in terms of benefit.
(00:52:35):
I’m guessing they’ll be doing some marketing out there to talk about what the benefits are. I have seen also, if you are under 50,000 page views a month, they now have a Journey version of that, which is I think 29.99 a month. If your traffic’s below 50,000 and you’re striving for Journey or just on Journey and not on, you may actually save money by moving to that plan, so that’s something to consider. But in terms of cons, I think the only con would be if you don’t want to be with BigScoots for some reason.
Melissa Rice (00:53:05):
Okay. Garrett asked how to contact Arsen. Garrett, I’m going to drop his email in here just in case anybody wants to reach out for services and consultations. Okay, next question. Let’s see. Dave asks, “Are there resources to learn best practices when using ChatGPT or other AI?” Casey, I’m assuming you might be the person to ask for this.
Casey Markee (00:53:35):
Well, we had a webinar. We do a webinar on AI and ChatGPT, so let’s share that. Let’s share that first, and then, yeah, feel free to, we’ll drop some resources in the recap. Actually, we’ll drop some resources in the recap.
Andrew Wilder (00:53:51):
I dropped a link in the chat already. OpenAI has a really nice article on prompt engineering best practices for ChatGPT, so that’s a really good overview. I think links aren’t working in the chat, but if you just go to help.openai.com and search prompt engineering best practices, that’ll come up.
Melissa Rice (00:54:09):
Okay. Here we go. Gigi asks, “How will I know if my site is locking AI bots?”
Casey Markee (00:54:16):
You would go to /robots.txt, /robots.txt. That would be in your robots file. That’s good first place to look.
Melissa Rice (00:54:27):
Awesome, thank you. Let’s go back up to a couple questions that we got at the beginning. Jennifer asks, “So, should the smaller bloggers keep the ingredients and steps in their post?” I think we covered a little bit of that.
Casey Markee (00:54:42):
Absolutely. Yes, you want to write, put forth the best recipe you can. The good recipes, the best recipes are the ones that are complete. You don’t want to have, again, we just don’t want to write a novel. We don’t need to write a full treatise on the histories of pudding from the French Napoleonic era. We just need to get into the pudding recipe and the tips to make it best from start to finish.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:55:07):
I have a little bit of a different viewpoint on this and just-
Casey Markee (00:55:10):
He does, he does. I don’t agree with it.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:55:15):
And I’m looking at what’s surfacing. And again, this is not something that we’re recommending, this is just something that I’m seeing. There’s not enough data for us to recommend this right now, but if we look at things and we look at things from just the bird’s eye view, and we’re looking at it from a perspective of you’re, unless there’s a significant difference in what you’re providing from a context and content perspective in your list of ingredients from what you’ve listed inside of your recipe card, there’s really no need to double up on that content on the page.
Casey Markee (00:55:47):
Well, first of all, if you’re doing that, you’re doing it wrong-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:55:50):
Right, right, but that’s-
Casey Markee (00:55:51):
We don’t list ingredients in a recipe post. We explain specific ingredients, and that’s what I want people to understand. If all you’re doing is pasting your ingredients from a recipe card to your post, you’re doing it absolutely 100% incorrectly. We want to show our expertise and we show our expertise by providing important information on specific, not all ingredients. So, if you would like to see, I’m happy to include an example of a high-quality post that does that, but I mean, there are plenty of people in this chat who are doing exactly that, and correctly, and they can share those examples, but we do not provide a whole list of ingredients in a post ever. No one needs to know that you have sugar and vanilla, unless you’re using some strange or weird variant for sugar and vanilla.
(00:56:34):
Your goal on the ingredients is to show expertise, and we do that by having a nice labeled photos so that people can casually go through and pull out the ingredients, but then you use the ingredients section in the post to show your expertise. “Here is,” for example, “this is the cut of meat I’m using and I recommend this, this, and this specifically when I’m looking for this cut of meat. Or by the way, here is a specific brand of sugar I recommend because I find that it works best because of this inflection point.” That’s how we use ingredient information in a recipe post. We do not use them as a way for us to just paste verbatim the ingredients and quantities from recipe card to the post.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:57:11):
Google continuously says this, if you read the documentation, the case you linked to earlier, Google talks about providing a unique perspective around the topic from an expert view. So, the same goes for instructions, step-by-step instructions. You are already providing those inside your recipe card, unless there’s something unique and a unique perspective or something that you want to showcase or suggest or for them to do that’s not listed in the step-by-step instructions. There’s really, and again, I’m saying this based on observations, there’s really no need to double up on that content, right? Now, you can have those headings and those sections within the post, absolutely. But if it’s very similar, I’m not talking about copy, paste. If it’s just very, very similar, it doesn’t make sense. You’re telling the user to go down to the recipe card anyways.
Melissa Rice (00:58:03):
Okay, we’ve got one long question and then I think you’ve got to wrap up, but I’m going to let you guys go for this one. Mary Ann, “I’m seeing queries for extremely high volume, general recipe queries in GSC that show lots of impressions and clicks, but I never see my links and results when I Google those queries. Is this an indication of Google using personalization for huge volume keywords like that? Ahrefs also never shows my site for those queries, but the traffic is there.”
Casey Markee (00:58:31):
It could be a combination of things. It could be the fact that these are in search features that you just don’t see because you’re not triggering them, depending upon if you’re on desktop or mobile. These could also be LLM queries. This could literally be AI overviews that you’re now starting to see with regards to the long-tail keywords. We are seeing more AI overview information in Google Search Console every day, and it will be double, if not triple, what it is now, probably by the middle of the first quarter of 2025. So, it is probably there and you’re probably just not seeing it. And yes, everything is 100% personalized these days, so it would be very hard for you to replicate those searches at your end without-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:59:15):
unless you go in [inaudible], right? It could be, Casey, it could be Google testing different pages on the website. It could be for a very popular query. It could be enough … Ranking in the top three spots for a high-volume query even for one day for a site that doesn’t usually get a lot of traffic will create that spike, absolutely. And Google will test, and we see this all the time. Google will test different pages for maybe a day or two on the search result, and you’ll see the spike. It could be a lot of stuff. It could be Google just being weird also.
Casey Markee (00:59:47):
Could also be Discover.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:59:48):
Discover, well, Discover would show in Discover traffic.
Casey Markee (00:59:51):
Well, not anymore. Discover is now literally showing more and more in the regular organic. That’s why you never see any web stories in Discover they’re all in the regular organic. [inaudible 01:00:01] more. Web stories are just not reported, they’re discover at all anymore in the tab. Discover literally now it’s almost 99% of just regular article pages, so good times.
Melissa Rice (01:00:13):
All right, ending notes. Here we are. We’ve come to the very end. Casey will be hosting.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:00:21):
What did we learn?
Melissa Rice (01:00:22):
Yeah, Casey’s really going to be hosting SEO 12 Days of Christmas. I know he name dropped that earlier in the episode, but it’ll be in partnership with Tastemaker Talk next week. Casey, please elaborate. Where can people find you? I know you’ve got a link to share. What are the deep?
Casey Markee (01:00:38):
Yeah, so I’m excited to do this the next Wednesday. This is going to go into a deep dive in a lot of the issues that we talked about today, but basically 12 Days of SEO. There’s going to be a lot of funny GIFs there. There’s lots of nostalgia references to Christmas movies. We’re going to try to make it as interesting as possible. It’ll be no more than an hour of your time, but I spent a lot of time on this. It’s going to be very, very good. I’m going to cover a lot of advanced techniques there. We’re going to talk literally more in detail about things like Print Pass.
(01:01:06):
We’re going to talk about things that we definitely don’t want to do with your ad company. We’re going to talk about how to best track AI overviews and visibility. It’s all over that. There’s going to be a different priority for each of the 12 days of Christmas, so I definitely urge all of you to go over there. It’s free. I can assure you, it will be worth your time, guaranteed. So, definitely check that out, and hopefully I’ll see most of you next Wednesday.
Melissa Rice (01:01:31):
Yeah, or else. No, I’m kidding. Okay, as usual guys, we’re going to have the recap on our blog in about a week, and this recording’s going to be right on YouTube right after this, so.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:01:44):
All right.
Melissa Rice (01:01:44):
The first half-
Arsen Rabinovich (01:01:44):
No editing.
Melissa Rice (01:01:48):
No editing. I mean-
Andrew Wilder (01:01:50):
Oh, boy.
Melissa Rice (01:01:51):
… watch me again. We’ll have an email blast going out to our subscribers to let you know when the recap is live on our blog. Thank you again for joining us. I know this year was highs and lows, but next year we’ve got our fingers crossed. I’m going to go ahead and ask the panelists to just stick around for a minute. I’ll mute your mics. We’re going to let these local recordings load up so everybody has the best quality on this recap. Everybody, thank you so much.
Casey Markee (01:02:24):
Happy holidays, everyone.
Andrew Wilder (01:02:25):
Happy holidays, happy New Year.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:02:27):
Happy holidays, everyone.
Melissa Rice (01:02:27):
You’re the best. We appreciate you. Bye.
