Big changes in search and AI development are the theme of this month’s roundup. Get ready for a ton of news, analysis, and case studies covering everything from the latest update to the tricks SEOs are still using to get ahead.
You’ll catch up with the August 2024 core update announcement in our top story for the month. Then, you’ll see some analysis on whether Search GPT can disrupt Google and what it means when some SEOs say attribution and clicks are dying.
After that, we have more top stories for the month that you shouldn’t miss. You’ll see the results of one search-based case study that achieved 2000%+ sales growth, learn how to get SEO results on easy mode and find even more news, announcements, and experiments.
What to Know about Our August 2024 Core Update
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/08/august-2024-core-update
Google’s latest core update landed on August 15th. In a very short statement, John Mueller explained that the update’s purpose was “to continue our work to improve the quality of our search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search.”
Mueller also insists that this update includes feedback from creators. As we’ve covered in recent roundups, some major content creators like Adam Conover have accused Google of crushing small websites with recent policies.
In the new statement, Mueller specifically identified small and independent sites as an important part of the results. He seems to imply that their situation will improve in this and future updates.
He also said that the update aims to capture site improvements that recent updates may have missed. This statement is likely intended to address recent reporting from past roundups (See Story: HCU Recovery Data) that nearly all sites hit by the HCU had yet to recover.
As the final part of the announcement, John provided a link to recent changes on the help page. You should visit if you want to see more in-depth guidance on what to do next.
Google may be responding to community complaints enthusiastically because it has a major competitor on the horizon. In the next piece for the month, you’ll learn about Search GPT and whether it has the potential to challenge the current big players in search.
Search GPT – Can Search GPT Disrupt Google Search?
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/search-gpt-can-search-gpt-disrupt-google-search/523296/
Kevin Indig brings you this look at the latest big AI moves. ChatGPT has yet to do much to replace Google Search so far, but a brand-new search engine from Open AI may finally turn search back into a competition.
As Kevin points out, OpenAI has several competitive advantages when it comes to launching a search product. First, this is the first product to position itself as a direct search product, which may give it the power to compete against Google in ways that weren’t possible with the GPT product.
Next, OpenAI already has a significant part of the infrastructure it needs to set up a search engine at high speed, as it already crawls the web for training data and sorts it. Kevin also thinks that the familiar search functions provided by this product will increase overall GPT adoption.
He identifies and analyzes a number of other features that give Search GPT the potential to cause Google problems. For example, he highlights the greater incentives that LLM search engines have to work with publishers (who provide them with necessary training data).
Check out the rest of the article for his complete analysis, including the stats and studies he adds to his arguments. Next, some SEOs worry that attribution is dying. You’ll learn what that may mean for your strategies moving forward.
Attribution Is Dying. Clicks Are Dying. Marketing Is Going back to the 20th Century
Rand Fishkin claims that marketing does not work the way you think it does in 2024.
He compares the situation now to 2010 when he would have claimed that marketing is “all about being able to track every view and every click so that when conversions happened, we could perfectly attribute them.” Now, he argues, this doesn’t work because attribution is dying.
By attribution, Rand means the data that tracking tools provided far more reliably in past years. Now, he argues that Apple’s cookie changes, anti-tracking laws across the world, ad-blocker adoption, app domination, and other factors have made attribution data rare and often incomplete.
He focuses on the” zero-click problem” in particular. He argues that he himself doesn’t click on things the way he used to. He thinks this may have happened because search engines have trained us not to click, largely so that Google could divert more eyes to search features.
Rand makes a complex argument for a different approach to marketing. For example, he discusses a pasta company’s small, non-attributable strategy.
This company used unconventional strategies, such as creating Amazon products just to have the credibility to be advertised in major cooking publications. They also paid chefs in tourist areas all over Italy to name the brand of pasta on the menu. Their American sales have skyrocketed in recent years, but not from any marketing attribution.
So where do we go now? Rand argues that we’re going back to Mad Men’s principles and days of talking about how to get the right message that appeals to the right people in the right places and at the right time to the right audience.
Next, we have a case study on the concrete steps one website took to increase its sales growth by over 2000%.
Gaming SEO Case Study: 3 Tactics That Drove 2300% Sales Growth
https://surferseo.com/blog/gaming-seo-case-study/
Satya D of Surfer shows you how one company in the ultra-competitive eSports market managed to SEO its way into massive gains. As he states in the article, things were not optimal when the SEO team first got involved with the clients. The existing website—
Had an inefficient content strategy- Lacked a strategy to proficiently rank their e-commerce product pages where users trade, buy, or sell.
- Was not effective at managing multiple publications daily while ensuring each piece achieved a top SERP rank for its target keywords.
The first stages of the recovery involved creating a major content clustering strategy. The current content was not built using data or a process. For that reason, a lot of the content that was produced wasn’t very effective.
After that, a complete keyword optimization was necessary. The content creation process was updated to include keyword optimization as a basic practice so that all content going forward would have a purpose.
For the next step, the team used AI to produce targeted content on a large scale while saving on costs. The marketing efforts didn’t just improve traffic and keyword rankings. They also led to an impressive 2300% increase in sales, amounting to growth from $5,000 to $120,000 over 24 months.
Some of this work can be pretty complicated, but SEO doesn’t have to be. Next, you’re going to learn how I argue you can do SEO on easy mode in 2024.
This Is How You Do SEO on Easy Mode in 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC-R7x6i3_M
I bring you this piece for SEO pros and agencies who are struggling with all the recent changes. Have you considered eCommerce SEO? You may fear that it’s hard to get into. It’s not, but everyone thinking it is gives you a serious advantage—less competition.
Throughout this video, I’ll explain why you should be doing ecommerce SEO, and give you the steps to do it yourself.
First, this is a huge growth area. Recent studies I reveal in the video have it growing by 8% every year. Google has also, intentionally or unintentionally, been directing more traffic to e-com websites over time.
I take you through all of the big strategies that I employ for e-commerce clients, and explain how my thought process works for each one. These include moves you’ll need to make for most clients like—
Category Page Optimization (We’ve increased traffic by 90% for some sites using this)- Title & Description Optimization
- User Experience Optimization (bounce rate, dwell time, page loading speed, etc.)
- Contactability (Google is super clear on this; you won’t rank if you can’t be contacted)
I further explain how you apply optimization, linking, and website architecture to achieve large traffic gains much more easily than you can in publisher SEO. You’ll even learn how to partner with e-commerce businesses for more lucrative deals. I’ll tell you the stories of how I made it happen.
Next, you’ll get the results of a fun little experiment. What do you think happens when you disavow every link to your website?
I Disavowed Every Link to My Website. Here’s What Happened
https://zyppy.com/seo/google-disavow-experiment/
Cyrus Shepard brings you this update on his recent experiment to disavow every link on his website. The initial tests suggested a lot about how Google receives this information, how it acts, and how long it takes to act.
First, Cyrus reviews some of the original information for newcomers. The test site was a 60+ DR site with over 10,000 links from authoritative sites like Moz, Ahrefs, Semrush, and Backlinko.
The experiment was necessary because disavowing was presented by Google as a solution for manual penalties, and Cyrus wanted to observe the effects.
Google does warn against using the disavow tool correctly, but that just makes testing the response more interesting.
The first two months of the test, as he covered in an earlier writeup, showed almost no changes in traffic whatsoever. At the time, the Search Console recorded a reduction in links down to around a hundred, but this turned out to be a bug. After the bug was fixed, the real results were clear.
Now Cyrus has a new finding: All of his disavowed links have returned. Google appears, by some process, to have disavowed his disavowal.
Apparently nothing has happened as a result of the experiment. Cyrus explores several theories, including—
- Theory 1: Google Didn’t Trust The Disavow File
- Theory 2: The Disavow Needs More Time To Work
- Theory 3: I Didn’t Disavow Enough Links
Of course, this may all be for nothing because John Muller seems sure that Google will remove the disavowal tool, anyway. Cyrus is trying to disavow the links again, and if that succeeds, you can read more about it here.
Google Scraps Plans to Kill Third-Party Cookies in Chrome
https://searchengineland.com/google-third-party-cookies-chrome-reversal-444317
Google has been promising to phase out all third-party cookies in Chrome for several years now. They even went so far as to announce deadlines for the phaseout by 2022. The deadline was l updated to 2023, then late 2024, and finally, in 2025.
Now, in a story by Anu Adegbola, Google has announced that all of those deadlines may be disregarded. The entire strategy of scrapping the cookies has been replaced with a new approach that Google says will be centered around user control.
This change in policy will come as a relief to many online marketers who rely on cookies (remember that attribution issue from earlier?). Google was never clear on what would or could replace the role of cookies, and many publishing and e-commerce sites weren’t excited to be completely limited to the information Google was willing to give them.
Instead of a new system, Google is implementing a user-centered “Privacy Sandbox.” The article includes a small quote from Google’s new Privacy Sandbox VP, Anthony Chavez. He says—
“We developed the Privacy Sandbox with the goal of finding innovative solutions that meaningfully improve online privacy while preserving an ad-supported internet that supports a vibrant ecosystem of publishers, connects businesses with customers, and offers all of us free access to a wide range of content.”
This sounds like Google is trying to consider publishers’ feelings more. However, this time, they aren’t offering another deadline. As Anthony puts it, “We’re discussing this new path with regulators and will engage with the industry as we roll this out.”
That’s not much to go on, but when we know more, you’ll find it in a future roundup. Thanks for reading!
